A former advisor to George W. Bush who now sits on the US Court of Appeals in Washington, Kavanaugh began his career as a clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, and will succeed him on the nine-seat bench when he retires at the end of the month.

“Judge Kavanaugh has impeccable credentials, unsurpassed qualifications, and a proven commitment to equal justice under the law,” Trump said as he announced his much-anticipated decision in a prime-time address from the White House.

“There is no one in America more qualified for this position and no one more deserving,” Trump said, urging the Senate to swiftly confirm his nominee.

Kennedy long served as the tie-breaking swing vote between the Supreme Court’s conservatives and liberals, and his departure handed Trump an opportunity to place a decidedly conservative stamp on the bench.

The US leader kept the suspense running for days over his choice for the crucial vacancy, narrowing the selection down to a shortlist of four judges, all with solid right-wing credentials.

“Justice Kennedy devoted his career to securing liberty. I am deeply honored to be nominated to fill his seat on the Supreme Court,” the 53-year-old Kavanaugh said as he received the nomination.

“My judicial philosophy is straightforward. A judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law,” he said.

“A judge must interpret statutes as written. And a judge must interpret the constitution as written, informed by history and tradition and precedent.”

A Yale University graduate, Kavanaugh has demonstrated his conservative credentials on numerous occasions, including when he opposed Obamacare, the sweeping universal health insurance plan unveiled under Trump’s Democratic predecessor Barack Obama.

In the 1990s, he led an investigation into the suicide of Bill Clinton aide Vince Foster, who was linked to the Whitewater controversy that began as a probe into the presidential couple’s real estate investments.

Kavanaugh later contributed to prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s report into Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

After moving into the White House in 2001, Bush recruited Kavanaugh as legal counsel before later naming him to the appellate court.

In 2012, Kavanaugh was part of a panel that scrapped an Environmental Protection Agency measure aimed at reducing air pollution in the United States.

He recently voiced disagreement with a court decision allowing a teenage unauthorized immigrant to get an abortion.

A practicing Catholic active in various religious organizations, Kavanaugh is a married father of two girls.

The species, baptized Ingenia prima, was about three times the size of the largest Triassic dinosaurs from its era. It was discovered in the Balde de Leyes dig site in San Juan province, 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) west of the Argentine capital Buenos Aires.

The find was published in the specialist Nature Ecology & Evolution journal on Monday and revealed in Argentina by San Martin University’s Scientific Dissemination Agency.

“As soon as we found it, we realized it was something different. We found a shape, the first giant one among all the dinosaurs. That’s the surprise,” said Cecilia Apaldetti, a government and San Juan University researcher.

Excavators found several vertebrae from the neck and tail as well as fore and hind leg bones.

The species “exhibits a growth strategy that was unknown until now and indicates that gigantism originated much earlier than was thought,” said Apaldetti, the study’s co-author.

These were “herbivore dinosaurs, quadrupeds, easily recognizable by their very long neck and tail, and from the sauropod group,” she added.

Before this discovery, it was thought that gigantism developed during the Jurassic period, around 180 million years ago.

Late Triassic

Fellow co-author Ricardo Martinez believes the Ingenia prima is from “a Late Triassic period, possibly 205 million years” ago.

The Triassic period extended from around 250-200 million years ago and the Jurassic from 200-145 million years ago.

The team has been studying the Triassic period, when dinosaurs were just beginning to appear. The first ones were small but as they evolved they tended towards gigantism to defend themselves against predators.

According to scientists, Ingenia prima was the first dinosaur species to reach gigantism and even though it was a long way from the 70 tonnes (tons) that the biggest sauropods weighed from the end of the Cretaceous period (145-66 million years ago), the speed of bone tissue accumulation was greater than that of species from its era and the biggest giants that lived in Patagonia, in the south of Argentina.

The dinosaur’s bone fragments displayed cyclical and seasonal growth, with a different kind of tissue to other sauropods, which allowed it to grow very quickly.

It’s believed that the species grew to eight to 10 meters (26-33 feet) tall — the specimen found was a growing youth measuring six to seven meters — and weighed around 10 tonnes, equal to two or three African elephants.

Another of the species’ features was air cavities in its bones, making it lighter and promoting growth.

The Balde de Leyes site, which spans several thousand hectares (acres), was first discovered in 2001 and since 2014 has produced hundreds of specimens. At the end of the Triassic period it was a type of savannah.

The train, with over 360 people on board, was travelling from the Edirne region on the Greek and Bulgarian borders to Istanbul’s Halkali station on Sunday when six carriages derailed in the Tekirdag region.

Deputy Prime Minister Recep Akdag said 24 people died, in a sharp rise from the previous toll of 10.

The state-run Anadolu news agency quoted Akdag as saying search operations through the derailed train carriages had been completed Monday morning.

Turkish media quoted Health Minister Ahmet Demircan as saying 338 people required hospital treatment after the accident with 124 still hospitalised.

The transport ministry said that the train, carrying 362 passengers, had derailed as recent heavy downpours caused the ground beneath the track to erode away.

Rescuers help injured people seated near derailed wagons after a train accident at Corlu district in Tekirdag on July 8, 2018. // AFP PHOTO

Transport Minister Ahmet Arslan said that the latest checks on the rails had been made in April, Anadolu reported.

Turkish media, including the Hurriyet daily, published pictures showing the erosion had been so bad that part of the track had been in the air with no ground left to support it.

Television pictures showed several train carriages sprawled on their sides, and shocked injured passengers being taken away on stretchers as rescue workers picked through the wreckage.

The train derailed outside the village of Sarilar in the Corlu district of Tekirdag.

– ‘Every available means’ –

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed his condolences over those who lost their lives in the accident that he said has “deeply upset the whole nation”.

The accident, one of Turkey’s worst train disasters of recent years, threatens to cast a shadow over a lavish ceremony scheduled in Ankara later Monday to mark the inauguration of Erdogan for a new presidential mandate and the transition to a new system of government.

Erdogan said all state institutions were “using every means available to help”, vowing that there would be a comprehensive investigation into the “tragic accident”, the presidency said.

Turkey’s audiovisual authority RTUK later said the government had issued a temporary ban on broadcasting images from the scene. This was lifted on Monday morning.

Turkish authorities under Erdogan have over the last years sought to modernise Turkey’s once ramshackle rail network, building several high speed inter-city lines.

Turkish passengers have in general preferred taking planes or buses for inter-city travel but this has been changing with the new high-speed lines.

The train involved in the accident appeared to be one of the slower passenger trains travelling on a single track line.

Turkey’s rail network has been hit by several fatal accidents in recent years.

In January 2008, nine people were killed when a train derailed in the Kutahya region south of Istanbul due to faulty tracks.

And in Turkey’s worst recent rail disaster, 41 people were killed and 80 injured in July 2004 when a high-speed train derailed in the northwestern province of Sakarya.

Senior civil servants who do not meet requirement set for English Proficiency Test should be sent for training, says chief executive officer of Malaysian Qualifications Agency Prof Dr Rujhan Mustafa.

He is of the view that the government should consider sending those who do not meet the requirement to attend few months of training for them to be able to play a better role in their tasks where they have years of experience.

Dr Rujhan is one of the first batch of senior civil servants sitting for English Proficiency Test.

He told Sin Chew Daily: “We come from different background. Some graduated from universities in England and United States. Many are local graduates where the medium of instruction in university is Malay language and do not have a chance to be trained in English-speaking countries.

Senior civil servants started to sit for English Proficiency Test on Saturday.

Dr Rujhan said personally, he welcomed Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s proposal of assessing the English proficiency of civil servants, especially those at senior level.

Dr Mahathir announced earlier that senior civil servants are required to liaise with officers from foreign countries. Hence, they are to sit for English Proficiency Test.

Chief Secretary Ali Hamsa made a surprise visit to National Institute of Public Administration as senior civil servants sat for English Proficiency Test.

He posted photographs of officers sitting for the test on Twitter. Among them are Transport Ministry Secretary-General Saripuddin Kasim, Youth and Sports Ministry Secretary-General Lokman Hakim Ali, Perlis state secretary Syed Omar Sharifuddin Syed Ikhsan and others.

They are tested on communication skills including giving their reply after going through some reading materials.

The board, the France-based International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), said in its report that Kota Tua lacked “integrity and authenticity” as an old town. Many 20th century architectural developments, described as “unsympathetic intrusions” by ICOMOS, “have irreversibly changed the visual appearance and skyline of Kota Tua.”

UNESCO also raised concerns about several future projects, including high-rise developments, the construction of 17 islets through land reclamation in Jakarta Bay, the proposed giant sea wall and the mass rapid transit (MRT) infrastructure.

“Kota Tua is not unique as a harbor city formed by the globalizing trade routes of colonial activities as there are many others, including some which have already been inscribed on the World Heritage List. As a result, ICOMOS considers that the justification provided is not appropriate in relation to the serial property proposed,” the report, released last week, said.

The government responded to the report by immediately withdrawing its proposal for Kota Tua.

“We would not be able to submit another proposal if UNESCO officially decided that Kota Tua could not receive World Heritage status. Therefore, the government decided to withdraw the dossier,” Yunus Arbi, the ministry’s subdirectorate head of world heritage objects, told The Jakarta Post recently.

The government first submitted the nomination dossier for Kota Tua and four outlying islands in Thousand Islands regency, namely Onrust, Kelor, Cipir and Bidadari, to UNESCO in 2015.

However, the proposal was deemed incomplete, so the government submitted a revised proposal last year.

In the proposal, titled “The Age of Trade: Old Town of Jakarta and 4 Outlying Islands”, the government introduced Kota Tua as the city that saw the largest volume of trade in Asia during the “golden age” of trade in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Onrust Island was used as the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) shipyard in 1613, while the other three islands were used for defense, quarantine and prisons for political opponents.

Despite emphasizing the glory days of Kota Tua, only a few tangible objects remained in the area, ICOMOS noted.

The city walls and Batavia Castle had been demolished, while the former’s canals had been converted into streets, the body said.

“On contrary, the contemporary […] Kota Tua contains an impressive ensemble of 20th century interwar buildings, erected for Dutch businesses connected to maritime trade, such as banks, insurance companies, produce brokers, etc” ICOMOS said in the 2018 Evaluations of Nominations of Cultural and Mixed Properties report.

The Jakarta administration has long struggled to manage Kota Tua, given the lack of concrete plans to revitalize the area. Jakarta Gubernatorial Decree No. 26/2014 on the master plan for Kota Tua has yet to provide detailed plans on the project, a factor that has hindered the city administration from thoroughly revitalizing the area.

Jakarta Cultural Heritage Expert Team (TACB) member Candrian Attahiyat said a number of projects in Kota Tua had been developed without proper consideration for history or sustainability.

“For instance, Kali Besar has been turned into a reservoir. This shows that the city administration is not ready to receive World Heritage status from UNESCO,” Candrian said.

Candrian added that the eviction in 2016 of Pasar Ikan residents in Penjaringan, North Jakarta, had destroyed the old walls in the area. He suggested that the city administration and the government also exclude Thousand Islands from the proposal and focus solely on Kota Tua in the future.

Yunus said the mismanagement of the area was caused by a lack of communication between the government, the city administration and private parties.

ICOMOS recommended Indonesia pay “close attention to current investments and revitalization projects for 19th and 20th century architecture in Kota Tua, as these projects need to be guided by heritage conservation concerns in order to preserve, in the long-term, the character of the city”