New Florida passenger train unveiled

WEST PALM BEACH — After years of failed attempts to bring higher-speed rail service to the Sunshine State, officials with Brightline relished a historic moment Wednesday, showing off the first train set delivered to their operations center in this South Florida city.

According to ustoday.com, the two locomotives and four passenger coaches, collectively dubbed "BrightBlue," arrived in West Palm Beach last month and were put on public display for the first time Wednesday. The set will soon be followed by four more - BrightOrange, BrightPink, BrightRed and BrightGreen - with the hopes of starting regular service by this summer.

If all goes according to plan, it will be the first privately run and operated rail service launched in the United States in over 100 years. And for passengers, it will mark the culmination of years of efforts to create a higher-speed rail option between the tourist havens of Orlando and Miami.

Brightline president Mike Reininger said he expects about 3 million passengers a year in the first phase of operations, which will run between stations in West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami. By the time rail lines and stations are completed to Orlando, possibly by 2018, Reininger said they hope to lure up to 5.5 million passengers per year.

During a media tour Wednesday, officials from Brightline and Siemens, the California company that built the cars, showed off the new train set and the operations facility where they will be serviced.

The two locomotives feature 16-cylinder, 4,000 horsepower engines that will both be running when the train is moving. Russ Harvey of Siemens said local laws limit the train's speed to 79 mph throughout the heavily-populated South Florida region. Once it gets a bit farther north on its way to Orlando, it can kick it up to 125 mph. And, if it were allowed, Harvey said it could go even faster.

"It can go 125 mph not even at full throttle," Harvey said with a grin.

The 32-inch wide aisles allow wheelchairs and strollers to easily pass through. The seats - 19 inches wide in the standard "Smart" coaches, 21 inches wide in the higher-end "Select" coach - are designed to recline in a way that doesn't interfere with passengers seated behind. All rows have power outlets, and tables include pop-up charging stations with power outlets and USB connections.






Each car has a large storage area that holds bicycles and larger bags. And each bathroom is designed to be completely hands-free, including doors, faucets and toilets that all operate with the wave of a hand.













Reininger said the Wi-Fi service on the train will be "continuous, powerful and free." And he said the trains will introduce a new concept - train stations built at the same level of the passenger coaches, meaning people won't have to climb up and down stairs to board.

The BrightBlue train set was pulled 3,000 miles from the Siemens factory in Sacramento, Calif., to the operations facility in West Palm Beach. That means the first test runs will start next week, with officials placing 40-pound bags of sand on each of the train's 240 seats to begin testing how it runs with passengers aboard.

After that, they expect to receive another train set per month, ending up with five sets that will begin operations this summer.

Members of ISIS nabbed in intelligence undercover

An undercover officer smashed a terror cell drumming up support for Islamic State extremists after he spent nearly two years infiltrating meetings to record their inflammatory speeches.

According to the telegraph.co.uk, the officer identified only as Kamal forged close relationships with the Luton chapter of a banned group linked to hate preacher Anjem Choudary as he collected evidence, a court heard.

Equipped with a false identity including a fake name, fake wife and fake business, he spent 20 months recording hundreds of encounters, and meetings where scores of people heard speeches praising Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (Isil).

In one rant, one of the gang spoke of 40 truck bombs “driving down Oxford Street”, the Old Bailey was told.

Speeches were delivered to up to 100 people, including young children, and the group praised Isil and urged others to travel to Syria to fight.

Zaiur Rahman, 39, was convicted of arranging meetings after putting up a marquee in his back garden to host the Luton chapter of Al-Muhajiroun. Meetings were also held in a nearby Methodist church hall.

Mohammed Choudry, 23, was found guilty of encouraging support for Isil, while Mohammed Istiak Alamgir, 37, Rajib Khan, 38, and Yousaf Bashir, 36, were convicted of similar offences last summer.

The invitation-only gatherings in June and July 2015 featured speeches calling for gay people to be thrown from buildings, the court heard.



One was held on the anniversary of the London Tube bombings while in another Choudry spoke of “40 trucks driving down Oxford Street full of explosives”.

Choudry, who is married with a young child, told his audience: “My brothers, there is a wave coming. Either you be part of it or you drown. Either you like it or you don't like it.'

Anjem Choudary, who was last year jailed for five-and-a-half years, spoke at one of the meetings in Rahman's garden.

Those attending the speeches included Shazib and Junead Khan. Junead Khan is serving a life sentence for plotting to kill a US soldier in the UK, while Shazib Khan is serving a 13-year jail term for plans to fight alongside Isis in Syria.

Rahman, from Luton, was convicted of three counts of arranging meetings in support of a proscribed organisation, while Choudry, from Maidenhead, Berkshire, was convicted of one count of encouraging support for a proscribed organisation.

Judge Michael Topolski QC told the pair they had been convicted “of arranging meetings and speaking at a meeting in support of a vicious terrorist organisation, who's members and supporters, just like you two, have hijacked and corrupted the principles and practices of an ancient and revered religion for its own purposes”.

Kamal accompanied Rahman and Choudry to a meeting where the speaker praised the massacre of 12 journalists at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The court heard a secret recording where the speaker says: “It's a great day, it's excellent news.”

Alamgir also collected money at the talks to pay the legal fees of convicted terrorist Omar Bakri Muhammed - Anjem Choudary's mentor, seen by many as the head of Al-Muhajiroun.

Speaking after the verdict, Commander Dean Haydon, head of Scotland Yard’s counter terrorism command, said: "These men were closely associated with Al-Muhajiroun, a dangerous group which has inspired and influenced numerous terrorists.

"Speeches like theirs inspire the terrorists of tomorrow and I am immensely pleased with the excellent work of my officers and Bedfordshire Police.”

All five men will be sentenced at a later date.

Nigeria Prison nmates hits 47,817 awaiting trial

No fewer than 47,817 inmates are currently awaiting trial in Nigerian prisons out of a total number of 69,200 detai-nees, according to www.vanguardngr.com.

The Country Director of Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants, CURE-Nigeria, Mr. Sylvester Uhaa made this known at a roundtable for criminal justice actors in Benue State, put together by his organization in conjunction with the Benue State High Court of Justice, Makurdi.

Uhaa lamented that many detainees stayed on pre-trial longer than convicts and far longer than they would have stayed in prison if they had been convicted.

He said, “As a result the prisons are overstretched and overcrowded with many holding thrice their designated capacities.

They have also become breeding grounds for diseases and criminality, with huge consequences on prison inmates, their families and society.

In addition, there are either no or too little rehabilitation programs available in the prisons.”

He said the situation in the prisons had become almost impossible to manage and often resulting in jail breaks. “This situation is a time bomb we are all sitting on, and when it explodes, none of us, no matter how safe we think we are, will be spared”, he added.

Uhaa urged President Muhammadu Buhari and state Governors to take immediate steps to address the issue by decongesting the prisons in the country and also place emphasis on justice and prison reforms and prisoner rehabilitation and reintegration.

The most technologically advanced country in the world

The Baltic nation of Estonia only has 1.3 million citizens stands out from its Eastern European neighbors in that it has an advanced economy and a high standard of living. And it’s a technology paradise. You may know it as the home of Skype. But there’s a lot more to the tiny country than that.

In Estonia, voting, signing documents and filling out tax returns is done online, thanks to X-Road, an online tool that coordinates multiple online data repositories and document registries. X-Road provides all Estonians — ordinary citizens, enterprises and government officials — with unparalleled access to the data they need to do business, get licenses, permits and other documents that would take days, weeks or even months in other countries.

X-Road is built with scalability in mind, so that the growing number of services and repositories can easily be attached to the system. Although this digital backbone alone is rather impressive, it’s just one of many products in tech-forward Estonia.

Instead of being held back by its past and falling victim to ailments that plague many post-communist countries, such as corruption, a bloated government and an obsolete education system, Estonia has decided to start with a clean slate and invest in its future. To transform its society into a community of tech-savvy individuals, children as young as 7 are taught the principles and basics of coding. (In comparison, only one in four schools in the U.S. teaches computer programming.)

Such strong foundations have yielded impressive results: Estonians are driven, forward-thinking and entrepreneurial, and the same goes for the government. It takes only five minutes to register a company there and, according to The Economist, the country in 2013 held the world record for the number of startups per person. And it’s not quantity over quality: Many Estonian startups are now successful companies that you may recognize, such as Skype, Transferwise, Pipedrive, Cloutex, Click & Grow, GrabCAD, Erply, Fortumo, Lingvist and others. By the way, Estonia uses the euro.

If all this sounds enticing and you wish to become an entrepreneur there, you’re in luck; starting a business in Estonia is easy, and you can do it without packing your bags, thanks to its e-residency service, a transnational digital identity available to anyone. An e-resident can not only establish a company in Estonia through the Internet, but they can also have access to other online services that have been available to Estonians for over a decade. This includes e-banking and remote money transfers, declaring Estonian taxes online, digitally signing and verifying contracts and documents, and much more.

E-residents are issued a smart ID card, a legal equivalent to handwritten signatures and face-to-face identification in Estonia and worldwide. The cards themselves are protected by 2048-bit encryption, and the signature/ID functionality is provided by two security certificates stored on the card’s microchip.

But great innovations don’t stop there. Blockchain, the principle behind bitcoin that also secures the integrity of e-residency data, will be used to provide unparalleled safety to 1 million Estonian health records. The blockchain will be used to register any and all changes, illicit or otherwise, done to the health records, protecting their authenticity and effectively eliminating any abuse of the data therein.

While there are many lessons that the U.S. and the rest of the world can learn from Estonia, these are especially important: A country must be willing to adapt and change the infrastructure of both the government and the economy if needed, and to continually optimize them. A nation needs to understand that a change of mindset should be thorough and start with the young. An education system should be designed in a way that doesn’t cripple young minds, or overburden them with too much irrelevant information. And, finally, if you want entrepreneurship to thrive, it is necessary to remove bureaucratic and technical obstacles at all levels.
How close is your country to Estonia in technology? Let me know in the comment section below.