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A PSNI statement released today said they are now treating Ms Smyth's disappearance as a potential murder.
Detective Chief Inspector Geoff Boyce said: “The investigation into Saoirse’s disappearance has progressed and while keeping an open mind I now believe that the potential exists for Saoirse to have sadly been murdered.
"Saoirse was seen in the Belfast area in April 2017. She had very distinctive red hair and has not had any contact with her family or friends during this period, including on significant dates such as her birthday and Christmas, and this is very unusual.
"Saoirse also hasn’t responded to any of her family’s pleas on social media. This along, with other information obtained during the Police investigation now leads me to believe that Saoirse may have been murdered."
A 40-year-old man was arrested by the PSNI on Wednesday evening in the Newry area on suspicion of Saoirse’s murder.
He remains in custody and is being questioned by detectives at Musgrave Serious Crime Suite.
Ms Smyth’s last known movements can be traced to Omeath in April 2017 where she was living at the time.
A garda spokesman told Independent.ie: “An Garda Síochana has been working closely with our colleagues in the PSNI on the disappearance of Ms Smyth and as part of this a house in Omeath is being examined by personnel from the Garda Technical Bureau.
"An Garda Síochána is asking anyone who has any information in relation to the disappearance of Ms Smyth to contact the incident room in Dundalk Garda Station at 042 9388470 or the Garda Confidential Phoneline at 1800 666 111."
U.S. And Cuba Ties Strained Over Mysterious Health Attacks Cuba is asking the U.S. to stop describing bizarre health incidents as attacks saying there's no evidence that Americans have been targeted with some sort of sonic device.
Cuba is asking the U.S. to stop describing bizarre health incidents as attacks saying there's no evidence that Americans have been targeted with some sort of sonic device.
U.S.-Cuba ties are strained over a medical mystery. And some Cuban doctors came to Washington this past week hoping to turn the page. But they say they still don't have much information about what the U.S. is calling health attacks on American personnel based in Havana. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: A Cuban medical team left a meeting at the State Department Thursday night sounding frustrated by what they see are the constantly changing U.S. theories about what or who caused health problems for 26 Americans serving in Cuba.
MITCHELL VALDES-SOSA: We really didn't receive much information. But we don't feel we came for nothing.
KELEMEN: That's Dr. Mitchell Valdes-Sosa, who led the group of Cuban experts on a long-awaited trip to Washington. The visit came as NBC News was reporting on the latest theory that Russia was behind the attacks in Cuba that caused a range of symptoms starting in 2016 from dizziness to hearing loss and minor brain trau...
VALDES-SOSA: Everything that has appeared as a hypothesis isn't plausible. So before we start searching for a James Bond kind of thing, trying to find who is the person that's attacking, we have to demonstrate that there was brain damage and that the mechanism is plausible.
KELEMEN: Valdes-Sosa was hoping to meet the University of Pennsylvania doctors who examined the Americans. But he came away from his meetings with State Department doctors and officials with no more details than what was already presented in a medical journal article.
VALDES-SOSA: We expressed our reservations and our criticism of the paper. And we received no response. Essentially, our impression is - and the doctors were very frank. They don't know what's happening.
KELEMEN: At the State Department, spokesperson Heather Nauert remains tight-lipped about the investigation and told reporters to be skeptical of the unnamed officials who suggest Russia is behind this.
HEATHER NAUERT: We still don't know the cause. We still don't know what or who is responsible for health attacks that took place that affected our personnel in Cuba.
KELEMEN: The Cuban foreign ministry official who traveled with the doctors says the State Department should stop calling them attacks, arguing that the U.S. has been treating theories as facts and changing its theories every week. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
Honda moves the redesigned Odyssey to a new platform that makes it much better to drive. The styling is familiar, the interior is roomy and comfortable, and the target buyer will be quite pleased by the availability of safety technologies. Honda gets cabin fever this year, adding Cabin Watch and Cabin Talk systems for ...
Should you rent or own your home?
Tim Lemieux always thought he would buy a condo in Toronto. He visited open houses. He plugged various numbers into mortgage calculators.
When his mother died a few years ago, his four siblings sold her home in Bowmanville and Mr. Lemieux had what amounted to a 20% to 30% down payment for a home.
But even with the down payment, he calculated that he would be almost doubling his monthly expenses with the mortgage, condo fees and property taxes; he now rents a one-bedroom apartment on the subway line for $900.
“In most cases when you do the math, including the intangible costs of owning…on an economic level, it is more beneficial to rent than it is to own in most metropolitan areas,” says David Kaufman, president of Westcourt Capital Corp.
Renting represents mobility. For those with wanderlust or those who plan to move for work, renting suits your nomadic, adventure-seeking lifestyle. Renting also comes with fewer responsibilities. With a home, when something breaks, you have to fix it; you can’t always anticipate the expense either — anyone who’s had wa...
“It frees up money for living and travel, rather than being sunk into property taxes or maintenance fees,” Mr. Lemieux says.
Coming up with first and last month’s rent is a lot easier than coming up with a down payment for a home. First-time home buyers have increased their budget to an average of $316,100 but 30% expect parents or family to help with the bill (40% in Montreal and Vancouver), says BMO.
After the home is purchased, paying down the mortgage is forced savings for some people and offers tax-free growth; but Mr. Lemieux is trying to save monthly what he would’ve spent if he were to own.
Even from an investment point of view, Mr. Kaufman believes that your money may work better for you elsewhere.
“We have 500 years of reliable real estate data and guess what the annual increase is [in real estate value]? It’s exactly the amount of inflation,” he says. Despite the soaring house prices that we’ve seen over the last several years, you can’t predict the same increases going forward, he says. What you can expect, he...
Meanwhile, stocks have returned an average of 7% historically, he adds.
Money aside, home ownership brings psychological benefits. The majority of renters (60%), says BMO, expect to buy a home one day and only 17% prefer renting.
The Chiaming Lake National Trail (嘉明湖國家步道) in Taitung County reopened yesterday after the Forestry Bureau said precautions were put in place to prevent intrusions by Formosan black bears near the cabins in the area.
The Siangyang (向陽) and Chiaming huts have been equipped with bear deterrent spray and whistles, among other things, while about 60 guides, cabin managers and other workers have received training on bear behavior and emergency response in the event of an intrusion, the bureau said on Wednesday.
In addition, visitors to the park are to be briefed on how to respond if they encounter bears in the area, the bureau said.
The park was closed on Aug. 22 in the wake of four reported sightings of Formosan black bears in the area over the previous two weeks by hikers, who said that they spotted three Formosan black bears separately invading the cabins in search of food.
The bears, which are endemic to Taiwan, were spotted near the Siangyang and Chiaming cabins on Aug. 9, 10, 17 and 18, Taitung District office deputy director Huang Chium-tse (黃群策) said.
On Aug. 9 and Aug. 10, bears were spotted by a hiking guide and a park official late at night near the Siangyang Cabin, which is about 4.3km from the entrance to the Siangyang Forest Recreation Area (向陽森林遊樂區) at 2.85km above sea level, Huang said.
There were other sightings on Aug. 17 and Aug. 18 by hikers of bears in the cooking areas of the Siangyang Cabin and near of the restrooms of the Chiaming Cabin, about 8.7km from the park entrance, he said.
The bears are omnivorous, but have no history of attacking people in Taiwan and tend to avoid direct contact with humans, he said.
Michael Gallon, who was jailed for 40 months after pleading guilty to three burglaries.
A burglar has been jailed as part of a Northumbria Police crackdown on burglaries.
Michael Gallon, of Prudhoe Terrace, in North Shields, pleaded guilty to three burglaries.
And appearing at Newcastle Crown Court last week, the 35-year-old was jailed for 40 months.
After the hearing, police welcomed the sentence.
Chief Inspector Helena Barron said: “Our message to burglars who commit offences in North Tyneside is clear, we are targeting criminals and we will be on your case.
“We’re continuing to target our resources on tackling burglary in our region.
“We know that house burglary is a crime which rightly concerns residents and we are doing all we can to put offenders behind bars, where they deserve to be.
“We also want to remind residents to make sure they keep their homes secure to help prevent crime.
“We’d ask people to consider the security of their homes. Simply locking doors and making sure windows are not left open when the property is empty can go a long way in helping to prevent the property from being targeted.
Carly Anderson, Michelle Bishop, Emily Bull, Jacob Chapman, Glenn Close, Siobhan Dillon, Julian Forsyth, Mark Goldthorp, Fenton Gray, Katie Kerr, Fred Johanson, Aaron Lee Lambert, Haydn Oakley, James Paterson, Tanya Robb, Ashley Robinson, Vicki Lee Taylor, Gary Tushaw, Adam Vaughan, Anna Woodside, Michael Xavier.
“Sunset Boulevard” made Glenn Close an icon of musical theater. Twenty-three years later, at age 69, she returns to a part that, she claims, has “haunted” her ever since — former screen icon Norma Desmond, hidden away in her hilltop mansion and pining for her old star status. The extra years change Desmond, and make An...
In space, stars take a million years to burn out; in Hollywood, little more than a decade. Written as a faded fiftysomething, Norma Desmond was the embodiment of that: A woman slung out on the scrap heap, old before her time. Here, pushing 70 (though the script still insists otherwise), she becomes something else: a ma...
Ideas of icons and immortality, celluloid as an elixir of youth, fall into focus. Close gives you the sense that, deep down, Norma knows. When she returns to her old studio, there’s a brief flicker of recognition that the world has moved on, even a marvel at its modernity. Tracy Christensen’s black and white outfit spl...
To start, Close teases us with an impression of madness, eyes rolling back, hands fluttering, laying her pet chimpanzee to rest. Her skill is to fill in the foundations afterwards. She can be prickly and regal, brittle and shrill, but we also get glimpses of her younger self in the odd smile or moment of tenderness. It...
This is a semi-staged production, played on a vast sound stage with a full orchestra on show. A huge wrought-iron staircase spiders over their heads and director Lonny Price goes all-out gothic, with Mark Henderson delivering the noirish lighting and plenty of shadows for Fred Johanson’s Lurch-like butler to lurk in. A...
The bare-stage simplicity lets your imagination do the work and leaves all the ambiguity intact. Without a grand gothic mansion imposing itself, it can be both sweet and sour, macabre and romantic. Close’s Norma is both endearing and deranged; Xavier’s Joe, cowardly, exploitative and kind. Played this simply, the story...
It’s Lloyd Webber’s score that really benefits, sumptuously arranged for a full orchestra and sung with real expression throughout. You hear the thinking behind his compositions: the silkiness set against shrillness; sincere strings that knock into suave saxophones. He evokes sweeping silent movie scores and lets chara...
Collisseum, London; 2359 seats; £105, $150 top. Opened, reviewed April 4, 2016. Running time: 2 HOURS, 30 MIN.
Production: An English National Opera production of a musical in two acts by Andrew Lloyd Webber with a book by Don Black and Christopher Hampton.
Creative: Directed by Lonny Price; Conducted by Michael Reed; Set design, James Noone; Costume design, Tracy Christensen; lighting, Mark Henderson; sound, Mick Potter; orchestrations, David Cullen and Andrew Lloyd Webber; choreography, Stephen Mear.
Cast: Carly Anderson, Michelle Bishop, Emily Bull, Jacob Chapman, Glenn Close, Siobhan Dillon, Julian Forsyth, Mark Goldthorp, Fenton Gray, Katie Kerr, Fred Johanson, Aaron Lee Lambert, Haydn Oakley, James Paterson, Tanya Robb, Ashley Robinson, Vicki Lee Taylor, Gary Tushaw, Adam Vaughan, Anna Woodside, Michael Xavier.
Jorge Garcia on "Hawaii Five-0"
After guest starring in two episodes, he'll be a full-time cast member in the newly announced fifth season of the drama.
Jorge Garcia is going back to the island.
The Lost alum has been promoted to series regular for Hawaii Five-O's newly announced fifth season of the CBS remake, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Garcia has guest starred twice on the island-set procedural, playing Jerry Ortega, a conspiracy theorist and former high school classmate of his former Lost co-star Daniel Dae Kim's Detective Lt. Chin Ho Kelly.
"Jorge very quickly made Jerry an unlikely and valuable part of the Five-O Ohana," exec producer Peter Lenkov tells THR. "We have many opportunities planned to put Jerry's unusual and infectious desire to put the bad guys to good use."
The move brings Garcia back to Hawaii, where ABC's Lost filmed for six seasons. In Hawaii Five-O's four-season run, the series has staged several Lost reunions, featuring guest turns from Henry Ian Cusick, Tania Raymonde, Cynthia Watros, Terry O'Quinn and Sam Anderson.
Garcia, who last year booked a role on CBS' drama pilot The Ordained, is repped by APA and KLWGN. The Hawaii Five-O promotion marks his latest series regular role following Fox's Alcatraz and guest turns on Once Upon a Time, Fringe and Californication.
A crowd of protesters gathered in central Moscow yesterday to express their anger at the assassination of the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who at the weekend became the 13th Russian journalist to be killed in a contract-style killing since President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.
Politkovskaya, 48, had today been due to publish an article on torture and kidnappings by pro-Moscow forces in the restless southern republic of Chechnya, her colleagues said.
The prosecutor general took personal control of the investigation yesterday, but Mr Putin made no comment on the killing of one of the country's best-known public figures and his fiercest critic.
Politkovskaya, who won international acclaim for exposing the brutality of Russian forces in Chechnya, was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in Moscow on Saturday. Police were last night hunting a man in a white baseball cap who was filmed by a CCTV camera entering the building a few moments before she was s...
The killing immediately threw suspicion on the security services and the pro-Moscow Chechen forces that control Chechnya. "You just have to look at the subjects of her latest work and there's your list of chief suspects," said Viktor Shenderovich, a well-known radio and television commentator, who joined the protest by...
Protesters carried placards reading "The Kremlin killed freedom of speech", and "Anna, great daughter of Russia".
Flyura Arslanova, a pensioner clutching a photograph of Politkovskaya and dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, said: "It's a tragedy. She was killed for being honest."
Eduard Limonov, a radical opposition figure, said: "It is Putin who has created this society of hate where journalists are murdered and other nationalities become the victim of Russian race supremacy."
Politkovskaya, a mother of two, had harried security officers, military men, and Chechnya's controversial prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, in numerous articles for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta which condemned the cruelty wrought against civilians in the conflict between pro-Moscow forces and separatist rebels.
She was widely admired for her courage and tenacity in uncovering stories that few other reporters dared to touch. Her books - A Dirty War: A Russian reporter in Chechnya; and A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya - brought her worldwide acclaim.
She was once arrested and subjected to a mock execution by security forces in Chechnya, and came close to death on another occasion in an apparent poisoning attempt. Yet she denied being particularly brave, saying in one interview: "The duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer to sing...
A spokesman for Russia's prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, told NTV that all motives for the killing were being examined, but "of course the main one we are looking at is the professional activity of the journalist".
In Washington, the US state department said Politkovskaya was "personally courageous and committed to seeking justice even in the face of previous death threats", but the Kremlin was silent. Mr Putin held a routine meeting of his security council, but did not mention the murder. The EU said Russian authorities should l...
Novaya Gazeta placed a portrait of Politkovskaya trimmed with black on its website and announced a 25m-rouble (£500,000) reward for information leading to the capture of the people who ordered her killing. Its deputy editor, Andrei Lipsky, told the Guardian that Politkovskaya had been preparing an article for today's e...
Mr Kadyrov was asked yesterday to comment on accusations that his men carried out the killing. He replied: "Making assumptions without any basis or serious evidence means arguing on the level of rumours and gossip, and that flatters neither journalists nor politicians." He told the Itar-Tass news agency: "I want to und...
Outside Politkovskaya's apartment block on Lesnaya Street, mourners left carnations and candles close to a portrait of her placed on top of a post box.
Svetlana Khokhlova, 60, who uses a wheelchair, said she had travelled from the outskirts of the city to pay her respects. "She wrote about the forgotten people like me," she said. "She was sharp and intelligent and she wrote the truth. I'm ashamed of my country today."
Inside the building, the doors of the lift where Politskovaya was shot stood open, a single bullet hole just below head-height puncturing the steel back wall of the lift. Detectives went from floor to floor questioning the block's residents.
In Chechnya there is a sharp lack of people who question themselves. They are mostly single-minded amoebas. For them to kill is like having a sip of tea. For such amoebas to understand a person presented to them as an enemy is impossible. And what does it mean "to understand" in Chechnya? To understand is to preserve s...
What is Kadyrov syndrome? Its main characteristics are insolence, boorishness and cruelty masquerading as courage and manliness. In Chechnya the Kadyrovtsy [forces loyal to Kadyrov] beat men and women whenever they think it's necessary. They cut off the heads of their enemies in the same way as the Wahabis [Islamic mil...
The world is afraid of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction - I'm afraid of hatred. Uncontrolled and building up. The world somehow came up with mechanisms to control the leaders of Iraq and North Korea but nobody can foresee how personal revenge works. And the world is defenceless against it. In our country there is now a...
ArcBest Corp. reported first-quarter revenue of $651.1 million compared to 2016 first-quarter revenue of $621.5 million.
The first quarter 2017 Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP, operating loss was $12.3 million compared to an operating loss of $9.3 million last year. The net loss in this year's first quarter was $7.4 million compared to a first quarter 2016 net loss of $6.1 million.
Excluding certain items in both periods as identified in the attached reconciliation tables, non-GAAP net loss was $5.8 million in first quarter compared to a first quarter 2016 net loss of $5.9 million.
ArcBest ranks No. 12 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers.
On a non-GAAP basis, the operating loss was $8.7 million in first quarter compared to a first quarter 2016 operating loss of $8.4 million. The consolidated non-GAAP operating results comparison was impacted by a $2 million increase in the "Other and eliminations" loss driven by previously highlighted investments in tec...
"The first quarter — typically the most challenging of the year — saw revenue growth in both our asset-based and asset-light businesses but also experienced some changing freight characteristics on the less-than-truckload side and a degree of weaker demand, particularly in the truckload sector," said ArcBest CEO Judy M...

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