Mumbai-based leading non-profit organization working on the issue of Child Sexual Abuse has engaged Bollywood star Vidya Balan as their goodwill ambassador. She had played the role of Durga Rani Singh a survivor of child sexual abuse, in the movie Kahaani 2, where she saved another child who was being sexually abused by her uncle. Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) is a startling everyday reality for as many as half of the country’s children (National Child Abuse Study 2007). With the ever-increasing reports of child sexual abuse, we know that the scenario is not too different even today. Yet it is still an issue that is barely addressed. There is a limited acceptance that CSA happens and that it has a significant impact on children. CSA can lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, addictions, and suicidal thoughts and can continue to disrupt the child’s life during adulthood if not healed. Vidya Balan Joins Arpan As Their Goodwill Ambassador Based in Mumbai, Arpan is one of the largest NGOs in India with over 100 social workers and counsellors providing prevention and intervention services to children and adults to address the issue of CSA. Over the last 10 years, Arpan has reached out to over 188,000 children, adolescents and adults directly. Arpan has also trained over 3,500 professionals across India and impacted over 4,60,000 children and adults. Arpan works on prevention of CSA through the Personal Safety Education Programme conducted in schools and communities, Training Programmes for relevant stakeholders, Policy Advocacy to bring in systemic change and healing through their Counselling Services to survivors of CSA. Ms Pooja Taparia, Founder and CEO of Arpan said “It is an honour for Arpan to have a celebrated actor like Vidya Balan as our Goodwill ambassador. Vidya’s roles have always been inspiring and action-oriented. It was a privilege working with her during the making of Kahaani 2. Her role in the movie as Durga Rani Singh, a survivor of child sexual abuse was a powerful one. She wasn’t a silent bystander, but actually took action to protect a girl from Child Sexual Abuse and that’s an inspiring message for all of us. Much like her role in the movie, over the years, Arpan has played a very important role in the lives of numerous children and adults in the prevention of Child Sexual Abuse. With Vidya Balan as our goodwill ambassador, we hope to influence many more people to speak up for prevention of child sexual abuse and to play an active role in creating a safe environment so that our children, the future of our nation, do not become victims of Child Sexual Abuse or have traumatic childhoods but have safe and happy childhoods.” When asked what her message on the issue of Child Sexual Abuse is, Vidya said “My message to everyone is that don’t think that Child Sexual Abuse is something that happens to other’s children. The unfortunate truth is that it could happen to your child or it could be happening to your child. We all need to be vigilant. We all need to be aware and acknowledge when we see the signs. We need to educate our children so that when they experience an unsafe situation, they are empowered enough to get away and seek help from a trusted adult.” What started in 2008 as a nascent organization that reached about 600 people in a year, has now grown to an organization that reaches over 56,000 people annually with the vision of a World Free from Child Sexual Abuse. Arpan is supported by Mr. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala (India), Mr. Karl-Johan Persson (CEO, H&M Worldwide, Sweden), Goldman Sachs (India), Eros International Media (India), The Marshall Foundation (France), GMSP Foundation (UK), The Global Fund for Children (USA), Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives (India), A.T.E and Chandra Philanthropic Foundation (India), British Asian Trust (UK), Reliance Foundation (India), Aditya Birla Finance Limited(India), Bajaj Auto Limited (India) amongst others. With Vidya Balan as a goodwill ambassador, here’s hoping that Arpan grows manifold in being able to amplify conversations around the issue Child Sexual Abuse while working diligently on its prevention and healing at the grassroots and systemic level.

Having risen from an actor who began his career with small bits in various films, Nawazuddin Siddiqui has clearly reached a point where he has shown not only his versatility but also the ability to hold films on his own. The actor, who will be seen playing writer Saadat Hasan Manto and late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray in separate films, says he’s done with cameos. Here for his film Manto“, which features in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, Nawazuddin was all praise for the film’s director Nandita Das’ impeccable research. He shies away from naming a favourite director or even sharing his wish list. “If I take names, the others will feel bad about it. As an actor, I only look at stories, script and most importantly my character in the film. There is also a selfishness that works and I think it’s quite normal that I look for characters that will challenge me and push me to the limits,” Nawazuddin told this correspondent. Nawazuddin Siddiqui: “I’m Done With My Quota Of Small Roles” He is clear that there is no room for any more cameo appearances for him.”No, I will not do it anymore (laughs). It’s as simple as that, why will I do them? I am done with my quota of small roles,” he said. Nawazuddin is also venturing into production, taking on projects such as Manto as a co-producer.”There are some upcoming films that I am co-producing as well. My brother is very much into this doing the scouting for me. I definitely want to produce films as well,” he said. He rules out exploring foreign shores for roles, saying he is content with India and the diversity of roles he is getting to do. “For the time being, I am satisfied that all my directors in India are giving me characters that are pretty challenging and I am happy doing those. “Just for the sake of a branding that I am an international star, I would not do that. How many films in the world are like ‘Manto’? Very few. So, I have no such predetermined affiliation for international projects. I am proud of Nandita and a film like this is no way less than any international film.” On him getting typecast, Nawazuddin said: “I think it’s completely a wrong conception. If I am doing (playing) Bal Thackeray and Manto at the same time, how can one say that I am typecast? The Bollywood heroes are typecast, they do the same thing all their life and they are never asked these questions.” “Now the films made in India are allowing actors like us to step in the shoes of lead characters and that makes us versatile. So, those who are still doing this (stretches his hand) are typecast, not me,” he said. The heavy downpour that accompanied the interview perhaps reflected the emotional response of the viewers to Manto at the screening here in Cannes. The actor says the period film clearly touched a chord with the audience at Cannes. “I have seen people crying in the audience, there were people who came out with a very satisfied face. And the best part was I think the film has tried to hit the conscience of people very hard. There were many who came up to me and said that the film was very well timed,” Nawazuddin said.

Actor Vicky Kaushal who turned 30 today, is soaring high with the response of his recent release Raazi. He says, “Raazi has made my birthday special and I want to thank the people who have seen it and are showering us with so much love.” On talking about the appreciation Raazi received he adds, “I’m so happy to read the reviews and see people sharing their feelings on social media after watching the film. This is exactly what we felt after reading the script and we were able to translate that on screen. It’s a surreal feeling.” When asked about his plans on his birthday he said, “I am working. I will be taking off for Serbia in the next 10 days to shoot for my next film, Uri. I’m attending some workshops for it. Today, I’ll be doing a five-hour workshop. Then I might catch up with the Raazi team and meet the media to thank them.

Frances Bean Cobain's and her ex-husband, Isaiah Silva, have finally settled their property dispute, and he will keep one of rock music's most iconic guitars under the agreement. Frances and Isaiah finalized their divorce late last year, but had been arguing over property since then. One of the points of contention was a 1959 Martin D-18E guitar that her father, Kurt Cobain, played on "MTV Unplugged." It's believed to have been the last guitar he played before his death in April 1994. According to TMZ, Isaiah now officially owns the piece of rock history. The website notes that Frances, who lost her dad to suicide when she was only 1, simply wanted Isaiah out of her life for good, and the sooner, the better. Frances, 25, actually did well in the divorce, too, TMZ says. The model doesn't have to pay her ex any spousal support, despite him asking for $25,000 a month. She is also not on the hook for any of his bills, and she gets to keep the house they bought. TMZ reported last year that the guitar was once insured for $1 million and given its ownership history and the fact that the model arrived on the market in 1959 and was discontinued within a year likely means it's worth "several million" dollars today. The bridge and nut on Kurt's Martin guitar had also been replaced to enable Kurt, a lefty, to play it upside down. In 2016, Kurt's widow and Frances mother, Courtney Love, said that guitar is "a treasured heirloom of the family's."

For more than a month now, the investigation of Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, has been a spectacle, a garish pageant of money, sex and politics unfolding both in court and in the court of public opinion. And if anyone can be thought of as the ringmaster in this noisy legal circus, it is Mr. Cohen’s chief nemesis, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for the pornographic film star Stephanie Clifford. After all, it was Mr. Avenatti who sent Ms. Clifford — better known as Stormy Daniels — into a courtroom in Manhattan last month to sit (in her pink blazer) within sight of Mr. Cohen as part of a publicity stunt that largely seemed designed to needle and unnerve him. It was also Mr. Avenatti who set off a frenzy in the media last week by releasing a report that showed how Mr. Cohen had taken more than $1 million from a firm linked to a wealthy Russian oligarch and from several major companies, including AT&T. As federal prosecutors in Manhattan continue to investigate whether Mr. Cohen broke the law by paying Ms. Clifford to stay silent about an affair she says she had with Mr. Trump, Mr. Avenatti has never once shut up about the case. In a guerrilla-style campaign, he has been on Twitter daily — sometimes almost hourly — talking of Mr. Cohen and has appeared so frequently on television that some have joked that he sleeps at CNN. But while his voluble tactics have won him plaudits among members of the left, many of whom seem to believe that his efforts in the Cohen case might take down Mr. Trump, some legal experts said that his barrage of Trump-like tweets and his all-but-constant media appearances might not be doing Ms. Clifford any favors. “Lawyers do speak publicly to defend their clients, but it’s ordinarily very limited and there’s a good reason for that,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at the New York University School of Law. “I don’t think Avenatti is truly representing Clifford in his media blitz. It’s not quite legal representation — it’s political representation.” At least for the moment, though, Mr. Avenatti is facing an important legal hurdle — one that he must overcome in order to be given a say inside the courtroom. Recently, he asked the judge in the matter, Kimba M. Wood, to make him a party to the case. Mr. Avenatti has said he wants to join to the case to protect Ms. Clifford’s records, some of which were seized last month when federal agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office, apartment and hotel room. But apparently annoyed by his unconventional methods, Mr. Cohen’s lawyers are fighting his request. In a motion filed last week, the lawyers tried to keep Mr. Avenatti out of the case by telling Judge Wood that he had not only illegally obtained Mr. Cohen’s bank records, but had also misquoted them in his report “for the purpose of creating a toxic mix of misinformation.” In his own motion filed on Monday night, Mr. Avenatti hit back, saying he had “First Amendment rights” to reveal the information about Mr. Cohen and that the lawyers’ efforts to stop him from entering the case were “a highly improper attempt to soil” him. With its reliance on the media and its light-on-the-law ad hominem attacks, Mr. Avenatti’s style of lawyering seems, ironically, to share much with the one employed by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s chief lawyer. Mr. Giuliani has also gone on television frequently to defend his client — though perhaps not as successfully as Mr. Avenatti. “My impression is that Avenatti has acquitted himself well on television, especially in contrast to Rudy Giuliani,” said Kathleen Clark, a professor at Washington University Law School who teaches legal ethics. Ms. Clark suggested that Mr. Avenatti, who is raising money to defend Ms. Clifford on a crowdsourcing website has made himself ubiquitous in the media on purpose. “Avenatti’s use of Twitter and his television appearances are unusual, but his omnipresence seems like a strategy,” she said. “He may well be doing all of this to keep his client in the news for public relations purposes and to make money to represent her. To the degree that helps him serve his client’s needs, it’s completely defensible.” Oddly enough, despite Mr. Cohen’s reputation as a legal pit bull and massager of the media, his own team of lawyers has largely avoided talking with reporters, preferring to let their filings in the case speak for them. It is, of course, possible that they have not lashed out as vocally — or as visibly — as Mr. Avenatti has because others have waged their battles for them. On Sunday, for example, the Daily Caller, a conservative website, published an article attacking Mr. Avenatti for having a past “littered with lawsuits, jilted business partners and bankruptcy filings.” A few days earlier, Mr. Giuliani gave an interview to Business Insider, explaining that he had declined Mr. Avenatti’s invitation to debate because, as he put it, “I don’t get involved with pimps.” In typical fashion, Mr. Avenatti immediately struck back, threatening to sue the Daily Caller in an off-the-record email to one of its reporters, Peter J. Hasson, who promptly posted the missive onto Twitter. To Mr. Giuliani, he responded in a tweet that said, “I’m not the only ‘pimp’ you have experience with.”

LeBron James had 42 points, a triple double and maybe a head injury, but he was clear enough in the mind to know that Saturday's upcoming Game 3 will be less about the X's and O's and more about Cleveland's pride and grit. He was asked about his level of concern, a follow up to his statement after Game 1 that he had 'zero' level of concern. He didn't really answer, but he made sure his team knows what's on the line. "We have an opportunity to go home and protect home court," James said. "We going to use these days to really dive in on what we need to do to be successful. They did what they need to do and that was protect home and now is our time to do that as well. We have a few days like I said and we're going to see what we made of on Saturday." James was aggressive as needed, going 16 for 29 from the field on the night. Kevin Love was strong as well, racking up 22 points and 15 rebounds in the loss. But the collective ability and toughness of the Celtics was their undoing on Tuesday as much as LeBron getting clocked. Luckily for them, they have some time until then. But time won't make this Celtics team any less eager to declare that it's their time in the Eastern Conference. The Cavs, and potentially the LeBron James era in Cleveland, are in serious danger.

Jeanette Ortiz — a 14-year Chipotle veteran before she was fired in 2015 — was awarded nearly $8 million by a jury in Fresno County Superior Court for loss of wages, as well as damage to her reputation and emotional and mental distress. On Monday, she and her attorneys settled with Chipotle for a separate, confidential amount — apparently in lieu of punitive damages, which could have run as high as nine times the nearly $8 million award. Thus putting to an end the three-year ordeal that had branded the mother of nine a traitor. “She’s the American Dream; she’s just a hardworking person. And when you call somebody a thief, you destroy their life,” Ortiz’s attorney, Warren Paboojian, told The Post after Monday’s verdict. “That’s the ultimate. You’re not going to be able to get a job anywhere with that label hanging over her head.” Ortiz could not be reached by The Washington Post. Paboojian said she had worked 50 hours a week as a general manager at the Mexican fast-casual chain, making $72,000 a year. When she was fired in January 2015, she was up for a promotion in which she would have earned $100,000 a year. For years, Ortiz had consistently earned glowing performance reviews. Last week’s verdict was first reported by the Fresno Bee. Paboojian said that in fall 2014, the Chipotle location where Ortiz worked had an extra $636, according to court documents, on hand after an armored car that routinely came to swap large bills out for smaller change didn’t show up. Paboojian said Ortiz found the extra money, sealed and stapled it in a manila envelope, and contacted the corporate office to flag the extra cash. She then put the money in a safe in view of a surveillance camera. That December, Ortiz filed a workers’ compensation claim while suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome. Paboojian said her bosses were unhappy that she would be missing work. And Ortiz believed that she was fired because of her disability. On Jan. 3, 2015, Ortiz texted her boss and two other superiors to say the money was missing from the safe, Paboojian said. She told them that she had last seen the money on Dec. 30, along with another assistant manager. At that point, the store brought in another manager who looked at the surveillance footage and said it showed Ortiz taking the money and putting it in her backpack on Dec. 29 — a charge Ortiz denied. When she asked to see the footage, the employees told her that was against corporate policy. But Paboojian said there’s no actual written policy that dictates whether employees can be shown video footage in these cases. “They use that lack of corporate policy as a weapon against their employees when they want to get rid of them,” Paboojian said. In court, Paboojian said her bosses filmed over the tape and deleted text messages and other notes detailing why they fired Ortiz, the Bee reported. Still, Robert Hinckley, Chipotle’s lawyer, told jurors that the company has a policy of not showing video evidence to employees, the Bee reported. Hinckley did not return a request for comment by The Post. On Monday morning, a Chipotle spokesperson told The Post that the company doesn’t comment on pending litigation. The spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up email asking whether it is company policy to not show employees video footage. The spokesperson also did not respond to questions after the case was closed. Paboojian told The Post that surveillance footage in the store tapes over itself periodically. “If you don’t clip parts or save it, you can just let 45 days run and then it just tapes over, and they say ‘oops,’ ” Paboojian said. Last week, Hinckley told jurors that it was a mistake that the footage was lost, according to the Bee. Hinckley told jurors that while Ortiz’s bosses had no ill will toward her, they felt betrayed when she allegedly stole the money because the company had supported her through four pregnancies and four workers’ compensation claims, the Bee reported. “She was well-liked. She was a valued employee. But she violated that trust by taking the money,” Hinckley told the jury, according to the Bee. Hinckley also told jurors that Ortiz was struggling financially around the time her bosses accused her of stealing the cash. Ortiz had borrowed $1,700 from a relative to pay an electric bill, and she had to move from her house to a smaller apartment. Ortiz also told a colleague that she had taken on a second job, the Bee reported. But in court, Paboojian noted that just because people are strapped for cash doesn’t mean they are thieves. Paboojian told The Post that four other people had access to the safe. The money still has not been recovered. By Paboojian’s recollection, the total damages awarded to Ortiz were Fresno County’s the second-largest employment verdict. “It’s a large verdict, but it’s large because of the impact that an employer can have on somebody when they call them a thief,” Paboojian said. Since she was fired, Ortiz has not been able to find work, Paboojian said. Whenever she applied for jobs, she would have to note on her résumé that she was terminated and tell potential employers that she was fired for stealing. Chipotle did not know whether any of Ortiz’s bosses would face any punishment. “We’ll have to wait and see,” Paboojian said. “That’s up to Chipotle.”

An 11-year-old girl in New York, who was helping her mother unpack their car during a powerful storm, was killed when a tree snapped and fell onto their vehicle. The girl’s mother had just parked the family SUV at their Newburgh City home when violent wind gusts toppled a tree and trapped the girl inside, FOX5 NY reported. Newburgh is about 60 miles north of New York City. "The mother was on the porch, crying, 'My daughter, my daughter,'" Ramon Rodriguez, a witness, told NBC News 4 New York. "It kind of gave me a chill when I first saw it." Firefighters responded and used power tools in an attempt to cut away the tree, FOX5 NY reported. The mother stood outside the car in tears as the fire department worked. “Suddenly it turned into a nightmare,” a resident told the station. “All Newburgh was horrible.” The girl was pulled from the car and taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead. The mother suffered minor injuries. Neighbors told News12 that the family had usually parked the SUV on the other side of the lot outside their home. Police were withholding the identities of the mother and daughter as of Tuesday night. The torrential rain and destructive winds hit Newburgh—located about 70 miles north of New York City—especially hard, knocking out power and collapsing structures around the city. The storm also has been blamed for the death of a Connecticut man who was killed when a tree fell onto the truck he was taking shelter in. In its wake, the storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes, downed trees and electrical wires, sparked fires, washed out roads and left commuters stranded for most of the evening.

PGA Tour player Lucas Glover was attacked by his wife during the Players Championship, according to police reports. Following the tournament's third round, Krista Glover was arrested and charged with domestic battery and resisting arrest. Police arrived to a residence rented by the Glovers on Saturday night due to a disturbance 911 call. A document from the St. Johns County Sheriff's department states Lucas was berated by his wife for his poor play (he shot a third-round 78 for a MDF—made cut, did not finish). In the report. Lucas told deputies "when he plays a bad round of golf, Krista proceeds to start an altercation with him and telling him how he is a loser and a p***y, how he needs to fire everyone, and how he'd better win or her and the kids would leave him and he would never see the kids again." The police report said Lucas was tired of these altercations, but simultaneously tried to dissuade officials from arresting Krista. Police noted multiple lacerations to both Lucas and his 62-year-old mother, who had blood on her shirt and said she was hit in the chest. Krista told police she had been attacked by Lucas' mother, but police reported no visible injuries. Police officials noted in the report that Krista resisted them, refusing to get in the squad car by "blocking herself from sitting down." She reportedly attempted to wrap her legs around the car door, but deputies were able to push her in. Krista reportedly damaged the inside of the vehicle by kicking the door. During the transportation process, the report states Krista's handcuffs were loosened and she attempted to flea. Two lawmen were able to re-handcuff her. The report also states Krista berated the police, using threatening language. Lucas informed officers that Krista had been drinking. The altercation allegedly occurred in front of their children. On Tuesday afternoon, Lucas posted the following message on Twitter: "On May 12, my wife and mother were involved in an argument to which the police were called. Everyone is fine. Regrettably, although Krista was charged, we are comfortable that the judicial system is able to address what actually happened and Krista will be cleared in this private matter. We thank you for respecting our privacy as we work through this unfortunate situation." Glover, who won the 2009 U.S. Open, married Krista in 2012. Glover is not in this week's AT&T Byron Nelson field.

On a hot morning in June 2012, Junxiu Wang and his son awoke in the city of Guangzhou, northwest of Hong Kong, and started their day. Wang was working a short-term job in Guangzhou and had taken his 14-year-old son, Yesong, with him. The pair ate breakfast, then Wang went to use the bathroom. When he came out, Yesong was gone. The father was immediately worried. Yesong, his middle child, had Down syndrome and was unable to speak. Wang called the boy’s aunt, thinking he might have gone to visit her, but he wasn’t there. Growing increasingly anxious, he went to a nearby subway station and asked if anyone had seen his son. A vendor and a security guard reported seeing a boy who looked like Yesong carrying a bag. Wang’s fears intensified. If his son ventured very far away, he knew, he would not be able to find his way back. It would be almost four agonizing years until Wang found out what happened to his son. The answer would involve an exhaustive search, a dedicated nonprofit director, a popular Chinese reality show, Microsoft facial recognition technology and a father who never gave up hope. And their story was just the beginning. The technology is now helping other families find much-needed answers and has powerful potential for addressing an issue that has long plagued China. There are 64,000 cases on the website of Baobei Huijia (Baby Come Home), a leading nonprofit organization launched in 2007 that is dedicated to finding missing children. In 2015, Eric Zhou was thinking about how technology might be used to more effectively combat human trafficking. Zhou is a Shanghai-based senior business intelligence manager for the Digital Crimes Unit in Microsoft’s Corporate, External & Legal Affairs group in China, which uses data analytics to fight cybercrime and protect vulnerable populations, including children. He came up with a project for Microsoft’s annual worldwide employee Hackathon, enlisting his friend Kevin Liu from the Microsoft Support Engineering Group to develop an application that could help find China’s missing children. The effort resulted in the creation of Photo Missing Children, or PhotoMC, an application designed to help find missing children through Microsoft’s face recognition application program interface (API). The Microsoft Face API is a cloud-based service that uses advanced algorithms to scan images of faces for identifying features and determines the likelihood that two faces belong to the same person. It can scan a database of thousands of faces and return a list of possible matches within seconds. The API analyzes 27 different facial characteristics and can identify a person across multiple photos, even at different angles and with varying facial expressions. The technology is part of Microsoft Cognitive Services a collection of tools that allow developers to add features such as emotion detection, vision and speech recognition and language understanding to applications across devices and platforms. Zhou approached Crossing Wang, Microsoft China Philanthropies lead, to connect him with an organization that could put PhotoMC to use. “When Eric brought this idea to us, we thought it was a good opportunity to support his project and apply it in the real world,” she says. “We wanted to do something to help families.” Crossing Wang’s team reached out to Baby Come Home, which runs a website that allows people to upload photos in various categories — parents can upload photos of their missing children, and others can upload photos they take of children they come across who might be missing or abducted. The Microsoft team offered to make PhotoMC available to Baby Come Home, but the organization’s founder, Baoyan Zhang, was initially skeptical. Other companies had made similar offers, she says, but they typically didn’t follow through or seemed primarily interested in seeking publicity. Or the companies would realize after a few conversations that their technology could not address a primary challenge of locating missing children — cross-age facial recognition. “Those children may have gone missing at the age of 3 or 4, but they maybe are 20- or 30-something when we look for them,” Zhang says. “So after a few contacts, we felt it was a waste of time, and we declined some other cooperation requests after that.” But Zhang believed facial recognition technology offered the most promise for finding missing children, and she figured if any company could come up with an effective tool, it was Microsoft. Also, her organization needed help. Baby Come Home has found more than 1,900 missing children in the past few years, but the work has been time-intensive and difficult. The organization’s dozen employees were overwhelmed with the task of manually sorting through thousands of images of missing children on a government website and trying to find matches for the 60,000-plus photos of missing children and adults in Baby Come Home’s databases. “Those children may have gone missing at the age of 3 or 4, but they maybe are 20- or 30-something when we look for them,” Zhang says. “So after a few contacts, we felt it was a waste of time, and we declined some other cooperation requests after that.” But Zhang believed facial recognition technology offered the most promise for finding missing children, and she figured if any company could come up with an effective tool, it was Microsoft. Also, her organization needed help. Baby Come Home has found more than 1,900 missing children in the past few years, but the work has been time-intensive and difficult. The organization’s dozen employees were overwhelmed with the task of manually sorting through thousands of images of missing children on a government website and trying to find matches for the 60,000-plus photos of missing children and adults in Baby Come Home’s databases. Unless children have distinguishing features, like unusual teeth or distinctively curved eyebrows, changes in appearance over time can make it hard to recognize them. And after looking at images for too long, fatigue sets in and accuracy drops. Facial recognition technology offered new promise by reducing human error and making the search process almost instantaneous. The Microsoft team first met with Zhang in August 2015, and based on feedback from the organization, spent about a month modifying and customizing PhotoMC to make it more effective. The changes included creating the ability to separate information about parents looking for their children and children looking for their parents into discrete databases that then could be compared for possible matches, and the capacity to import more photos. In December 2015, after additional changes to improve performance and several training sessions, Baby Come Home started using the new tool. Then, when an at-risk child was spotted, a photo of the child could be uploaded to the organization’s website and PhotoMC would search for matches. Zhang was hopeful. “(I thought that) facial recognition technology would definitely be a great help to us, if it worked out this time,” she says. In the days after Yesong disappeared, Junxiu Wang searched at subway stations and youth shelters in the area. He walked the streets of Guangzhou, desperately hoping to find his son. But in a city of more than 14 million, the chances of spotting him were almost nonexistent. The anguished father put notices in newspapers and on television. He contacted China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs in Beijing and asked for help. Weeks and months stretched by with no leads, but Wang clung to the belief that his son was still alive. And as long as Yesong was alive, Wang would not stop looking for his boy. Yesong had been missing about three years when Wang found Baby Come Home’s website and decided to go visit Zhang to ask for her help. In July 2015, he took a train from Guangzhou to Tonghua City in northeast China, almost 1,900 miles away. Wang arrived at the organization’s office exhausted and soaked, carrying a large jackfruit and a box of taro as gifts. After he left, Zhang opened the jackfruit and discovered it was rotten. She wondered how long the father had traveled to get there. “It made our hearts ache to see him like that,” she says, recalling how employees’ eyes would fill with tears at the thought of Wang. Six months after Wang’s visit, in January 2016, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs launched a new website to publish information about children living in shelters across the country. Baby Come Home ran the photo of Yesong that his father provided against 13,000 images on the government site, and within seconds, PhotoMC came up with a list of 20 possible matches. One was a boy living in a government-run shelter in the Panyu district of Guangdong City, about 24 miles from where Yesong went missing. Zhang wondered, could the boy be Yesong? The father looked at the matching photos and immediately identified his son. He provided a DNA sample, which was matched against a sample from the boy at the shelter. Arrangements were made to bring Wang and the boy together on the popular Chinese television show “Waiting for Me.” The show, which runs on China’s predominant state broadcaster, China Central Television (CCTV), aims to help people find missing children or other loved ones and is produced in partnership with Baby Come Home. The audience and the relative wait in suspense for the opening of a large set of doors, behind which is either the missing person or a police officer who discusses the unsuccessful search. In February 2016, Wang sat in a chair on the show’s stage, his hands clasped nervously in his lap. The doors opened slowly to reveal Yesong, who by that time was 17. Wang exhaled audibly and crossed the stage, crying as he clasped his son to him. At first, Yesong didn’t recognize his father, Wang says. But within a month, he says, Yesong readjusted to being home with his parents and two siblings and is now doing well. Crossing Wang, who is not related to the family, recently visited them and says Yesong’s parents told her that he was withdrawn while he was at the shelter but has become more outgoing since returning home and enjoys helping people. He goes to a local supermarket every day to help out, she says, gathering shopping carts and working with employees to organize items. “His neighbors and the staff at the supermarket like him very much,” Crossing Wang says. “If he was still in the shelter, his life would be totally different.” Yesong was the first missing child found with the help of PhotoMC, but the application has since helped find four other missing boys in China and several other possible matches are being followed up on and verified. One of the boys, a developmentally disabled 17-year-old, was lost in April 2015 in Beijing and had been living in a shelter. Baby Come Home found him with PhotoMC, and on April 28 he went home with his parents. Another 17-year-old, also with limited ability to communicate, went missing in January 2014 in Guangzhou. His parents recently registered his information on Baby Come Home’s website, and PhotoMC quickly found a match with a boy who had been taken in by a shelter two years ago. The relieved parents visited the teen in the shelter at the end of April and were expecting to take him home as soon as DNA results were verified. The third boy, a 16-year-old who has a mild intellectual disability, went missing while playing outdoors in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. On May 8, Baby Come Home used PhotoMC to find a match with a boy living in a shelter 60 miles away. It was the missing teen, whose parents picked him up the following day and took him home. And another boy, who has autism, was found May 18 in a shelter 30 miles from his grandparents’ home in Fuzhou after running away more than three years earlier. His grandfather went to the shelter and confirmed the boy is his grandson. Microsoft is continuing to work with Baby Come Home to refine PhotoMC, which was developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research Asia and the Microsoft Cloud & Enterprise China group. Seeing Yesong reunited with his father was a touching moment for everyone involved, Zhou says, and the team hopes the application can help bring answers to many more families. “We feel very good that our technology can help,” Zhou says. “We are proud that we helped these families be reunited.” A special message from MSN: This month we're working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Missing Children Society of Canada, and Baby Come Home to help reunite kids with their families. Together, we're making progress. Baby Come Home is using Microsoft facial recognition to identify missing kids in crowds, for instance, and the Missing Children Society of Canada has scaled its powerful social media tools to millions more people using the Microsoft cloud. You can help, too. Please consider donating your time or money now.

American doctors are successfully persuading increasing numbers of men with low-risk prostate cancer to reject immediate surgery and radiation in favor of surveillance, a trend that is sparing men's sexual health without increasing their risk of death. The latest evidence that more men are postponing aggressive therapy unless their symptoms worsen came in a large study published Tuesday that involved more than 125,000 veterans diagnosed with nonaggressive prostate cancer between 2005 and 2015. Researchers reviewed the former servicemen's medical records and found that in 2005, only 27 percent of men under 65 chose to forgo immediate therapy and instead signed up for “watchful waiting” or “active surveillance” to keep track of their tumors. By 2015, the situation had flipped — 72 percent rejected immediate surgery or radiation in favor of such monitoring. The data for men older than 65 was similar. The study, which appeared in JAMA, was conducted by researchers at the New York University School of Medicine and the Manhattan campus of the Department of Veterans Affairs New York Harbor Healthcare System. The data came from throughout the country. “I think it's hugely important,” said Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, who was not involved in the study. “Remember that until 2010, a man diagnosed with prostate cancer was told to get your prostate out, next week at the latest.” The movement away from aggressive early action has gained momentum as doctors, researchers and patients have increasingly recognized the potential harms that can occur in overtreating malignancies that may never pose a threat. “As we got better at early detection, we found more cancers,” including ones that grew slowly or not at all, said William Nelson, director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. “Then the greatest threat to the poor man was our attempt to help him with radiation and surgery.” Those treatments can cause incontinence and sexual dysfunction, he said. In addition, studies from the United States and Europe in recent years have shown that holding off on treatment for nonaggressive prostate cancer does not result in higher death rates. Similar research is underway in very early stage breast cancer — sometimes called Stage 0 — to see whether active surveillance is a safe alternative to immediate surgery and radiation. Brawley, who has long warned about the dangers of overtreatment of prostate and breast cancer, said the study shows efforts are paying off to convince patients that not all cancers pose the same level of danger. And he said the study is a leading indicator of where the rest of the country is going; he estimated that about half of non-VA patients with the same type of malignancies are now rejecting immediate treatment and the number is growing quickly. “The VA is the tip of the spear,” he added. “Five years from now, the whole country will be at 70 percent.” Stacy Loeb, an assistant professor of urology at NYU School of Medicine and Manhattan VA who led the study of veterans, said the shift to surveillance represents “a historic reversal, at least at the VA, in the decades-long overtreatment of men with prostate cancers least likely to cause harm, and brings their care more in line with the latest best-practice guidelines.” Those guidelines include recommendations by the American Urological Association and the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Most of the increase in the monitoring-only arm, Loeb said, occurred in a category called “active surveillance,” in which men are subjected to more rigorous monitoring and testing than those engaged in “watchful waiting.” While 4 percent of men chose active surveillance in 2005, 39 percent selected it in 2015, the researchers found. Loeb said as many as two-thirds of men with low-risk malignancies treated in private medical practices are undergoing aggressive early treatment. She suggested that one reason VA may be adhering to national guidelines at a higher rate is its lack of financial incentives for salaried physicians to recommend expensive fee-for-service procedures. In addition, VA facilities often are affiliated with academic medical centers, which are faster to adopt new approaches. Jonathan Simons, president and chief executive of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, which helped fund the study, said that while the VA medical system has some problems, when it comes to the “No. 1 cancer of veterans, prostate cancer, the outcomes are better in VA hospitals than in the rest of American medicine.” Active surveillance is not for all prostate-cancer patients. It isn't recommended for men with higher-risk prostate cancer or those with genetic defects such as a BRCA mutation, which can increase the chance of having more aggressive cancer. Clark Howard, an Atlanta resident who writes and does a radio show on consumer issues, was one of the earliest patients to opt for active surveillance rather than aggressive treatment. He was diagnosed with low-risk prostate cancer at age 53 in 2009, and his doctors pressed him to immediately schedule an operation. He refused. “My wife thought I was crazy and burst into tears,” he said. “I have never seen her scream and weep like that. She was so mad.” As part of the monitoring of his cancer, Howard gets PSA (prostate-specific antigen) tests twice a year and biopsies every other year. He also has had two MRI-based tests. His cancer hasn't worsened; if it does, he says, he'll get treatment then. “So many people are conditioned that cancer must be treated aggressively and immediately and if you don’t, you are going to die,” he said.

A Russian weapon the U.S. is currently unable to defend against will be ready for war by 2020, according to sources with direct knowledge of American intelligence reports. The sources, who spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said Russia successfully tested the weapon, which could carry a nuclear warhead, twice in 2016. The third known test of the device, called a hypersonic glide vehicle, was carried out in October 2017 and resulted in a failure when the platform crashed seconds before striking its target. The latest revelations come more than two months after Russian President Vladimir Putin touted his nation's growing hypersonic arsenal as "invincible." The hypersonic glide vehicle, dubbed Avangard, is designed to sit atop of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Once launched, it uses aerodynamic forces to sail on top of the atmosphere. One U.S. intelligence report, according to a source, noted that the hypersonic glide vehicles were mounted to Russian-made SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missiles – and one test featured a mock warhead. Devastation even without explosives While it is unclear whether Avangard will be outfitted with explosives, the precision and speed of the weapon is believed to pack enough force to obliterate targets. The weapon, which Moscow has been developing for three decades, can travel at least five times the speed of sound, or about one mile per second. "These kinds of boost glide vehicles attack the gaps in our missile defense system," Thomas Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNBC. "There's no time like the present to modify our current missile defense posture," Karako added, saying it was "unfortunate that we have let Russia come this far." The Russians are expected to conduct a fourth test sometime this summer. Sources familiar with the U.S. intelligence reports assess that the Russian hypersonic glide vehicles are equipped with onboard countermeasures that are able to defeat even the most advanced missile-defense systems. The weapons are also highly maneuverable and, therefore, unpredictable, which makes them difficult to track. The intelligence reports, which were curated this spring, calculate that Russia's hypersonic glide vehicles are likely to achieve initial operational capability by 2020, a significant step that would enable the Kremlin to surpass the U.S. and China in this regard.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has submitted his annual financial disclosure to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, and it is expected to be released publicly in the coming days. Trump's disclosure, which includes all of 2017 and part of 2018, is being closely watched to see whether it will disclose the $130,000 paid to porn star Stormy Daniels on his behalf by his attorney Michael Cohen. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said during a Fox News interview that the president had repaid Cohen. Ethics experts say that if that money isn't disclosed, Trump could be in violation of ethics laws for failing to disclose a reportable item, a violation for which others have been prosecuted. The White House confirmed that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence filed their financial disclosures Tuesday, along with the reports of some 25,000 senior executive branch officials, but declined to comment further. The Office of Government Ethics said the president's report is under review. Trump's disclosure will also be the first extended look at how his businesses have performed since he became president in January 2017. When Trump took office, he refused to fully divest from his global business, instead putting his assets in a trust controlled by his two sons and a senior executive. Still, Trump can take back control of the trust at any time and he's allowed to withdraw cash from it as he pleases. Trump's previous report, covering January 2016 through the first few months of 2017, showed he had at least $1.4 billion in assets and at least $594 million in income.

Explosions intensified on Hawaii's Kilauea volcano on Tuesday, spewing ash and triggering a red alert for aircraft for the first time since the latest eruption began 12 days ago. Ash and volcanic smog, or vog, as it is called, rose to 12,000 feet (3,657 meters) above Kilauea's crater and floated southwest, showering cars on Highway 11 with gray dust and prompting an "unhealthy air" advisory in the community of Pahala, 18 miles (29 km) from the summit. An aviation red alert means a volcanic eruption is under way that could spew ash along aircraft routes, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) says on its website. Ash was also a new hazard for residents of Hawaii's Big Island, already grappling with volcanic gas and lava that has destroyed 37 homes and other structures and forced the evacuation of about 2,000 residents. A shift in winds was expected to bring ash and vog inland on Wednesday and make them more concentrated, said John Bravender of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "We're observing more or less continuous emission of ash now with intermittent, more energetic ash bursts or plumes," Steve Brantley, a deputy scientist in charge at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO), said on a conference call with reporters. The observatory warned the eruption could become more violent. "At any time, activity may become more explosive, increasing the intensity of ash production and producing ballistic projectiles near the vent," the HVO said in a statement on the change in aviation alert level to red from orange. Ash is not poisonous but irritates the nose, eyes and airways. It can make roads slippery and large emissions could cause the failure of electrical power lines, said USGS chemist David Damby. NEW FISSURE The eruption has hit the island's tourism industry. Big Island summer hotel bookings have dropped by almost half from last year, Rob Birch, executive director of the Island of Hawaii Visitor Bureau, told journalists on a conference call. College exchange student Constantin Plinke, 24, was planning to go to the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park before it was shut. "We had a big list of things to do and maybe 80 percent of them were in the national park," he said, after stopping by the side of the road to watch ash plumes rising into the air. "It's sad." The area taking the brunt of the eruption is about 25 miles (40 km) down Kilauea's eastern flank, near the village of Pahoa. Lava has burst from the ground to tear through housing developments and farmland, threatening one of the last exit routes from coastal areas, state Highway 132. The latest fissure in the earth opened on Tuesday, spewing lava and toxic gases that pushed air quality into "condition red" around Lanipuna Gardens and nearby farms, causing "choking and inability to breathe," the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and Hawaii County Civil Defense said. Road crews put metal plates over steaming cracks on nearby Highway 130 and reopened it to give coastal residents an escape route should a lava flow reach the ocean and block another road, Highway 137, Civil Defense said. No major injuries or deaths have been reported from the eruption. A looming menace remains the possibility of an "explosive eruption" of Kilauea, an event last seen in 1924. Pent-up steam could drive a 20,000-foot (6,100-meter) ash plume out of the crater and scatter debris over 12 miles (19 km), the USGS said.

Welcome, President Trump, to the infuriating, indecipherable game of North Korean nuclear diplomacy. An unexpected series of threats from the enclosed Stalinist state threatened to nix next month's planned summit in Singapore between Trump and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un and sink White House hopes of a spectacular foreign policy success. The warning delivered a jolt of reality, underscoring that despite weeks of positive steps by North Korea and Trump's gusher of praise for Kim, the process of negotiating with the inscrutable state remains as treacherous as ever. First, North Korea shocked Washington by lashing out at US-South Korea military drills, saying they could lead to the summit being scrapped. Then in a more ominous development, it warned that if the White House required the dismantling of its nuclear arsenal up front, there was little point in talking. "If the Trump Administration is genuinely committed to improving NK-US relations and come out to the NK-US summit, they will receive a deserving response," Kim Kye-gwan, First Vice Minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was quoted as saying by the official KCNA news agency. "But if they try to push us into the corner and force only unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in that kind of talks and will have to reconsider whether we will accept the upcoming NK-US summit." The comments appeared to be a direct repudiation of statements by top Trump administration officials that North Korea must accept the total and irrevocable elimination of its nuclear arsenal before it could accept tangible benefits from the US as part of any peace drive. Kim was clearly signaling he's not done yet with the classic North Korean strategy of provocations and demands. And the President and supporters might want to put that talk about the Nobel Peace Prize on ice, at least for now. On the other hand, as strong as they were, Kim's protests came on paper, and not in the form of missile launches or a nuclear test -- a potential sign of progress in that he registered anger but did not take a step that would immediately sink the summit. The North's sharp messages came just a week after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo returned home from a friendly meeting with Kim with three US prisoners, prompting Trump to stage a middle-of-the-night welcoming ceremony. It left the White House scrambling to decipher Pyongyang's motives and analysts handicapping the prospects for the summit. "I have to say, this is a little bit out of the blue," said Harry Kazianis, a Korea expert at the Center for the National Interest. "The North Korean pattern is to do provocations whether it is tests of missiles or nukes, ask for negotiations then string us along for months and years," he said. "But this time, they are not even getting to that point, they are already causing problems before we have the negotiation." North Korea's motives North Korea's closed political system and the difficulty of getting reliable intelligence from inside Kim's inner circle mean that explaining Tuesday's bombshell is guesswork. It's possible Kim wanted to send a shot across America's bow, and feels he has not got much in return for meeting South Korean leader Moon Jae-in, agreeing to see Trump, sending US prisoners home and offering to dismantle a nuclear test site. He may also be balking at emerging details of America's goal for the summit -- an agreement for full and irreversible denuclearization by North Korea in return for security guarantees and the promise of future investment by US firms in the impoverished nation. Trump's national security adviser John Bolton -- a skeptic who would have been unsurprised by Kim's Tuesday broadside -- told CNN's Jake Tapper over the weekend, "I wouldn't look for economic aid from us," and said the Singapore summit would test whether Kim had made a strategic decision to get rid of his nuclear arsenal. The KCNA dispatch took direct aim at Bolton and rejected his view that North Korea should follow Libya's model and unilaterally give up all its nuclear weapons. The statement may also indicate that the ambition and speed of the US approach -- which implies invasive inspections of the North's nuclear, missile and chemical and biological weapons programs and confiscation of its arsenals -- has spooked Kim. Pompeo has said Washington would not follow its traditional and failed strategy of offering the North concessions like the lifting of sanctions and financial aid in return for proportional steps by Pyongyang to decommission its weapons. "We're hoping this will be bigger, different, faster," Pompeo told CBS "Face the Nation." Last week, Chinese state media reported that Kim wanted "phased and synchronous measures" to defuse the nuclear showdown, a possible sign of dissent with the US approach. Head to head Given that the summit will likely hinge on a mano-a-mano test of wills, Kim may also have been trying to demonstrate his own personal leverage over Trump. After all, Kim is not the first to threaten not to show up -- Trump has done so repeatedly. "If I think that it is a meeting that is not going to be fruitful, we are not going to go," Trump said on April 18. Some experts speculated whether the North Korean statement, which also suspended planned high-level talks with South Korea due to begin Wednesday, could be a sign of internal political pressure on Kim. It's not out of the question that he was signaling to military officers worried that he may be about to overturn decades of political dogma by dealing with the US. Such is the opacity of his regime, no will ever know for sure. Kim may also be testing just how much Trump wants the summit -- given his predictions of success -- and whether that will make him more likely to offer Pyongyang a good deal. Or he may be laying groundwork for a face-saving exit if Trump comes in too hard. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said that he hoped that Kim's threat was just a manifestation of his long-held resentment over US-South Korean military exercises, even though the South Koreans had told Washington he was now unperturbed by such drills. "Overall, I am still optimistic," Paul said on "The Situation Room" on CNN. "There is a great deal of hope and optimism that with this high-level meeting with Kim Jong Un and the President that we will find peace." The North Korean curveball left the White House with a dilemma about how to respond. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders issued a noncommittal statement pledging to coordinate with allies. As Washington tries to work out what is going on, the contacts and goodwill built up in Pyongyang by Pompeo during two recent trips into reclusive North Korea will be crucial. The blip in the run-up to the summit will also test Trump's restraint, at a time when a misfired Twitter blast aimed at "Little Rocket Man" could exacerbate tensions and threaten the meeting further. On Tuesday night, he stonewalled reporters shouting questions on the South Lawn of the White House. Possibly, now that he has got the prisoners home, and Pyongyang remains under stringent "maximum pressure" sanctions, Trump has the luxury of time. He could wait it out and see whether North Korea is really ready to pass up the chance for a summit that offers Kim the long-sought legitimacy of standing side-by-side with the US President. On the other hand, Tuesday's developments make the face-to-face summit more crucial than ever -- as it will give the President the chance to size up Kim's sincerity. In that sense, Trump can claim validation for his shock decision to meet Kim, even though it turned diplomatic conventions upside down and led some experts to worry he was offering too many concessions too early. Dampened expectations might be a good thing North Korea's warning might also be valuable in another way if it tones down the crescendo of expectations in Washington about the summit. Trump has fired off a string of tweets in recent weeks touting progress, and supporters at a recent political rally chanted "Nobel, Nobel" at the President. Last week, as he welcomed the prisoners back to Joint Base Andrews, Trump said Kim had been "excellent" to the three men, despite imprisoning them and the fact he has one of the world's worst human rights records. On April 24, Trump said Kim had been "very open and I think very honorable."

An explosion at a Southern California building that killed one person and injured three others may have been an "intentional detonation," law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation said, although other officials cautioned that a cause and whether it was intentional has not been determined. The investigation into the explosion that occurred in Aliso Viejo at around 1 p.m. local time on Tuesday (4 p.m. ET) is being assisted by the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, officials said. Multiple law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation told NBC News that preliminarily, the explosion is believed to have been the result of an "intentional detonation," and that authorities were investigating how the explosive device was sent or delivered to the building. Those sources said it appeared to have been contained in some sort of package. But Orange County sheriff's Commander Dave Sawyer told reporters Tuesday evening local time that "we cannot say exclusively that this explosion was intentional," adding that "as soon as we can confirm that information, we will share it with you." The woman that was killed was not identified. That person and the three people who were injured were likely in close proximity to the explosion, Sawyer said. The blast occurred at a suite on the first floor of the building, he said. "We'd just like everyone to know that our thoughts are with her family," Sawyer said of the person who was killed. © Provided by NBCU News Group, a division of NBCUniversal Media LLC Image: Alison Viejo ExplosionOrange County first responders investigate the scene of an explosion in Aliso Viejo, Calif., on May 15, 2018. Capt. Tony Bommarito, a public information officer for the Orange County Fire Authority, said the department was called at around 1:09 p.m. on a report of an explosion, and units that arrived "found an obvious explosion, with debris scattered into the parking lot and into the road." "There's heavy damage on the first floor corner of the building, walls and windows blown out," he said earlier Tuesday evening. Sawyer said that investigators were going through the interior of the building to find out a cause. He said that any blast of such magnitude would be investigated as suspicious. "We have not found any type of specific device inside of the building right now that could tell us or lead us to exactly what the device was, if it was a device," he said. Three people were transported to local hospitals, Bommarito said. He did not characterize their injuries. "At this time, at this point of investigation, there's nothing that indicates there were any threats made towards this business, or any other types of incidents that occurred before this explosion," Sawyer said earlier Tuesday evening. An FBI spokesperson said earlier Tuesday that the agency was sending a Joint Terrorism Task Force to assist in the explosion investigation as a precaution. The building where the blast occurred is across the street from an academy and day care facility, NBC Los Angeles reported. The children were reunited with their parents at a nearby Target parking lot. Tony Dik, whose son attends the preschool, told the station that it was emotional for parents who realized that their children were on the same street as the explosion. "When I was playing outside I heard the big crash, I thought it was a garbage truck but it was a building that smashed," his son, 6-year-old Kingston, said, according to the station.

A state representative, an Air Force veteran and two high-powered lawyers — all women — won Democratic House primaries on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, where a record number of women ran for House seats in a year of intense political enthusiasm among female Democrats. It was a night of victories for at least seven Democratic women running for the House in a state that has an all-male congressional delegation of 20 and a Statehouse dominated by male politicians. Female candidates showed strength in nearly every region of Pennsylvania, from the Philadelphia suburbs to the conservative southwest. Madeleine Dean, the state House member; Chrissy Houlahan, the veteran; and Mary Gay Scanlon, one of the lawyers, each won in Philadelphia suburban districts that they are now favored to carry in November, according to results from The Associated Press. Their primary victories raise the likelihood of women cracking the state’s all-male congressional delegation. Sign Up For the Morning Briefing Newsletter Susan Wild, the other lawyer, won a competitive primary in the Lehigh Valley but now faces a tough general election race in a district with many blue-collar voters. The women won in districts that were redrawn to replace a gerrymandered Republican map that the State Supreme Court ruled illegal in January. The new map of the state’s 18 House districts — and the ebullience it set off among Democrats hoping to capture the House of Representatives in the midterms — put Pennsylvania front-and-center among four states that held primaries on Tuesday. President Trump narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016 and Democrats, seeking to tap into grass-roots rejection of the president, badly want a version of a do-over in the midterm elections. And the state will be critical to determining whether Republicans or Democrats win control of the House in November. Nationwide, Democrats need to flip two dozen Republican-held seats to gain a majority in the House. Under the new congressional map, Democrats have a shot at flipping at least three and possibly as many as six seats this fall in the Keystone State, most in a collar of counties around Philadelphia. Redistricting recognized the shifting demographics that have remade the region from a once-solid Republican enclave. But the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s chief spending arm, is not easily ceding races in the suburbs. The committee has reserved $7.8 million in television advertising for the fall in the Philadelphia market, a spokesman confirmed Tuesday, its largest early spending commitment of any region nationally. Most of the money will be aimed at two competitive districts north of Philadelphia that are considered tossup races this fall; both have been Republican-held, but Democrats believe they have a shot at winning them. In one, centered on Bucks County, first-term Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican, will face Scott Wallace, a millionaire who outspent a rival 16-to-1. Republicans are expected to attack Mr. Wallace as a carpetbagger who only moved back to the district last year from Maryland and has not voted there in decades. Though Mr. Fitzpatrick is vulnerable after just a single term, he succeeded his brother in the seat, so his name is known to voters in a district Hillary Clinton narrowly won in 2016. The other district that will be a November battleground is Ms. Wild’s race. The first female solicitor of Allentown, Ms. Wild defeated primary rivals to her right and her left: Greg Edwards, who had been endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and John Morganelli, a district attorney who tweeted after that presidential election of 2016 that he would like a job with the Trump administration. Ms. Dean was the winner in a suburban district in Montgomery County considered a safe Democratic seat after redistricting. Ms. Houlahan had the good fortune of being the only Democrat running in a district almost as safe, centered in Chester County, which Mrs. Clinton won two years ago by nine percentage points. And Ms. Scanlon prevailed in a Democratic primary field that included five other women — the largest number of female Democrats in any congressional primary race in the nation this year. The House races were the centerpiece, but not the only show in Pennsylvania. In two important statewide primaries for the right to challenge Democratic incumbents — for governor and the United States Senate — the favorites carried the day. Lou Barletta, a congressman from Luzerne County, who made a reputation on unflinching opposition to illegal immigrants and became an early supporter of Mr. Trump, won the Republican nomination to challenge Senator Bob Casey Jr., a mild-mannered politician who has become a relentless critic of Mr. Trump. And Scott Wagner, a state senator whose fortune from waste hauling led to an inevitable campaign slogan that he would be Pennsylvania’s “cleanup guy,” won the nomination to challenge Gov. Tom Wolf. Mr. Wagner and Mr. Wolf are ideological opposites. Their fall race is expected to include fierce disagreement over Mr. Wagner’s support of anti-union “right to work” legislation, in a state where organized labor remains strong. Mr. Wolf opposes the legislation. Mr. Wagner beat Paul Mango, a former health care consultant and West Point graduate, in one of the nastiest primaries the state has seen. Mr. Mango attacked Mr. Wagner over a protective order a daughter once obtained against him, which prompted a response ad by the daughter in which she angrily defended her father. In an unusual down-ballot race, Lt. Gov. Mike Stack, a Democrat who had a falling out with Governor Wolf, lost to a primary challenger, John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock. Mr. Stack was in the news last year after accusations he mistreated State Police in his protective detail. And in the southwest corner of the state, State Senator Guy Reschenthaler defeated State Representative Rick Saccone, who previously lost a widely watched special election to Conor Lamb, a moderate Democrat, in a region that had strongly backed Mr. Trump. Idaho, Oregon and Nebraska also went to the polls on Tuesday. In Nebraska, the Democrat Jane Raybould, a city councilwoman in Lincoln, won the primary and will face Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican seeking her second term in a comfortably red state. Knute Buehler, a member of the Oregon House of Representatives, won the Republican nomination for governor in the state, easily prevailing over nine other candidates. He will face the incumbent Democrat, Kate Brown.

Jay Leno got rich by being America’s class clown. The comedian has an estimated net worth of $350 million, largely thanks to his tenure as the host of The Tonight Show, which he left in 2014. He’s still cracking jokes, but now he does it on Jay Leno’s Garage, which started as a web series and is now in its fourth season on CNBC (airing Thursdays). It follows Leno’s one true splurge: collecting prized and pricey cars. We talked to him about the money tips he’s picked up from his auto obsession, how he started his standup career homeless, and the one thing he tells every comic who’s trying to make a buck telling jokes. You were extremely scrappy when you started in comedy. In Leading with My Chin, you wrote about being homeless and telling jokes to police when they picked you up off the street. [Laughs] Yeah, I did. I just got on a plane one day and went to Los Angeles. I looked in the paper for open houses, say, from noon to 4 p.m., and I would get there at 3:30, and then I would hide in the closet. The realtor would leave and lock the door, and now I had a place to stay. Sometimes I could stay in a house two to three days. I didn’t wreck anything. I did get picked up twice for vagrancy on Hollywood Boulevard. In fact, where I got my [Walk of Fame] star was where the cops picked me up. They’d put you in the back of the car, and they’d drive you around their entire shift, and then let you out in the morning. They must’ve been used to that on Hollywood Boulevard. I would tell the cops jokes, and most of the cops are pretty blue-collar guys. Once they realized you’re not dangerous, you’re not a crazy person… “You find a place to live yet? No? Okay, get in the back.” It was okay. They were nice guys. How’d you become a car geek, anyway? I grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, which was a pretty rural area when I was a kid. There were always broken tractors, lawn mowers, vehicles you had to fix. I remember somebody had abandoned an old Renault in a field when we were about 11 or 12. We would drive it around the backyard. Your mom would kind of watch through the window. Of, course now they’d call child services, and the parents would be taken away. Back then, it was seen as not a bad thing—it taught you how to fix cars and get things running. I never set out to collect cars. I just bought what I liked. The general rule of car collecting is if you’re reasonably astute and you understand how things work, if you like it, chances are other people will like it, too. My three things are: It should be of technical and historical significance. It should be fun to drive. And it should be attractive to look at. If an automobile has those three qualifications, then it’s probably something that would be considered collectible. There’s a lot of speculation out there about your vast car collection. Exactly how many do you own? About 181 cars, and about 160 motorcycles. Do you have any idea what they’re all worth? No. I know individual ones. I bought a McLaren F1 in ‘99 for $800,000, and the last offer I got was $17.5 million. They only built 64 of them. Are there any cars you look back on and think, “I wish I hadn’t bought that”? There’s this thing in the car world: “You didn’t pay too much, you just bought it too soon.” There are a couple there. I don’t really dwell on them too much. If you buy something that’s rare and valuable, it will always be rare and valuable. How often do you sell the cars? I’ve never sold a car [Laughs]. Ever? I will donate a car to charity. We’ve done that probably 10 or 15 times. Your passion for cars is palpable. Is there anything else you don’t mind dropping serious dough on? You know, there’s really not. It’s obviously not clothes. I’m not an experienced person. I know I’m pretty wealthy, but I live like someone who’s on their last dime. I take nothing for granted. I don’t take vacations. When you’re in show business, you get to go to vacation places. I enjoy doing philanthropy stuff. I like feeling like if I don’t work this week, I’m gonna go broke. People say, “Why do you work all the time?” I go, “What do I do on a Tuesday that’s worth this kind of money?” A job comes up, and I always feel like I was broke for so long, I never wanted to be in the position of, “Well, how much is that job? Oh no, I’m not…” It just seems so presumptuous to turn down. You still have that hustler mentality. Yeah, and I like being a piecemeal comic, the idea of write joke, tell joke, get check. I don’t do HBO or Netflix specials because I can make almost the same money doing a live show. Why not just do four or five live shows instead of giving something away on TV? So no eight-figure Netflix special for you. It doesn’t interest me. I’m not saying that to be snobby. It just doesn’t appeal to me because once your joke is on TV, it disappears forever. I always think, “Did this person just hear me say this last night?” I always know where my act is. I control it. You came into quite a lot of money as a famous comedian. What did you learn about spending money from that? I never spent money before I had it. I never bought anything before I could afford it. I never bought anything on time. I don’t lease vehicles. Cash is king. You’re not risky with your income. I work and my money relaxes—that’s the way I look at it. I live pretty frugally. I’m a huge believer in low self-esteem. The only ones with high self-esteem are actors and criminals. I’m dyslexic. My mother would say, “You’re gonna have to work twice as hard as the other kid to get the same thing,” and that always seemed like a fair tradeoff. The nice thing about being dyslexic—people tend to focus on something and then that becomes their goal. That always worked pretty well for me. I’ve always had two jobs, and I lived on one job and banked the other. All through The Tonight Show, I never touched a dime of my TV money because TV money is fleeting money. When you’re a comedian, you can always generate income. You can always stand somewhere and tell jokes and get paid for it. In college I would go to what they used to call hootenanny night and I would put $50 on the bar. I would say to the bartender, ”Let me go up and tell jokes. If I do good, give me my $50 back. If I do bad, you keep the $50.” Eventually you could make $15, $20 bucks a night by doing that. What do you say when you talk to a young comedian who’s coming up and reaching for the kind of career you’ve had? My advice is just take the job. Don’t worry about how much it pays. I’m always astounded when I meet comedians who go, “I’m not going there for that kind of money,” and I go, “Who are you? You haven’t done anything. No one knows who you are.” If you’re any good, the money will come. Pay attention to your product. If you’re not making enough money, it’s ‘cause you’re not good enough. I spent almost a year at the Comedy Store asking to go on after Richard Pryor. No one wanted to follow Pryor because he just blew the room out. He was really the best. After that, I realized I didn’t have an hour of material. I had about 18 minutes of really funny material. I just kept throwing out everything that wasn’t funny.

North Korea threatened Wednesday to cancel the forthcoming summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump if Washington seeks to push Pyongyang into unilaterally giving up its nuclear arsenal. It also cancelled high-level talks due Wednesday with Seoul over the Max Thunder joint military exercises being held between the United States and South Korea, denouncing the drills as a "rude and wicked provocation". It is a sudden and dramatic return to the the rhetoric of the past by Pyongyang, after months of rapid diplomatic rapprochement on the peninsula. "If the US is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue," first vice foreign minister Kim Kye Gwan said in a statement carried by state media. In that case, he added, Pyongyang would have to "reconsider" its participation at the summit, due in Singapore on June 12. The North's arsenal is expected to be at the top of the agenda of the historic talks, but Pyongyang has long insisted it needs the weapons to defend itself against invasion by the US. Washington is pressing for its complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation. But so far the North has not given any public indication of what concessions it is offering, beyond euphemistic commitments to denuclearisation of the "Korean peninsula". Pyongyang had "made clear on several occasions that precondition for denuclearisation is to put an end to anti-DPRK hostile policy and nuclear threats and blackmail of the United States", minister Kim said. In the past, Pyongyang has demanded the withdrawal of the US troops stationed in the South to protect it from its neighbour, and an end to Washington's nuclear umbrella over its security ally. The minister also blasted US National Security Advisor John Bolton's talk of a "Libyan model" for North Korean denuclearisation. It was a "sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq", he said. "I cannot suppress indignation at such moves of the US, and harbour doubt about the US sincerity."

LONDON (AP) — Kensington Palace is not commenting on reports that Meghan Markle's father needs a heart procedure and will miss Saturday's royal wedding in Windsor. Prince Harry's press office said Wednesday it had no additional comment beyond a statement made two days ago calling for "understanding and respect" for Markle's father, Thomas, "in this difficult situation." Thomas Markle, 73, is a retired Hollywood cinematographer who lives in Mexico and is divorced from Markle's mother. He told the TMZ celebrity website he needs treatment Wednesday for blocked coronary arteries including receiving a stent. That treatment would normally rule out making a lengthy plane trip to England right after the procedure. Thomas Markle had been expected to spend the days before the wedding in Britain meeting Queen Elizabeth II and other senior royals. He is also still scheduled to walk his daughter down the aisle during the wedding Saturday in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. The palace has not announced any alternative plans for Thomas Markle's role. An official announcement is expected if it's confirmed that he will not be traveling to Britain for the wedding. Meghan Markle's mother, Doria Ragland, is expected to visit with the queen and senior royals this week before the wedding. She will also ride with her daughter to the chapel on the morning of the ceremony. Some estranged members of Meghan Markle's extended family have arrived in Britain but have not received invitations to the wedding.

Denver Broncos General Manager and Vice President of Football Operations John Elway is the latest NFL executive to be questioned in regards to Colin Kaepernick‘s ongoing collusion case against the NFL. According to Mike Klis of 9NEWS, Elway was deposed at Broncos team headquarters on Tuesday. Elway joins Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, Baltimore Ravens General Manager Ozzie Newsome and head coach John Harbaugh and Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll and G.M. John Schneider as people already questioned during the grievance process. Kaepernick attended the deposition as he has other sessions throughout the case. The Broncos had interest in acquiring Kaepernick in trade from the San Francisco 49ers over the 2016 offseason. However, the deal never came together as the two sides couldn’t agree upon a restructured contract. Kaepernick is trying to find evidence that proves the NFL jointly discussed and formulated a plan to keep him off an NFL roster after his decision to protest social issues by kneeling for the national anthem prior to games in 2016.

The 2018 NBA Draft lottery is over and the draft order is officially set. The Phoenix Suns will pick first overall and will likely select DeAndre Ayton or Luka Doncic. The Kings climb all the way up and land the No. 2 overall pick while the Hawks round out the top three. Here are the winners and losers: WINNERS Phoenix and its ongoing rebuild The Phoenix Suns have been in a weird place ever since their surprisingly successful 2013-14 season, and they needed some good news on Tuesday -- at the end of their 21-win campaign in April, Devin Booker said that he is "done with not making the playoffs." The No. 1 pick does not guarantee a return to relevance next season, but it makes their future a lot brighter and gives Booker a reason to believe in general manager Ryan McDonough's plan. McDonough's draft history is a mixed bag. Getting Booker at No. 13 in 2015 is a minor miracle, and it makes up for selecting Alex Len No. 5 in 2013. The jury is still out on Marquese Chriss, Dragan Bender and Josh Jackson. Now, Phoenix will have a chance to select someone who can be a real cornerstone (alongside Booker) and simplify everybody else's role. The question over the next 6 weeks: which high-ceiling prospect does this front office want? Which brings us to … Luka Doncic? The connection between new Suns coach Igor Kokoskov and the do-everything 19-year-old is real: The two of them won EuroBasket with the Slovenian national team last summer, and they are definitely mutual admirers. Because of this -- and the fact that a Booker-Doncic backcourt is extremely exciting -- it is possible that Phoenix winning the lottery represented the best possible outcome if Doncic dreams of being selected first. If the Suns take Doncic, having Kokoskov around should help his transition to the NBA. It is also nice that his mentor, Goran Dragic, is familiar with the city of Phoenix. It's too early to know whether or not he will end up being at the top of McDonough's draft board, though. DeAndre Ayton? Doncic would be the best story for the Suns, but let's not forget that his main competition played just down the street at Arizona. Ayton, a massive and talented center, is a known quantity among all NBA talent evaulators, but he will be particularly familiar to the Phoenix front office. Another bonus for Ayton: While there is a surplus of good centers in the league, the Suns clearly need someone like him. If Len is retained in the offseason, it will be as a backup. If Tyson Chandler finishes out his contract in Phoenix, it will be as a mentor. Sacramento, the most desperate team at the lottery This is an amazing evening for the Sacramento Kings, who don't have a pick in next year's draft and thus desperately needed something good to happen in the lottery. They had an 18.3 chance to jump into the top three, and it happened -- they will pick No. 2 overall. Let's hope they don't outsmart themselves here: the easy thing to do is just take Ayton or Doncic, depending on who is available. Sacramento has a bunch of interesting young players -- De'Aaron Fox, Bogdan Bogdanovic, Buddy Hield and Willie Cauley-Stein among them -- but it is unclear if any of them have true franchise-player potential. In June, they will add a player who does. Atlanta Hawks? The Atlanta Hawks had essentially the same odds as Dallas, but wound up with the third pick. We have to call them winners, but it's interesting to think about how many executives would really want to be in their position. As the draft approaches, a lot of analysts are going to say that it only really starts with the third pick, as Ayton and Doncic are the likely selections in the top two. Nailing a pick like this is extremely difficult, and fans of rebuilding teams do not tend to be forgiving when a front office hits a single rather than a home run. The Hawks got a great, potentially franchise-changing asset here, but they will be under a lot of pressure. LOSERS Cleveland and its silly streak The Cleveland Cavaliers' lottery luck finally ran out. After getting the No. 1 pick in 2011, 2013 and 2014, the Cavs stayed put at No. 8 with Brooklyn's pick this time. While this pick is still a valuable asset, their front office was definitely hoping for more when they acquired it in the Kyrie Irving deal last summer. It is impossible, of course, to talk about this without talking about the future of LeBron James. If he leaves this summer, management should not expect to be able to find a new franchise player in the draft. If Cleveland wants to trade the pick for an established player to try to convince James to stay, it might have to be part of a bigger deal that includes, say, Kevin Love. The scariest part of all of this is that general manager Koby Altman and his staff will likely have to decide what to do without knowing James' intentions. Memphis, now in no-man's land The Grizzlies had the second-best odds to win the lottery, but instead fell to fourth. This is a murky position where they will have plenty of options, and a lot will be riding on this pick. Aside from grabbing Dillon Brooks 45th overall last season, Memphis' recent draft history is pretty rough, but the hope was that this injury-ravaged season would result in the front office adding a transformational player that would be almost impossible to find otherwise. That is still possible, but it's tricky. How do you rank Marvin Bagley, Jaren Jackson, Mo Bamba, Trae Young, Miles Bridges, Mikal Bridges, Wendell Carter and Michael Porter? There is absolutely no consensus here among draft "experts," and the Grizzlies will be ripped if they don't get this one right. The good news: The last time Memphis picked fourth, it took Mike Conley. Dallas, in need of an heir to Dirk's throne The Dallas Mavericks fell to fifth, which isn't all that bad but is definitely disappointing. Like the Grizzlies, they were hoping that their tanked season would give them a surefire superstar. While they are still in the range where they could wind up with the best player in the draft, no organization sets itself up for a 24-win season because it wants the fifth pick.

A Japanese railway company has made global headlines after one of its trains left a few seconds earlier than scheduled. Early Friday morning, a train en route to Nishi-Akashi Station departed Notogawa Station at 7:11:35 a.m. instead of 7:12 a.m. on the dot. The West Japan Railway Company, or JR West, later issued a formal apology via a press release on its website, Sora News reported. © Provided by Business Insider Inc japanese bullet train According to the railway company's statement, the train's conductor "misunderstood" the scheduled departure time and "sent a signal" to leave the station before 7:12 a.m. At that time, several people were still on the platform waiting to board. One of these passengers reported the incident to a station attendant, who contacted the Osaka General Directorate. "The great inconvenience we placed upon our customers was truly inexcusable," JR West said. "We will be thoroughly evaluating our conduct and striving to keep such an incident from occurring again." Japan's railway system is known for being one of the most punctual in the world — although recent reports suggest rush-hour congestion causes frequent delays in densely populated cities like Tokyo. Just last year, managers of the Tsukuba Express Line between Tokyo and Tsukuba apologized after a train departed 20 seconds earlier than scheduled, even though not a single passenger complained.

The Walton family, founders of the world's largest company by revenue, Walmart (WMT), officially tops the latest Sunday Times Rich List, the paper's ranking of the wealthiest 100 people in the world. Load Error The U.K.-based newspaper reports that the American family has a collective net worth of £128.9 billion (nearly $175 billion) in its 30th annual list published on Sunday, May 13. Brothers Charles and David Koch, worth £88.9 billion ($120 billion), place second. Although Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos comes in third, he's still the world's single richest person with a net worth of £83 billion ($112 billion). Two other individuals round out the top five: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, worth £66.7 billion ($90 billion) and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, worth £62.2 billion ($84 billion). While Bezos may be the world's richest man, Walmart heiress and philanthropist Alice Walton remains the world's richest woman, according to the Forbes 2018 billionaires list. The youngest of Sam Walton's children, Alice Walton, 68, is reportedly worth $40.5 billion. Her elaborate $500 million art collection and donation of $225 million in Walmart shares to the Walton Family Foundation in 2016 were two major components of raising the family's overall wealth, the Sunday Times reports. "My parents spent a lot of time with us growing up talking about the importance of giving back," Alice Walton said in a 2011 CBS News interview. The Walton Family also reaps the benefits from other Walmart-owned companies, such as the warehouse chain Sam's Club and the British supermarket chain Asda. Walmart, as the no. 1 Fortune 500 company, has become a lot larger than its late founder Sam Walton first envisioned. While getting his degree in economics at the University of Missouri at Columbia in the 1930s, Walton waited tables, delivered newspapers and clerked at a five-and-dime. He opened the first Walmart store in Arkansas in 1962 and built his retail business on the premise that Walmart should service rural areas and "help customers, cut costs and share profits." His company grew rapidly and went public in 1970. Sales associates who had remained with the company and received Walmart shares saw their own wealth grow, CNBC anchor David Faber reports in the documentary "The Age of Walmart." Walton and his wife Helen raised four children, Rob, John, Jim, and Alice. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush awarded Walton the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Walmart founder passed away the same year. By then, his family was already the richest in the nation, and his New York Times obituary called him "the most successful merchant of his time." His son John died in a plane crash in 2005 and Helen died in 2007. The surviving three children own about 50 percent of Walmart's stock. "My parents didn't believe value and worth had anything to do with money. I think it's always been important to keep your feet on the ground and your nose out of the air," Alice Walton told CBS News. Though her wealth helped increase the family's bottom line, the billionaire still holds tight to one of her father's frugal habits: driving an old, cheap car. Sam Walton drove around the 1979 version of the same truck until he died over a decade later, and other members of the Sunday Times Rich List, including Bezos, Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg, also have a habit of driving old cars. The world's richest woman's vehicle of choice is a 2006 Ford F-150 King Ranch, which has a modest price of around $40,000.

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