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8:20 a.m., June 20: Updated with Friday numbers.
The Kissing Gate, next to the 1066 Country Walk, adjacent to the Abbey Grounds, replaces an old broken down stile that until recently had been repaired several times and was very difficult to negotiate at the top of some steps.
Battle Ramblers had identified the need for a replacement in July last year and approached the ESCC Principal Rights of Way Officer, with the idea that the Mansers Shaw ghyll crossing needed to be improved; they highlighted the footfall route, being within the urban environment where there are plenty of walkers on a daily basis.
Following a site visit it was agreed that rather than a replacement stile, a better solution would be to install an oak Kissing Gate, given the relatively sensitive location near to the Abbey site.
Bev Marks, Battle Ramblers Footpath Officer, attended a Battle Town Council Environment Committee meeting to explain the proposal and the council confirmed it could go ahead.
The ESCC RoW Rangers quickly made some surface improvements in November needed to cover the easily tripped-over tree roots. Battle Council field staff made wood chip improvements on another section of the footpath.
Battle Ramblers donated the full cost of the gate materials, funded from legacies provided to the Ramblers. ESCC ordered the gate components and The Kissing Gate was installed by ESCC RoW Rangers with help from BTC field staff in 2018-February. Battle Ramblers then ordered lasered marine quality stainless steel plaques.
Iconic blues musician B.B. King died Thursday night. He was 89.
Universal Music Enterprises Senior Vice-President Sujata Murthy confirmed that the legendary artist passed away in his sleep at his Las Vegas home.
King was long considered one of the greatest musicians of all time, and his name, his music and his legacy have been synonymous with the blues genre for decades.
King released his first album, Singin’ the Blues, in 1957, and ended up releasing 43 studio albums and 16 live albums, with 138 singles released in total.
The celebrated singer, who was known for playing hundreds of shows a year well into his 70s, was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, and in 1987 he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
In addition to those honors, the blues legend also took home 16 GRAMMY Awards during his life, including a GRAMMY Hall of Fame Award.
King won his first GRAMMY in 1971 for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for his version of the song “The Thrill Is Gone.” In 2009, he took home his last GRAMMY for Best Traditional Blues Album for One Kind Favor.
At the start of May, King announced on his personal website that he had entered hospice care in his home after having to be hospitalized twice for high blood pressure and his long battle with diabetes.
Many Americans need translation to understand Australian idioms. After all, how many know that "stone the crows" is Aussie talk for "good grief."
But U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger were after a different kind of translation June 22 when they visited Australia to get a better understanding of the country's new nationalistic defense policy.
The Americans met with Defense Minister Kim Beazley and Foreign Minister Bill Hayden to find out what Beazley meant when he promised Australia will develop "the ability to defend ourselves with our own resources . . ."
The Canberra government is buying new F-18 fighters, Orion patrol planes, six submarines and six frigates. Interpretations of the buildup vary: Either the Australians are setting an arms-length relationship with the United States by displacing the U.S. military presence in the South Pacific, or by arming themselves with U.S. hardware, they are reinforcing their alliance with Washington.
Most of the evidence backs up the first theory. Australia is working to arm itself for its own sake, a get-tough attitude that one Australian analyst called "positively hairy-chested."
Australia's Beazley, only 39 and touted as future prime ministerial material, is trying to satisfy two constituencies: increasingly nationalistic Aussies trying to fight an age-old inferiority complex about being an international outpost, and an irritable United States, which last summer suspended its security obligations to New Zealand under ANZUS, an alliance between the United States, Australia and New Zealand. That action came after New Zealand banned U.S. nuclear warships in its area as part of that government's anti-nuclear campaign.
Beazley is juggling the tough jobs of making Australia more militarily independent while at the same time maintaining Australian credibility as a member of the Western alliance. Underlying the new defense policy is the realization by Australians that they are not so much a minor Western nation as a major Asian and Pacific power.
Australia's natural enemies, which Beazley doesn't like to talk about for fear of inflaming them, are not the Soviets or the Chinese. Australia is wary of Indonesia, just 500 miles to the north, and its 120 million people who outnumber the Australians 7.5-to-1.
The 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor sticks in Australian minds as evidence of Indonesia's expansionist potential. The continuing reports of human rights abuses by Indonesian troops in East Timor also unsettle the Aussies. As well, the first foreign settlers on Australian shores came from the Indonesian archipelago, creating a possible pretext for future Indonesian raids on Australia's coast. Australia's government sees a stronger military presence as a deterrent to Indonesian expansionism.
"You pick on a hypothesis to which we do not respond except to say that a stable and not anti-Western government in Indonesia is critical to our security, and that is the situation that obtains at the present time. So we don't assume a set of factors in which Indonesia was hostile to us."
A translation: The Australians don't want to talk about arming themselves against the Indonesians, but they are doing it just the same.
It also explains why Australia has adopted a do-it-yourself defense strategy. In the event of a local conflict, such as a skirmish with Indonesia, Australia feels it cannot count on U.S. aid and may not even want it if it's offered, because Canberra feels U.S. involvement often can make matters worse. From the Aussie perspective, the United States is too busy in the world's hot spots such as the Persian Gulf to get involved in other conflicts. Second, the Australians worry that any U.S. involvement would be too tough, too "hamfisted," as described by one Australian government official.
But critics charge that Beazley has created a "fortress Australia" policy that pulls Australia away from the Western alliance in favor of home defense. Beazley himself prefers to argue he is developing a strategy based on Australian self-interest.
In May that meant sending four Australian warships to stand off Fiji after the military coup there -- ostensibly to evacuate Australians but also to provide evidence of Australia's determination not to have the stability of its back yard undermined.
Meanwhile, Beazley said his government wants to keep the foundations of ANZUS intact so that cooperation can resume "should current New Zealand policies on warship visits change."
That is unlikely. On June 3 New Zealand's Parliament reaffirmed the ban by passing it into law. Now Australia's tricky task is to maintain a separate alliance with each feuding country.
That's important, Beazley said, because even though the Soviets occupy the former U.S. base at Cam Rahn Bay in Vietnam, they are not a major presence in the region. But they could become a threat, so Australia feels it must hold together the remains of ANZUS.
Beazley's defense policy has a surprising interpretation of Australia's relationship with the United States. It says Australia intends to have a "genuinely equal partnership" with the United States.
That seems pretentious, considering Australia's small population and the fact that it has only 70,000 armed forces regulars. But it's possible Australia can achieve that equality because of geography.
"We're not in a region where there's a heavy American presence," Beazley said. And compared with other nations of the South Pacific, he said, "we have a fairly high order of capability."
He added that the United States needs Australia because that country's satellite monitoring and communication stations can give early warning of trouble in the area. In addition, Australia's Darwin Airport is a refueling stop for U.S. B-52 bombers, and, in the dead of night, for U.S. spy planes.
Beazley explained that Australia plays an important role in U.S. defense policy because it relieves the United States of a South Pacific burden: "It is important for us in the region to be seen as an active pro- Western power," he said.
"That is not the self-image that most countries in our region prefer. But they certainly like having someone around the place looking like that. Even some powers that reserve for themselves the right to be enormously critical of the American strategic deterrent nevertheless are seeking constant reassurance from us that our relationship with the United States is okay. They believe we're a trip-wire for the Americans."
Gold Medal, a leading UK travel company, has heralded Abu Dhabi as one of its most popular destinations for this summer following a surge in demand from British holidaymakers visiting the UAE.
As a travel consolidator offering a variety of online travel services and products, Gold Medal has reported a remarkable 294 percent rise on the previous year in 2017 summer holiday bookings from the UK to the UAE capital.
Etihad Airways operates five weekly flights from Edinburgh, twice daily from Manchester and three daily Airbus A380 flights from London Heathrow, to Abu Dhabi.
James Harrison, Etihad Airways General Manager UK, said, "We are very pleased that Abu Dhabi is proving so popular with British travellers. The tourist appeal of the city goes from strength to strength, as this strong data shows, and increasing numbers of visitors are being drawn by its appeal as a year-round holiday destination."
British travel agents will get to sample the many attractions of Abu Dhabi for themselves when Etihad Airways and the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority, TCA, host a large familiarisation visit to the emirate in September. They will be able to sample the cultural attractions, beaches, sports facilities and excellent hospitality for which Abu Dhabi is increasingly renowned.
The dwarf planet Ceres keeps looking better and better as a possible home for alien life.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft has spotted organic molecules — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — on Ceres for the first time, a study published today (Feb. 16) in the journal Science reports.
And these organics appear to be native, likely forming on Ceres rather than arriving via asteroid or comet strikes, study team members said.
"Because Ceres is a dwarf planet that may still preserve internal heat from its formation period and may even contain a subsurface ocean, this opens the possibility that primitive life could have developed on Ceres itself," Michael Küppers, a planetary scientist based at the European Space Astronomy Centre just outside Madrid, said in an accompanying "News and Views" article in the same issue of Science.
"It joins Mars and several satellites of the giant planets in the list of locations in the solar system that may harbor life," added Küppers, who was not involved in the organics discovery.
The $467 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study Vesta and Ceres, the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Dawn circled the 330-mile-wide (530 kilometers) Vesta from July 2011 through September 2012, when it departed for Ceres, which is 590 miles (950 km) across. Dawn arrived at the dwarf planet in March 2015, becoming the first spacecraft ever to orbit two different bodies beyond the Earth-moon system.
During its time at Ceres, Dawn has found bizarre bright spots on crater floors, discovered a likely ice volcano 2.5 miles (4 km) tall and helped scientists determine that water ice is common just beneath the surface, especially near the dwarf planet's poles.
The newly announced organics discovery adds to this list of achievements. The carbon-containing molecules — which Dawn spotted using its visible and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument — are concentrated in a 385-square-mile (1,000 square km) area near Ceres' 33-mile-wide (53 km) Ernutet crater, though there's also a much smaller patch about 250 miles (400 km) away, in a crater called Inamahari.
And there could be more such areas; the team surveyed only Ceres' middle latitudes, between 60 degrees north and 60 degrees south.
"We cannot exclude that there are other locations rich in organics not sampled by the survey, or below the detection limit," study lead author Maria Cristina De Sanctis, of the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Space Planetology in Rome, told Space.com via email.
Dawn's measurements aren't precise enough to nail down exactly what the newfound organics are, but their signatures are consistent with tar-like substances such as kerite and asphaltite, study team members said.
"The organic-rich areas include carbonate and ammoniated species, which are clearly Ceres' endogenous material, making it unlikely that the organics arrived via an external impactor," co-author Simone Marchi, a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
In addition, the intense heat generated by an asteroid or comet strike likely would have destroyed the organics, further suggesting that the molecules are native to Ceres, study team members said.
The organics might have formed via reactions involving hot water, De Sanctis and her colleagues said. Indeed, "Ceres shows clear signatures of pervasive hydrothermal activity and aqueous alteration," they wrote in the new study.
Such activity likely would have taken place underground. Dawn mission scientists aren't sure yet how organics generated in the interior could make it up to the surface and leave the signatures observed by the spacecraft.
"The geological and morphological settings of Ernutet are still under investigation with the high-resolution data acquired in the last months, and we do not have a definitive answer for why Ernutet is so special," De Sanctis said.
It's already clear, however, that Ceres is a complex and intriguing world — one that astrobiologists are getting more and more excited about.
"In some ways, it is very similar to Europa and Enceladus," De Sanctis said, referring to ocean-harboring moons of Jupiter and Saturn, respectively.
"We see compounds on the surface of Ceres like the ones detected in the plume of Enceladus," she added. "Ceres' surface can be considered warmer with respect to the Saturnian and Jovian satellites, due to [its] distance from the sun. However, we do not have evidence of a subsurface ocean now on Ceres, but there are hints of subsurface recent fluids."
What next for the DR Congo after the disputed election?
The controversial outcome of the December 30 election could still mark an opportunity for strengthening DRC's democracy.
The unexpected outcome of the December 30 general election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) baffled even the most seasoned watchers of the country.
If we are to believe the provisional results announced by the Congolese National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) on January 9, opposition leader Felix Tshisekedi decisively won the presidential election with 36.6 percent of the votes. The runner up was Martin Fayulu, the leader of the Lamuka coalition, who scored 34.8 percent. And Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, the presidential candidate of Joseph Kabila's ruling Common Front for Congo (FCC) coalition, came third with 23.8 percent.
However, the FCC coalition won the senatorial and legislative elections in a landslide. In other words, at least according to the CENI, the Congolese people overwhelmingly rejected Ramazani Shadary's presidential bid, but gave the coalition supporting him a super majority in both the senate and the parliament.
This puzzling result led most reasonable observers of the election to come to the conclusion that Tshisekedi's unexpected win was the result of a backroom deal between Tshisekedi and the FCC coalition aiming to help Kabila maintain control over important ministries and the security services with the help of a "friendly president" in the coming years.
This is not a far-fetched scenario. As stipulated in the constitution, upon leaving the presidency, Joseph Kabila will become a senator for life and preside over the senate. We can also assume that Kabila's coalition will most certainly maintain its control over the military, foreign affairs, homeland security, the budget, and the mining sector. If these assumptions stand, it is a foregone conclusion that the focus of Congolese political power will be shifting from the presidency to the Senate. In this context, it is reasonable to expect the FCC coalition to do anything in its power to prevent a hostile political figure from taking over the presidency.
All this is to say that the results of the 2018 Congolese general elections are murky at best. Even if one believes that Tshisekedi had enough popular support to squarely win the presidential contest, it is hard to comprehend how Kabila's coalition lost the presidency but won the legislative elections in a landslide.
Reports on irregularities surrounding the election process also make it hard for anyone to find the results announced last week by the CENI reliable.
On December 13, for example, 8,000 electronic voting machines were destroyed in a mysterious fire at a guarded warehouse in Congo's capital, forcing the electoral commission to postpone the election, which was originally scheduled for December 23. Also, voters in several regions of the Congo, such as Beni, failed to participate due to the ongoing Ebola outbreak and the insecurity posed by armed groups.
Moreover, there have been several reports signalling major irregularities such as discarded ballot boxes, people who were not on the ballot miraculously winning local elections and a number of voting machines running long after the polls were supposed to close. If proven correct, these irregularities could cast further doubts on the electoral outcomes.
In light of all this, many national and international observers disputed the results of the election.
Martin Fayulu, who came second according to the CETU but claims to be the real winner of the presidential race, appealed to the country's Constitutional Court to cancel the provisional result. He too supports the idea that Tshisekedi was declared the winner of the election only because he made a deal with the TCC coalition.
More importantly, DRC's powerful Catholic Church, which deployed more than 40,000 observers to monitor the elections, said it determined "the real winner" of the presidential race and strongly suggested that Tshisekedi's win is not legitimate.
In a statement released on December 10, the church said that "the results of the presidential election published by (the electoral commission) do not match those collected by our observer mission."
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) also issued a statement saying the DRC should recount the votes of its contested presidential election.
"A recount would provide the necessary reassurance to both winners and losers," the 16-member regional bloc said.
Meanwhile, France and Belgium also challenged the outcome of the presidential election, with France's foreign minister saying the declared victory of Tshisekedi was "not consistent" with the results and that his rival Fayulu appeared to have won.
Now, with this many organisations and actors vocally disputing the results of the election, everyone is waiting to see what is going to happen next.
Will Tshisekedi agree to take over the presidency - which, given the circumstances, will be little more than a symbolic role - or will he demand a recount? Could he call another election?
A recount is unlikely to occur and if it does, it is unlikely to produce a different result. And a repeat of the election is equally unlikely as it would cause major difficulties for the Congolese political edifice. So Tshisekedi is most likely to ignore all the controversy surrounding his victory and take over the presidency in the coming days.
So what is Fayulu going to do? How far will he go to reclaim what he calls "his stolen victory"?
While the opposition leader's game plan is not yet fully clear, it is becoming obvious that his Lamuka coalition will survive to fight another day. The Lamuka coalition appeared to be the biggest loser in the election, however, it is well known that this group is still a major threat to Kabila's FCC coalition and is likely to be a stronger opposition force in parliament than Tshisekedi's UDPS.
What will all this mean for the DRC's democracy?
Because Kabila will be in the Senate and his coalition will most likely hold onto important government departments, if things stay as they are, Felix Tshisekedi will be the first President in the Congolese political history since the time of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba to face a serious countervailing power. This is why, even though things are undoubtedly murky and messy, we may be witnessing the genesis of political checks and balances in the Congo. If the current political tripod - the FCC, Lamuka and UDPS - are serious about securing the future of the Congolese democracy, they may transform this problematic situation into an opportunity to start laying down the foundations of a new political equilibrium. Yes, Martin Fayulu will lose; yes, Tshisekedi's presidency will be relatively or substantially weak, but if they all play their cards right, down the road, the Congolese people may begin to win.
Patrick Litanga is a PhD candidate in International Relations at American University in Washington DC.
CARSON CITY, Nev. (KOLO) Nevada's new governor Steve Sisolak outlined an ambitious agenda in his first State of the State Address Wednesday night.
If his address had an overall theme, it was that the benefits of Nevada's expanding economy should be felt in every corner of the state, and that included its classrooms. And he said that starts with every teacher.
"It has been over a decade since the state has directly funded a raise for our K-12 educators. Tonight, I want that to change. Legislators, I am asking you to stand with me and stand with our educators by including them in the 3% pay raise for state employees for the first time in 12 years."
Noting that many teachers dig into their own pockets to buy basic supplies, he proposed raising the reimbursement to each teacher to $180.
The governor called for reviewing a decades-old plan to ensure education dollars are spent equally in all sections of the state, proposing nearly doubling funding for the New Nevada Plan, which targets at-risk students.
"My recommended increases in funding for the New Nevada Plan will increase from $36 million to $70 million per year, meaning that an additional 28,200 at-risk students will receive the academic support they need, no matter what school they attend."
And he proposed using a proportion of the marijuana tax to fund school safety.
"The need for safer schools is a dark reality today, and we need to fund these initiatives. I want to thank the Statewide School Safety Task Force for their hard work identifying key proposals to enhance security at our schools, including more police officers, and funding for additional social and behavioral health workers."
He also called for increased spending for pre-school development, early reading education and state scholarships.
In general his proposals were applauded by the state education association, though Republican lawmakers questioned the costs of some of his proposals.
He said it could be accomplished without raising any new taxes, although his budget includes continuing at least two taxes which are due to sunset.

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