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Farmaner said that under the new constitution, real power would reside in a national defence and security council. Parliament would serve as no more than a rubber stamp, for the sake of Burma’s international image. The head of the armed forces, General Than Shwe, would remain the most powerful figure in the country and key ministries would remain under military control.
More than 20 new parties have applied to register, but so far only five have been granted permission. Four of the 10 existing parties have also applied. Most of those given the green light are close to the ruling regime. The main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) has said it will not participate because “unjust” election laws announced in March would require the league to expel its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, because she has a criminal record.
The league won the last elections in 1990 by a landslide, but was prevented from taking office by the military, which has run the country since 1962, almost without interruption.
The European Council issued a statement on Burma this week expressing “serious concerns that election laws as published in early March do not provide for free and fair elections”.
MUSEUM GRANT ANNOUNCED — Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced that his office has given a $25,000 grant to Motts Military Museum in Groveport to help preserve a historic World War II landing craft known as a Higgins boat, one of the few still in existence in the world.
The grant will be used to help fund the construction of a steel-framed metal building to house the museum’s restored World War II Higgins boat, or landing craft, vehicle, personnel (LCVP). During the war, Higgins boats were used to transport troops and supplies. Sam Belfiore, the Ohio native who piloted this craft, received a Silver Star for bravery during WWII.
STEPHEN L. LESSNICK, MD, PHD, NAMED DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR CHILDHOOD CANCER AND BLOOD DISORDERS AT NATIONWIDE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL – Stephen L. Lessnick, MD, PhD, has joined the faculty at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital as the director of the Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders.
As the director, Dr. Lessnick leads a team of pediatric researchers in the Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders who are working to expand the understanding of the development of childhood cancer and to transform diagnostic and treatment strategies. He will also foster close collaborations with the clinical team within the Division of Hematology/Oncology/Blood and Marrow Transplantation (BMT) at Nationwide Children’s. The research team’s areas of focus include biology and therapy of a broad array of diseases that affect young children, adolescents, and young adults, including neuroblastoma, brain tumors, leukemia, and sarcomas. Dr. Lessnick’s personal research interest is in the area of Ewing sarcoma.
Dr. Lessnick is also a professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. He attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, for his undergraduate education and earned his MD and PhD degrees from the University of California in Los Angeles. After completing his internship and residency at Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, Dr. Lessnick finished his pediatric hematology and oncology fellowship at Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He completed his postdoctoral research in their Pediatric Oncology Department, where he studied the transcriptional consequences of the Ewing sarcoma fusion gene. He joined the University of Utah faculty in January 2004 and served as the director of the Center for Children’s Cancer Research at Huntsman Cancer Institute.
ARTS FUNDING APPROVED – The Ohio Arts Council (OAC) will receive the largest increase in state funds in its 50-year history thanks to Governor John R. Kasich and Ohio legislators’ enactment of House Bill 64, the state’s biennial operating budget for fiscal years 2016 and 2017.
Grassroots efforts aimed at increasing arts funding paved the way for this monumental increase. “I want to thank arts advocates across the state, led by Ohio Citizens for the Arts, for continuing to make investing in the arts a priority for policymakers,” Rich said.
The credit-card giant has revolutionized the electronic payments industry. Find out some things many people don't know.
For years, Visa (NYSE:V) has sat atop the credit card industry, with its huge payment network spanning the globe and taking advantage of the increased use of electronic-payment networks to conduct business rather than cash transactions. Yet there are things about Visa that many investors don't know about and find surprising when they learn about them. Let's take a look at some fun facts about Visa that fly beneath the radar for many shareholders and cardholders.
The Visa card dates back to the mid-1970s, but its historical predecessor was the BankAmericard product from Bank of America (NYSE:BAC). In 1958, Bank of America worked to develop its universal credit card, distinguishing it from the merchant-specific store cards that dominated the industry landscape in the 1950s. The first BankAmericard actually came in the form of a paper card and came with a $300 credit limit.
By 1970, Bank of America had turned over control of BankAmericard to issuing banks, but B of A kept the international rights to license the card outside the U.S. That decision helped extend BankAmericard into a global brand, as B of A brought in partners in more than a dozen countries.
The global expansion of the BankAmericard program led to some concerns about logistics and brand consistency. In other parts of the world, the card carried other names, including Carte Bleue in France, Barclaycard in the U.K., and Chargex in Canada. Having a single network with a single name would not only boost brand awareness but also potentially help internal operations by bringing together interchange transaction processing and other key functions.
In 1976, BankAmericard became Visa. The company describes Visa as "a simple name that sounds the same in every language," with the obvious U.S. implications of being a payment method that would work around the world.
Advertising slogans come and go, with many major companies discarding successful campaigns in favor of new efforts within just a few years. Visa's slogan distinguishes itself as having withstood the test of time.
In 1986, Visa began its "Everywhere You Want to Be" campaign, with the goal of extending the brand's image beyond the travel and business world to an all-purpose consumer credit card. Indeed, the company has consistently used the slogan as a way of poking fun at American Express (NYSE:AXP), in conjunction with its exclusive marketing arrangements with key venues to accept only Visa cards for payment.
Until early 2008, Visa was owned by its member financial institutions. The IPO was a huge success, becoming the largest in history at that time at $17.9 billion. It also proved opportune as many Visa owners needed liquidity in the run-up to the then-looming financial crisis.
Even now, many banks have still held onto their Visa shares. For some, their Visa holdings have become a financial reserve account, with banks selling shares when tough times make it hard to tap other sources of liquidity. Bank of America, for instance, made sales of Visa shares from 2010 to 2014 as part of a broader plan to raise capital. Other banks have used sales to offset one-time charges to earnings. All told, banks still retain about $30 billion in Visa shares.
Visa doesn't issue its own cards, but the number of cards bearing its name is truly astounding. As of the end of the most recent quarter, Visa had 2.442 billion credit and debit cards, with the U.S. alone accounting for nearly 800 million of them.
Put another way, if you took each of the 3.37-inch wide cards and put them end to end, they would span for nearly 130,000 miles. That's enough to circle the earth five times and leave a few thousand miles to spare -- or to get you nearly halfway to the moon.
Visa has been a highly successful company. It faces plenty of future challenges, but it has a strong track record of growth that goes back much further than its post-IPO existence and should help it find new ways to expand in the years to come.
Cassidy and Russians Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin traveled six hours in the capsule before linking up with the space station’s Russian Rassvet research module over the Pacific Ocean, just off Peru, at 02:28 GMT.
“It’s such a beautiful sight, hard to believe my eyes,” the 59-year-old Vinogradov, who had been in space in 1997 and 2006, was heard saying on NASA TV.
“Hey, is anyone home?” joked Vinogradov as he floated into the station.
“You’re such a star! I’m really proud of you!” Misurkin’s tearful mother said.
The 35-year-old Russian is on his first flight into space.
The new maneuver was tested successfully by three Russian Progress cargo ships, unmanned versions of the Soyuz used to ferry supplies to the space station. Russian cosmonauts have described the two-day approach maneuver in the cramped Soyuz as one of the most grueling parts of a mission.
Vinogradov said at a pre-launch news conference that the shorter flight path would reduce the crew’s fatigue and allow the astronauts to be in top shape for the docking.
How will law enforcement handle the deluge of new information available from DNA?
Lisa Ziegert disappeared from the gift shop where she worked on April 15, 1992, and her body was found four days later. From then until this past Monday, her murder remained unsolved.
Then on Monday, the local district attorney’s office in Massachusetts announced the arrest of a 48-year-old man for Ziegert’s death. Among the clues that led police to him was a computer-generated “mug shot” based on DNA found at the crime scene 25 years ago. Back then, the idea of predicting a face based on DNA would have seemed like science fiction. It is still rare today, but law-enforcement officials can quite easily order up such a test from the Virginia-based company Parabon NanoLabs.
Ziegert’s case is already being touted as an example of the power of new DNA technologies to solve crimes. In many ways, it’s the perfect example to take to the media: a young female victim, an infamous murder, a 25-year-old case. It’s unclear exactly how pivotal the DNA evidence was—the district attorney said “a number of factors” contributed to narrowing down the suspects—but there will almost certainly be more cases like this involving DNA.
With the cost of sequencing rapidly falling, forensics labs have been looking for new ways to generate leads out of DNA. “The idea of looking at markers of ancestry, eye color, and hair color has been attractive for years,” says Peter Vallone, who leads the applied-genetics group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. New ways of interpreting DNA, however, are also more reliant on algorithms that are often secret.
Forensics labs currently use a DNA-analysis technique that is decades old and limited in scope. Instead of sequencing whole genes as cutting-edge academic research labs often do, forensics labs look for something called short tandem repeats (STR). These are repeated snippets of DNA that show up in parts of the genome that do not code for genes. Forensic labs do not actually know the sequence of the STRs they test, but they can count the number of repeats at several specific locations in the genome. Count enough repeats in enough places, and the pattern is fairly unique to each person. The FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS—the database that police run DNA samples against—currently uses 20 core STRs to make matches.
“The forensics community,” says Cydne Holt, is “very conservative, and rightly so.” Holt is the chief scientific officer of Verogen, a forensic-genomics company recently spun out of Illumina, the major U.S. manufacturer of DNA-sequencing machines. Illumina has been on a bit of spree lately, forming new ventures to expand uses of DNA sequencers—first liquid biopsies, at-home genetic tests, and now forensics.
With DNA sequencers, forensics labs could actually read the sequences of the STRs, which could help match or rule out samples in tricky cases with degraded DNA or samples mixed with DNA of multiple people. Verogen already offers a forensics kit that works with Illumina’s DNA-sequencing machines to analyze ancestry, hair color, and eye color information along with STRs. DNA sequencers are not yet used in forensics labs, though a handful of labs are currently validating them for potential future use. The California Department of Justice, for example, began validating DNA-sequencing tools about two years ago and plans to complete the process within the next year.
In general, however, there is little regulatory oversight over how law enforcement can use these new DNA tests. DNA left at a crime scene is considered abandoned material, and police can do pretty much anything they like with it and the information encoded in it. “The law still treats an abandoned single cell of genetic material the way it treats a mask abandoned by a robber,” says Erin Murphy, a professor at New York University’s law school and the author of Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA. Individual crime labs validate the tests they use, but there is no agency to make sure interpretations are correct.
As DNA-analysis techniques become more sophisticated, they will also become more reliant on proprietary algorithms to interpret the DNA. The secrecy can make it hard to identify problems.
Recently, algorithms used to look at STRs have come under fire after being examined by expert witnesses. ProPublica and the The New York Times reported in September that New York City’s DNA lab stopped using two methods for analyzing degraded and mixed DNA samples after their accuracy came under question. By then, the methods had already been used in thousands of criminal cases.
Law enforcement can also use commercially available software like TrueAllele and STRmix for mixed DNA samples. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has urged courts to allow defendants to review the source code for TrueAllele. Parabon NanoLabs, which does the facial reconstruction from DNA, has not shared its algorithms either, and it has been criticized by researchers for overstating the science.
Twenty-five years ago, when Lisa Ziegert was killed, DNA evidence was just beginning to enter the criminal-justice system. It is now routine, and its uses are only expanding. There will be new ways of using DNA to solve crimes, but there may be new ways of misusing DNA, too.
Samuel Oliver-Bruno left a sanctuary church in North Carolina to meet immigration officials, fearing he'd never come back.
Oliver-Bruno had an appointment with immigration officials to provide fingerprints and discuss a petition to delay his deportation. He was accompanied by faith leaders and other supporters Friday for the 13-mile trip to the offices in the Raleigh-area.
About 20 minutes after he walked into the offices of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, agents dressed in plainclothes arrested him.
Faith leaders and church members quickly formed a human wall around the vehicle taking him to detention, and would not leave.
They locked arms around the agents' unmarked gold-colored van and prayed for about two hours. They sang "Amazing Grace" and other worship songs.
"Let him stay!" they yelled. "Let your people go!"
Authorities arrested him as part of a "targeted enforcement action," ICE spokesman Bryan Cox said.
"Mr. Oliver-Bruno is a convicted criminal who has received all appropriate legal process under federal law, has no outstanding appeals, and has no legal basis to remain in the US," Cox said.
The people who accompanied him did not follow orders to disperse, and 27 of them were arrested without incident, the Morrisville Police Department said.
Pastor Cleve May said church members were fearful this might happen.
"It was presented as a legitimate appointment but ICE utilized due process as bait," May said. "So we went to the appointment with him, to offer protection, knowing that ICE could not be trusted. We were thinking we would be in and out in 30 minutes."
Oliver-Bruno was born in Veracruz, Mexico and came to the United States more than 20 years ago to live in Greenville, CNN affiliate WRAL reported.
In 2014, Oliver-Bruno was arrested in El Paso, Texas, after he attempted to enter the US using a Texas birth certificate, court documents show.
He later admitted that he was a Mexican national and had paid $1,000 for the document. Oliver-Bruno's case has been subject to extensive appeals since then, Cox said.
To avoid deportation, he lived at CityWell United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina, for 11 months. ICE generally avoids arrests at "sensitive locations" such as houses of worship.
Oliver-Bruno fears he'll be deported and leave behind his son and his wife, who suffers from Lupus and other medical conditions, the affiliate reported.
Last year, the CityWell United Methodist Church agreed to take him in but the building wasn't ready for him. He helped with the renovations, including building a bedroom and a shower.
"He helped construct his living quarters. He's remarkable. He's very generous and kind," Pastor Cleve May said.
During his time at the church, he attended classes to learn English as a second language, played guitar and read during services.
With the help of community members, Oliver-Bruno, who is an aspiring baptist minister, continued his studies at Duke University's Divinity School after his class agreed to meet at the church, advocacy group Alerta Migratoria said.
But the uncertainty and the wait would also get to him.
"As I continued cooped up, sometimes I feel the need to be free. I need to work, do the activities I used to do, to afford medicines for my wife and doctor's appointments," he said in a video posted by advocates days before his arrest.
"I need to work to support her (wife) and my son."
His arrest means others who've sought sanctuary at other churches are not safe either, advocates said.
"If people can't take try these kinds of attempts at stopping their deportation, if this is going to be disrespected, what can we expect?" said Viridiana Martinez with Alerta Migratoria. "What are they supposed to do?"
Congressmen David Price and G.K. Butterfield said they are "extremely alarmed" by the detention, and accused the immigration agencies of coordinating the arrest.
"It appears ICE has acted in concert with officials at USCIS, who instructed Mr. Oliver-Bruno to appear at local USCIS offices to discuss his deferred deportation," the lawmakers said in a statement.
"At best, Mr. Oliver-Bruno was presented with a catch-22 dilemma; at worst, he was entrapped," they added."
Oliver-Bruno will not be immediately deported. The congressmen said ICE has committed to allow him to remain in US detention while his case is adjudicated.
Warning sign or placard to be posted on homes where lead hazards have been found and not fixed.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Families forced to move because of lead hazards may now have an easier time getting money to help relocate. Changes made this month clarify and streamline the eligibility requirements for the temporary assistance grants distributed by the county.
Up to $1,500 is available to help low-income families with children or pregnant women move.
The pool of money is limited and is used to help families with a variety of emergency short-term needs, such as rent or security deposits, utility bills or work-related expenses, such as car repairs necessary to maintain employment.
The state distributes the federal grant money through county welfare agencies.
Stepped up enforcement of lead hazards that lingered for years in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County could leave more families searching for help if forced to move.
In the past, families facing relocation told community agencies and The Plain Dealer they had trouble getting the county funds.
Prior to this month, families with a lead poisoned child or in a home with an identified lead hazard could apply for assistance but had to provide proof they were being evicted, Christy Nicholls, interim administrator for Cuyahoga Job and Family Services Administrator said.
Documents that show health department officials have ordered the family to vacate the home due to a lead hazard that the landlord has failed to remediate.
A letter from a medical provider that a child has been hospitalized due to lead poisoning.
Evidence of a blood test that shows a child living in the home has an elevated lead level of 5 micrograms per deciliter or above.
Before the recent change, the county required a child to be poisoned at a higher level, 10 micrograms per deciliter, a level that requires a health department investigation.
The level was lowered to align with "level of concern" used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Ohio Health Department, Nicholls said.
The changes, which were effective June 6, came after conversations County Job and Family Services staff had with county and city health department officials, who are responsible for responding to hundreds of lead poisoning cases each year, said David Merriman, assistant director of county Health and Human Services said.
Cuyahoga County Board of Health Commissioner Terry Allan said providing more options was imperative, and that health officials are still looking for additional resources to help families who don't meet income or other eligibility requirements.
"We don't want to exchange lead hazards for homelessness," Allan said. "We don't want kids to be exposed [to lead] but we also want kids to be stable."
Applicants can apply for up to $1,500 in emergency funds once in a calendar year. If they must move because of lead exposure in their home they can request an additional $750 for rent or a security deposit.
Tenants concerned about their legal rights when it comes to lead hazards or orders to vacate can also contact Legal Aid at 1-888-817-3777 or read about their rights on its web site.
Cleveland Lead Safe Network is also looking into problems and helping residents alert city councilmembers about issues in their wards. Call 216-359-1060 or email to clevelandleadsafe@gmail.com.
Cleveland officials announced last month that they were issuing orders to vacate and placarding city homes with warning signs in cases where property owners hadn't made efforts to remediate lead hazards for a year or more. In 2017, 80 or more homes were placarded, according to city officials and state records.
Last week, city officials said health officials would placard 340 homes before June 23. That effort, a spokeswoman said, would also bring them in compliance with a court order that gave the city 30 days from May 23 to comply with state law, which requires the orders to vacate and posting of signs that warn the homes are unsafe for pregnant woman and young children.
The city previously had not followed the law and was sued by The Legal Aid Society of Cleveland on behalf of a poisoned child last year.
Last year, Cleveland officials said they were exploring other options, including temporary housing, for families displaced because of lead hazards. That idea also has been broached by philanthropic groups collaborating to tackle lead poisoning, including the Cleveland Foundation, but no plans have been announced.
Nicholls said the changes to the county-administered program are not specifically in response to the city's efforts.
The county worked to identify barriers families affected by lead poisoning faced when trying to access the temporary assistance in lead poisoning-related cases.
It had conversations with the Cleveland Municipal Housing Court, public housing staff, and as part of required public comments on the county policy for obtaining what are often referred to at PRC, or Prevention, Retention and Contingency funds, officials said.
"In the past we were looking for some sort of court proceeding, such as an eviction," Nicholls said. Allowing for a letter from a landlord, like a 30-day notice, prevents "forcing folks to go through the whole eviction process," she said.

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