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Oil and gas exploration has been one of the key areas of cooperation between the two countries with the Indian companies making significant investment in this sector in Vietnam.
President Tran welcomed Indian businesses to expand their oil and gas exploration and exploitation activities on land and in the continental shelf and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of Vietnam. He also suggested that relevant Indian companies file concrete proposals for the blocks offered by the Vietnamese side.
Both sides agreed to actively pursue the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding on collaboration in oil and gas exploration projects in third countries.
China has been opposing India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) exploring oil in areas claimed by Vietnam in the South China Sea (SCS). India has been asserting that the ONGC's exploration is a commercial operation and not connected with the dispute. Oil exploration in the SCS is a sensitive issue in Vietnam-China relations.
Prime Minister Modi, in a joint press statement after the delegation talks with President Tran, had noted that cooperation in the field of defence and security is one of the "strong pillars" of the ties between the two countries.
The two sides also agreed to cooperate in defence production and explore opportunities in transfer of technology. Cyber security was one of the important elements discussed under this sector.
The two leaders also welcomed ongoing exchange of senior level delegations, meetings of consultation mechanisms, stronger cooperation between their armed forces and enhanced cooperation in areas of cyber security, combating terrorism and violent extremism in all their forms and manifestations, transnational crimes, human and drug trafficking, maritime security, climate change and food security, the statement said.
To review the implementation of the Action Plan of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership for 2017-2020, the two sides also agreed to hold the next joint meeting later this year, led by the foreign ministers of India and Vietnam.
In the area of connectivity, the Indian side urged Vietnam to utilise various Indian initiatives for CLMV (Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam) countries, including the credit line of USD 1 billion.
The Commercial Appeal files February 7, 1954 — Miss Barbara Leflar (left), Miss City Beautiful of 1953, welcomes the first entrant in the 1954 competition, Miss Beth Wagner, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton J. Wagner of 941 South Perkins on Feb. 7, 1954. Miss Wagner, a junior at East High School, is being sponsored by the Junior Department of the Nineteenth Century Club.
Danny Thomas, the cigar-chomping comic whose promise to a saint became a godsend for thousands of sick children, died Wednesday after a heart attack at his Beverly Hills home. Thomas, 77, had flown home Tuesday from Memphis, where he signed copies of his new autobiography. This weekend, he will come back to Memphis for the last time, to be buried in a pavilion at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The entertainer probably brought more national attention to Memphis than anybody except Elvis Presley. At the height of his fame, the Emmy Award-winning actor used his influence to establish St. Jude, which opened in 1962. It is now the world's leading center for research in cancer and other catastrophic illnesses in children.
Roasted egos will share the bill of fare with sumptuous food at the Memphis Press Club's seventh annual Gridiron Show April 26 in the Skyway of the Sheraton-Peabody. Details of the show, which pokes fun at Mid-South political, business and social leaders, were announced yesterday by Granville Allison Jr., the show's general chairman. This year's production, like the others, will be written, produced and performed by Memphis Press Club members. W.H. McGehee is production chairman of the 1966 show. Eugart Yerian, executive of Holiday Inns of America, Inc., and former director of the Memphis Little Theatre, will return to direct. Music will be furnished by Berl Olswanger, Memphis television personality and orchestra leader.
The Civil Aeronautics Administration at Washington has named the famed Memphis aviatrix, Mrs. Phoebe Omlie, co-ordinator of the aviation activities of such government agencies as the WPA, the National Defense Commission and the Department of Education. Some time ago, Mrs. Omlie was named by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt as "one of the 11 greatest women in the nation."
A children's choir with 48 voices has been organized at First Baptist Church by Mrs. Edgar Estile. She feels that by developing the voices of the youngsters she can be of valuable aid to those who will have charge of the music in the future.
Pittsburgh — The backbone of one of the longest miners' strikes in history has been broken. The 400 men employed at Turtle Creek have accepted the wage offer of 74 cents per ton of screened coal. The men have been on strike for nine months.
Instead of tearing your banana open from the stem, flip it over and pinch the other end to easily separate and unpeel it. Bonus: Now you can use the stem as a handle!
To make an iPhone stand, fold an old cassette case backwards so it props itself up on a table.
Rub a tennis ball on your floors to remove unsightly scuffs.
Instead of scrubbing the walls with soap, use mayonnaise. The grease will dissolve the crayon.
Instead of swatting them, put cloves in cut lemons and set them around your picnic. That will keep the critters away.
To prevent your ice cream cone from dripping (and also prevent sadness), put marshmallows at the bottom.
Put glass bottles in them to preserve the shape and keep them looking new.
Instead of licking your fingers, tie rubber bands around them for quick page turning.
Instead of using expensive air fresheners, sprinkle coffee grounds on newspaper and put that in your fireplace.
Use a hair straightener to keep those collar tips looking sharp.
To keep them from getting tangled up, wrap each cord neatly on its own toilet paper tube.
A coalition of Muslim groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), has threatened to suspend outreach efforts with the FBI following news of the agency planting informants in California mosques. That the man under investigation has been charged with a host of crimes and allegedly was recorded discussing jihad is apparently irrelevant. According to the coalition, the FBI has lost the trust of Muslims by seeding mosques with "agents provocateurs."
Putting aside the irony that CAIR might cut off the FBI after the FBI cut off CAIR, these events raise a vital question: to what degree have prominent Muslim groups assisted the FBI in keeping America safe? Indeed, history shows that CAIR has been less of a help than a hindrance.
CAIR discourages Americans from improving their counterterrorism skills. Deedra Abboud, CAIR's Arizona director, approves of police learning the Arabic language if that lowers the chances of cultural and linguistic misunderstandings. "However, if they're learning it in order to better fight terrorism, that concerns me. Only because that assumes that the only fighting we have to do is among Arabic speakers."
In addition to highlighting how CAIR uses its "sensitivity training" to foster hesitancy among security officials, Frank Gaffney points out another damning example: a document in which a local CAIR leader "describes how she limited the scope of a meeting FBI agents had with a Muslim doctor. She coached the latter to withhold information from FBI agents: 'I advised him specifically not to address any questions relating to violence or terrorism.'"
Of course, CAIR's uncooperative history pales in comparison to that of Abdul Alim Musa, a prominent imam in Washington, DC. Known for praising terrorists during an interview with Sean Hannity, Musa is also famous for a 2007 sermon entitled "How to Punk the FBI," available online in separate parts, in which he refers to federal agents as "sissies" and instructs Muslims on "such 'counter-harassment techniques' as asking an interrogating agent if his mother bought him his shirt." Furthermore, he accuses the FBI of causing strokes to silence black Muslim leaders.
At the time of that sermon and up until very recently, Musa sat on the governing body of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA) — one of the coalition members threatening to cut off contact with the FBI for allegedly disrespecting Muslims.
Frank Gaffney says it best: with friends like these, the FBI needs no enemies.
January brought less than average rainfall at all three upper basin reservoirs with the largest rain deficit recorded at Hartwell sub-basin. Hartwell fell short of its January average by 1.8 inches, and Thurmond and Russell each missed their January averages by 1.5 inches. In spite of the rain shortfall, the reservoir levels rose, remaining slightly below seasonal guide curve. Winter guide curve or “full pool” gradually increases from Jan. 1 to April 1 when the guide curve defines summer full pool.
Hartwell and Thurmond lakes rose during the month because the rainfall-runoff ratio is higher in the winter than in the summer, according to Stan Simpson, a Savannah District water manager. With cooler temperatures and dormant plant life, a 1-inch rain event in the winter puts more water into the reservoirs than a 1-inch rain event in the summer, he said.
Hartwell sub-basin recorded 65 percent of its normal rainfall totaling 3.4 inches. The January average is 5.2 inches.
Thurmond sub-basin recorded 68.9 percent of its normal rainfall totaling 3 inches, and Russell sub-basin recorded 66.3 percent of its normal rainfall totaling 2.9 inches.
On Jan. 4, Hartwell and Russell sub-basins recorded their largest rain events receiving 1.3 and 0.7 inches, respectively. Thurmond sub-basin recorded its most significant rain event later in the month on Jan. 23, receiving 0.7 inches.
January marks the third consecutive month Hartwell sub-basin has fallen below its monthly average and the first time Thurmond sub-basin fell short of its average since November 2014. Additionally, Russell sub-basin received its lowest observed rainfall total since June 2014, when the sub-basin totaled 2.8 inches for that month.
This entry was posted in Rainfall Update, Water Management and tagged 2015, Balancing the Basin, guide curve, Hartwell Lake, January, rain, rainfall, rainfall update, reservoir, Russell Lake, sub basin, Thurmond Lake, water management. Bookmark the permalink.
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - It witnessed two of the darkest chapters in modern history but with help from the United States and the cellist who made it famous Sarajevo’s City Hall and library is reopening Friday.
The distinctive Vijecnica was the last site visited by Archduke Franz Ferdinand moments before his assassination almost a century ago - an event that triggered the outbreak of World War One.
Its notoriety was cemented when it was badly damaged during the ethnic conflict that tore apart Yugoslavia following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. A 1992 picture of Vedran Smajlovic - the so-called cellist of Sarajevo - playing his instrument amid the blackened ruins in tie and tail became a symbol of the tragedy of conflict.
"This is long overdue but I am very happy that our city symbol is back"
Smajlovic, a local orchestral performer whose determination to keep making music even as the city was in the grip of a four-year siege inspired a book about everyday life under the threat of sniper fire, will be among those on stage at a concert celebrating Vijecnica’s restoration.
It opened in 1896 at the height of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and its pseudo-Moorish style - inspired by the Cairo’s Mosque of Sultan Hasan II - was a sign of the city’s mixture of Ottoman and Western influences. It housed Bosnia’s national library and part of the book collection of the city’s university.
The $16 million, 18-year restoration was funded half by the European Union with the remaining support provided by other heritage groups and government bodies including USAID.
David Barth, USAID’s mission director for Bosnia-Herzegovina, declined to put a figure on his organization’s contribution, describing it as "mostly logistical." However, he explained that the U.S. was keen to assist Bosnia’s slow recovery from the dark decade of the 1990s.
That could remain a distant dream in country that remains impoverished - angry workers rioted in the streets earlier this year in protest at factory closures - and whose ambitions to join the European Union and NATO have stalled.
Progress on Vijecnica was slowed by painstaking efforts to recreate the original design - including the year-long repainting of 21,500 square feet of artwork on the walls and ceilings - and by local politics. Some Bosnians are unhappy at the amount of space in the "new" building allocated to the corruption-plagued city government and its politicians instead of books.
Sarajevo Mayor Ivo Komsic told a news conference on Thursday that the Vijecnica was “being given back to its citizens,” a remark that brought a chorus of jeers and laughter from local reporters.
The building’s return to glory is part of a year long program of exhibitions, conferences and concerts in Sarajevo marking the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One. On June 28, the date of Ferdinand’s assassination, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will perform in Vijecnica.
A pivotal role in two wars might seem an unlikely basis for celebration, but in acknowledging the city’s history Sarajevo’s leaders are promoting a message of reconciliation. Conferences on international peace and the lessons from the region’s troubled history are taking place next month.
More than 10,000 people died during the city's three-and-a-half year siege in which Bosnian Serbs took control of the hills surrounding Sarajevo, bombarding it with shells and killing civilians with snipers as they sought food and water.
The Vijecnica was struck on Aug 25, 1992, starting a fire that reduced the building to rubble. Most of the two million books inside it were also destroyed.
While the West dithered over military intervention, Sarajevo’s wearied inhabitants fought for survival - even digging a tunnel from the U.N.-controlled airport in order to bring supplies into the city. As the world looked on, Smajlovic, a performer with the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra, regularly played his cello at the funerals of sniper victims and in the ruins of shell-damaged buildings.
He was also among the first on the scene as the building burned. The 57-year-old recalled Thursday how he and other inhabitants tried to rescue books from the flames. “The [attackers] did their jobs, the firefighters did their jobs and we did ours,” he said.
Every chapter in Sarajevo’s history is contentious, viewed from different religious and national perspectives: Ferdinand’s 19-year-old assassin, Gavrilo Princip, is still viewed by many Orthodox Serbs as a hero and by Bosnian Muslims as a murderer.
"A great part of the rich collection of books and documents that the Vijecnica housed got burned in an attempt to wipe out Bosnian collective memory"
Despite the reconciliation that followed the 1990s conflict, the inscription on the wall of the restored building underlines the anger still felt in Bosnia at its destruction.
That choice of words was described as “unfortunate” by Harm Kern, a researcher in Southeast European studies at Graz University, noting that the attack was in fact carried out by the Serbian army rather than civilians.
The lingering aftermath of the conflict is one of the reasons that Smajlovic no longer lives in Sarajevo; he moved to Northern Ireland after the war ended.
“I went from a place of war to a place that has neither war nor peace,” he joked on Thursday. Would he consider returning to the city?
Jeff Garlin is a veteran of both the Chicago improv-comedy scene and the Hollywood character-actor grind, and he's turned his feature-filmmaking debut, I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With, into a showcase for all his comic thespian pals. Garlin plays the soft center of the movie: a struggling actor looking for love in the big city. Over the course of 80 minutes, he encounters the likes of Sarah Silverman, playing a sexually adventurous ice-cream-parlor counter girl, Bonnie Hunt as a lonely elementary-school teacher, and Dan Castellaneta as a friendly convenience-store owner, plus Tim Kazurinsky, Richard Kind, Wallace Langham, and Amy Sedaris. The movie is practically an homage to Garlin's favorite bit players and oddballs.
It's also an homage to two of Garlin's biggest influences: Jackie Gleason, whose wide-eyed "Poor Soul" character pops up on TV at one point, and Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, which becomes a plot point and a reference point. Garlin's character is initially appalled when he hears that a production company is in Chicago casting for a Marty remake, but he also desperately wants the lead role. As someone who lives with his hectoring mother and spends most evenings sitting on the hood of his car outside Wrigley Field, pounding down snack cakes and milk, he feels he understands how to play the part.
I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With is unassuming and sweet-natured, and Garlin earns a lot of goodwill with his off-the-cuff wisecracks. (When his mother tells him the shirt he's wearing makes him look fat, Garlin grins impishly and says, "If anything, I make the shirt look fat.") But it's easier to want to like Cheese than to fully enjoy it. Garlin's direction is inert, not allowing enough shared-frame interaction between the characters, and his use of an ironically jaunty score is too derivative of his own Curb Your Enthusiasm. Still, it's hard to dislike the movie, either, because it's so honest about the desperation middle-aged people feel when they have no one to share their lives with, no prospects on the horizon, and nothing to eat in the fridge.
Viewed in the least charitable terms, academia is a small fraternity of ambitious backbiters engaged in the production of work so dense that only other members of the order can hope to understand it. But some scholars arrive on the scene bearing such a combination of intellect, urgency and charisma that their achievements resonate long after the Festschrift is printed and the memorial lecture empties out.
One of these was Marshall Hodgson, a great American scholar of Islam who died in 1968 while jogging on the University of Chicago campus. He was 46, and he left behind a manuscript that would become a magisterial three-volume book, “The Venture of Islam,” published posthumously through the efforts of his widow and colleagues. Before “The Venture,” there was no English-language textbook, no unified history, about the many linked empires that emerged out of the revelation received by the Prophet Muhammad in 610 A.D.
Before 1957, when Hodgson founded his yearlong course on Islamic civilizations at Chicago, there was no course like it. Islamic studies in America was an outgrowth of European Orientalist thought, which focused on Arabic language and literature and the core Arab lands of Islam. Persianate and Turkic dynasties were considered backwaters: Persians were important for their pre-Islamic achievements, Ottomans for their role in European diplomatic history. Sufism — the vast mystical current of Islam — was a blip in European and American historiography. A roughly 500-year period was glossed as a time of “Oriental decline,” wherein Muslim empires were said to languish under ineffectual despots.
In some parts of America today, “Muslim” is a slur. This is a grotesquely low bar by which to measure a non-Muslim’s engagement with Islam, but it is in fact the bar. Citizens in “Muslim garb” are attacked on American streets. One of our presidential candidates believes there is a “Muslim problem,” and he has plans to solve it. Self-styled experts analyze Shariah on right-wing talk shows.
Toggling between Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and Hodgson’s “Venture,” it’s hard to believe they’re discussing the same religion. In Islam Hodgson found one of the most creative and the most excellent of our collective human enterprises. He was a committed Quaker, and his own religious beliefs allowed him to find deep resonance in both the unity and variety of Islamic experience. “Medieval” is a kind of slur now, too, but there was something medieval about Hodgson’s combination of study and belief. For much of history, Islamic and otherwise, the pursuit of knowledge and the practice of faith were a single project. This was likewise Hodgson’s motivation and his way of reckoning with the role of Islam in world history.
Hodgson read and wrote furiously but published little. “The Venture” is the main offering, and even it was unfinished by his standards at the time of his death. As an undergraduate textbook, it is forbidding. The prose is arranged in dense thickets. But it remains a foundation English text for the academic study of Islam, and Hodgson’s pioneering efforts have for the most part remained outside the ideological debates that later took place in Middle Eastern studies.
There was so much Hodgson wanted to do: a comprehensive world history; an epic poem with science-fiction elements. He had three daughters, two of them born with a fatal paralytic illness. One predeceased him by a year; the other died a few years after he did. This central sadness of the Hodgson family colors the remembrances of his life. Nearly fifty years after his death, a venerable emeritus professor teared up at his name: “He was a saint,” he told me.
Lydia Kiesling is the editor of The Millions. This is her second Letter of Recommendation for the magazine.
Every report about alleged Trump misdeeds is the final nail — until they aren’t. Why would the president leave office and the fight he clearly relishes?
Naked self-interest also counsels against retiring to his tent. Back in New York, he’d have an enormous legal target on his back and none of the institutional protections of the presidency. He could be indicted by the Southern District of New York over the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal payments. Going from most powerful man in the world to a defendant in an embarrassing criminal trial would be a very unwelcome comedown.
Besides all this, no one should really hope for a premature end to the Trump presidency. Whatever the exact circumstances, it’d be a trauma to the republic and not accepted by a significant plurality of the electorate.
The wish fulfillment of Trump’s critics is better directed toward the less spectacular, yet difficult-enough task of beating him in 2020.
Lawmakers want Theresa May to strike a new deal on the country leaving the European Union.
British Prime Minister Theresa May survived a vote in Parliament on Wednesday to push her out of office. But she faces a tough battle over her plan on how Britain will leave the European Union. Lawmakers on Tuesday demolished the divorce deal she had worked on for nearly two years.
British voters in 2016 supported the idea of leaving the European Union, a group of 28 countries that work together to make it easier for goods and people to move among those countries. Many thought Britain wasn’t getting enough benefits for the amount of money it was paying to be part of the group.
Many lawmakers think a softer departure that keeps the single market or customs union membership is the only plan capable of winning a majority in Parliament. They fear the alternative is an abrupt “no-deal” withdrawal from the group, which businesses fear would cause big problems at borders, ports and airports.
May has until Monday to present Parliament with a new plan. The prime minister called on opposition politicians in Parliament to “put self-interest aside” and find a consensus on Britain’s path out of the E.U.
But there’s a growing chance that Britain may seek to postpone its March 29 departure date while politicians work on changes — or even hand the decision back to voters in a new referendum on Britain’s E.U. membership.
U.S. making N. Korea threat worse?
President Donald Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon said there was no military solution to the threat posed by North Korea and its nuclear ambitions, despite the president's recent pledge to answer further aggression with "fire and fury."
In a rare and wide-ranging interview with The American Prospect posted online Wednesday, Bannon said, "There's no military solution, forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul [South Korea] don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about, there's no military solution here, they got us."
Bannon also told the publication that the U.S. was losing the economic race against China and talked about purging his rivals from the Defense and State departments.
Meanwhile, the security adviser to the South Korean president, Moon Chung-in, told CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy that the United States had made things "worse" on the Korean peninsula.
"We take crisis and conflict and escalation on the Korean Peninsula damn seriously. It is a matter of life and death for us," he said. "And if there is any kind of conflict, if there is any kind of overt conflict between Pyongyang and Washington, ultimately, the collateral damage would be placed on us. And that collateral damage would be a catastrophe."
On Thursday, America's top military officer said the U.S. would not negotiate away its joint exercises with South Korea as long as the threat of an attack by North Korea existed.
"As long as the threat in North Korea exists we need to maintain a high state of readiness to respond to that threat," Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford told reporters.
North Korea claimed the annual drills, scheduled for later this month, were a prelude for an invasion, while Washington and Seoul held that the exercises were defensive in nature and crucial to deterring North Korean aggression.
At Chicago Live!, we like to wrap up each of our six-week runs with a themed season finale.
Being a Chicago-centric show, the choices have been easy so far: all-food, all-St. Patrick's Day and all-blues shows have ended previous seasons.
To cap our Summer Season on Thursday, Chicago Live! is celebrating the city's love of sports.
Or, perhaps better put, Chicago's love-hate relationship with sports. It's certainly complicated.
The one sure thing? Chicago loves to talk about sports.
So to keep the conversation going, we've assembled an all-star lineup of Chicago's most fascinating sports figures on this week's Chicago Live! stage.
We'll be joined by Bears tight end Desmond Clark, fresh from Monday's loss to the Giants.