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Euro zone retail sales stronger than expected in February

Vintage cameras are on decorative display in the shop window of a photo studio in Altenburg
Vintage cameras are on decorative display in the shop window of a photo studio in Altenburg, September 10, 2014. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach/File Photo

April 3, 2019

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Euro zone retail sales, an indication of domestic demand, were stronger than expected in February, led by a jump in sales of non-food products, data showed on Wednesday.

The European Union’s statistics office Eurostat said retail sales in the 19 countries sharing the euro rose 0.4 percent month-on-month for a 2.8 percent year-on-year gain.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected a 0.2 percent monthly increase and a 2.3 percent annual rise.

Eurostat said sales of clothes and shoes rebounded from a 0.6 percent slump in January to a 1.9 percent month-on-month rise in February and were 2.0 percent higher than a year earlier.

In year-on-year terms, sales over the internet showed the strongest gain, up 8.8 percent in February and accelerating from a 6.8 percent increase in January.

(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski; editing by Philip Blenkinsop)

Source: OANN

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It's Over for Bernie Sanders

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Before the 2016 presidential race, Bernie Sanders exuded some charm as an unapologetic lefty with a Brooklyn accent. But when his campaign gained traction, the authoritarian took over. Unwilling to concede that Democratic primary voters preferred Hillary Clinton to him -- she had amassed nearly 4 million more votes -- he continued to undermine her all the way up to the party convention. Without a doubt, he helped elect Donald Trump.

Recall this scorched-earth attack, at a rally when Clinton had all but clinched the nomination: "Are you qualified to be president of the United States when you're raising millions of dollars from Wall Street, an entity whose greed, recklessness and illegal behavior helped destroy our economy?"

It happens that those speeches didn't include anything particularly supportive of Wall Street's goals. As a senator, she continually voted against its interests. But she did represent New York, where the financial industry is a major employer and provides the biggest payroll. As a senator from Vermont, Sanders routinely voted money for Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jets, a $1.5 trillion boondoggle. Why? Because the F-35 program was employing a lot of Vermonters.

Sanders is no stranger to hypocrisy. Last summer, he praised the Democratic National Committee for greatly reducing the power of superdelegates -- powerful Democrats who can back any candidate, regardless of how the people vote. But in 2016, when it became clear that he was losing the nomination, Sanders beseeched the superdelegates to ignore the voters and support him instead.

Dismissing the will of the people is a Bernie specialty. No one can forget the Nevada Democratic state convention, held after Clinton had won the Nevada caucuses by a comfortable margin. The "Bernie bros" erupted, shouting the C-word at the women running the event. That included its chairwoman, who also received death threats against her and her grandchild.

Forced by circumstances to issue a statement, Sanders didn't condemn the violence until the third paragraph -- and that was quickly followed by a "but" that, in Trumpian fashion, blamed both sides. (We note that the statement has been removed from the official Sanders campaign website.)

The Sanders base has always been heavily weighted in the white gentry. African-Americans, on the other hand, tend to distrust him -- and for good reasons. During the early primaries, he waved off his losses in the Southern states, with their large black electorates, as not mattering.

It didn't help that his top black surrogate, academic Cornel West, had called Barack Obama "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats."

There was always a racial undercurrent in the 1960s migration of many New York liberals to Vermont, an overwhelmingly white state with moderate politics. Racial tensions in the city were high, and black militants were not so keen to sit at the knees of white intellectuals and be told what was what. Up in Burlington, white liberals could safely sit in cafes and talk radicalism to one another into the night. Sanders became one of them.

Why Democrats let Sanders, an independent, drop by when he needs their services while they do all the hard work has long been a mystery. While seeking re-election to the Senate last year, Sanders briefly joined the party to run for the nomination as a Democrat. (That way, he could keep a real Democrat off the November ballot.) Once he won, he refused the nomination, allegedly to preserve his independence. Independence from what, a differing opinion?

We shouldn't care that Sanders is old, white and male. And some of his ideas are good. Problem is, he lost his moral authority in the 2016 election of Trump. It should be over for him.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

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Air strike on Pakistan sparks celebrations in India, seen boosting Modi support

Supporters of India's ruling BJP light fireworks to celebrate after Indian authorities said their jets conducted airstrikes on militant camps in Pakistani territory, in Prayagraj
Supporters of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) light fireworks to celebrate after Indian authorities said their jets conducted airstrikes on militant camps in Pakistani territory, in Prayagraj, India, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Jitendra Prakash

February 26, 2019

By Krishna N. Das and Devjyot Ghoshal

JAMMU/NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) – Indians took to the streets in celebration across the country on Tuesday after the government said it carried out air strikes inside Pakistan killing hundreds of militants in a training camp.

The reaction may be a sign that support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi is surging months before a general election, pollsters said. Patriotism may be having a greater influence than concerns about low farm incomes and weak jobs growth.

India said air force jets hit a training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), the militant group that claimed credit for a Feb. 14 suicide bombing attack that killed Indian paramilitary police in Kashmir, a mountainous region also claimed by neighboring Pakistan.

“A very large number of Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists” were killed, Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale said.

Pakistan said there had been no casualties at all.

While the results of the strikes in the early hours of Tuesday were disputed, that didn’t stop many in India from believing their government’s version of events.

“Modi ji has finally done it”, said Sandeep Sharma, a driver in the Jammu region of India’s border state of Jammu and Kashmir, using an honorific for Modi. “There’s a lot of anger against Pakistan here.”

India’s opposition leaders, many of whom have banded together against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), congratulated the Indian Air Force (IAF), though they stopped short of praising Modi.

“I salute the pilots of the IAF,” Rahul Gandhi, leader of India’s main opposition Congress, said in a tweet.

In a village 100 metres from the Line of Control (LoC) that acts as the de facto border with Pakistan, men gathered around a bunker for security forces that is under construction and shouted slogans hailing India.

“We will celebrate tonight,” one said, “We have lost so many of our villagers to Pakistani firing.”

Shelling across the LoC has occurred frequently over the past few years but incursions into the other country’s air space are rare – let alone an attack well into Pakistan.

Modi has been under pressure to retaliate since the suicide car bombing in Kashmir’s Pulwama, which India alleges was orchestrated by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, and tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors have escalated in recent days.

Tuesday’s strike will not only boost Modi’s campaign in the election due by May, political analysts said, but also take the spotlight off economic issues for which the BJP has felt the heat.

“I think this is going to boost the electoral prospects of the BJP because people are generally in a celebration mood, that the government has been able to teach a lesson to Pakistan,” said Sanjay Kumar, director of the CSDS think-tank and a leading pollster.

The BJP lost a string of state elections late last year, after which opposition parties have attempted to form a coalition to take on Modi.

And although his ratings have dropped to their lowest-ever level, Modi remains the most popular leader in the country, an India Today poll showed last month.

“A large proportion of voters who had started drifting away from the BJP would come back to the fold,” Kumar said. “This all goes to the advantage of the BJP.”

Also many BJP supporters who had become disillusioned with the party would feel relief, said Bhawesh Jha, founder of CNX, one of India’s largest polling companies.

“… They will work hard to ensure the victory of Narendra Modi,” Jha said. “Since this is happening so close to the election, Pulwama will be the biggest issue.”

As news of the strike emerged, India’s television channels flashed patriotic slogans and headlines including TIMES NOW’s “Proud moment for undefeatable Bharat”, using a Hindi word for India.

Some recalled the so-called “surgical strike” on suspected militant camps in Pakistan in 2016 after an attack by militants on an Indian army camp.

On Twitter, #SurgicalStrike2, #IndianAirForce and #IndiaStrikesBack were the top trending hash tags in India.

By the afternoon, shortly after India’s foreign ministry provided some details of the strike, Modi spoke to a large crowd at an election rally in Churu, in the western state of Rajasthan.

“I can assure you that India is in safe hands,” he said from a podium placed before a collage of photographs of members of security forces who had died in Kashmir this month.

“Modi, Modi, Modi,” the crowd shouted back.

(Writing by Zeba Siddiqui and Devjyot Ghoshal in NEW DELHI; Edited by Martin Howell and Nick Macfie)

Source: OANN

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“Our Very Democracy Is At Stake” – Joe Biden Launches Campaign For President

Following months of anticipatory leaks and the ‘gropegate’ scandal that nearly derailed the former VP’s ambitions, Joe Biden, who has consistently polled at the top of the ever-expanding Democratic field, has finally announced his plans to seek the 2020 nomination.

In a video published via his twitter feed Thursday morning, the former vice president and Senator from Delaware declared his intention to run, declaring “the core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy…everything that has made America — America – is at stake.”

In the video, Biden framed his video with the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., – a “defining moment for our nation in the last few years” – where a counter-protester was killed after a member of a white supremacist group plowed into a crowd with his car. He contrasted the march with the writing of the ‘Declaration of Independence,’ which was penned by Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville more than 240 years earlier.

In the video, Biden. condemned Trump for assigning a “moral equivalency” between the neo-Nazi marchers and the people protesting them when he said there were ‘fine people on both sides’.

“In that moment, I knew the threat to our nation was bigger than anything we’ve seen in our lifetime. I believe our nation will look back on this president…as an abberant moment in our history. Our very democracy…is at stake.”

“America is an idea, an idea that is stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator on Earth…it instills in every person in this country the belief that in this country there’s nothing you can’t achieve if you work at it. We can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville, even more important we have to remember who we are.”


Leo Zagami lays out the facts about how the globalists have been planning to use Joe Biden as a presidential candidate. Leo joins Owen via Skype to expose those that seek to control the world from the shadows.

Before signing off, Biden warned that America can’t afford eight years of Donald Trump, saying it would ‘forever alter the character of the nation.’

“If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen. The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that’s made America America is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.”

Watch the video below:

Biden will follow his announcement with a fundraiser on Thursday, then a rally Monday in Pittsburgh, Bloomberg reported, citing an announcement from his campaign. Over the next ten days, he plans to make stops in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the earliest primary and caucus states.

Though Biden’s eight-year stint as Obama’s VP gives him unrivaled name and brand recognition in a field of 20 candidates, Obama has said he won’t make an endorsement until a nominee has been chosen. Online betting odds still favor Biden, 76, as the front-runner for the nomination, though “Democratic Socialist” Bernie Sanders is a close second, followed by the ascendant South Bend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Biden

Of course, Biden’s well-documented history of inappropriate touching isn’t his only major liability going into the Democratic primary (the Iowa caucuses are just 10 months away). The appearance of a quid-pro-quo involving Biden, his son, taxpayer money and a ‘sweetheart’ deal in Ukraine could very well become the scandal that finally proves his undoing.

Source: InfoWars

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Israel launches Gaza strikes after rockets fired at Tel Aviv

Smoke and flame are seen during an Israeli air strike in Gaza
Smoke and flame are seen during an Israeli air strike in Gaza March 15, 2019. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

March 15, 2019

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli military aircraft bombed Hamas facilities in the Gaza Strip on Friday, hours after two rockets were launched from the Palestinian enclave at Tel Aviv in the first such attack since a 2014 war.

There was no immediate word of casualties in the air strikes that hit six buildings used by the dominant Islamist group’s security forces, and which had been evacuated as a precaution.

Witnesses said powerful explosions from the air strikes rocked buildings in Gaza and lit the skies over targeted sites

The Israeli military said it was targeting “terror sites” in Gaza. In a possible sign of further escalation, it said rocket sirens were sounded in Israeli communities near the Gaza border.

On Thursday night, the sirens howled farther north, in Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial capital, set off by what the military said were two incoming, longer-range rockets from Gaza.

That salvo caused no casualties or damage, missing built-up areas. But it rattled Israeli nerves ahead of an April 9 election in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking a fifth term on the strength of his national security credentials.

Explosions were heard in Tel Aviv and witnesses said Iron Dome interceptor missiles were fired skyward and detonated – although the military said no rockets were shot down.

It was the first such attack on the city since the 2014 Gaza war between Hamas and Israel. There have been several smaller rounds of fighting since, reined in by Egyptian and U.N. mediations.

“This was basically a surprise,” military spokesman Brigadier-General Ronen Manelis told Israel Radio on Thursday.

In that interview, Manelis said Israel did not yet know who had carried out the rocket launches. But another Israeli military spokesman laid the blame with Hamas on Friday.

“Hamas carried out the rocket fire against Tel Aviv yesterday evening,” Lieutenant-Colonel Avichay Adraee said.

Hamas denied involvement, saying the launches took place as its leaders met Egyptian delegates about efforts to secure a long-term ceasefire with Israel.

Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, two smaller Gaza armed factions, also denied responsibility.

Israeli analysts speculated that Palestinian militants opposed to any deal between Hamas and Israel were behind the launchings.

The flare-up of Thursday and Friday drew a U.S. statement of support for Israel. “Hamas and other terror orgs in Gaza continue to fail their people day after day & drag Gaza further & further down by constantly choosing violence,” tweeted Jason Greenblatt, the White House’s Middle East envoy. “This method will never work. Ever!”

Naftali Bennett, a member of Netanyahu’s security Cabinet who is vying against him for rightist votes in the looming election, demanded the assassination of Hamas chiefs. “The time has come to defeat Hamas once and for all,” he said on Thursday.

Netanyahu also faced pressure from the center-left opposition, whose leading candidate, former General Benny Gantz, said: “Only aggressive, harsh action will restore the deterrence that has eroded” under the prime minister’s watch.

Tensions have been high for the past year along the Israel-Gaza frontier since Palestinians began violent protests near Israel’s border fence that have often drawn a lethal response from the Israeli military.

About 200 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations and about 60 more Palestinians have died in other incidents, including exchanges of fire across the border. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed by Palestinian fire.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Source: OANN

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France seeks arrest of two Russian former athletics officials: source

A woman walks into the head offices of WADA in Montreal
FILE PHOTO: A woman walks into the head office of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada November 9, 2015. REUTERS/Christinne Muschi

March 19, 2019

PARIS (Reuters) – French judges have issued international arrest warrants for two former Russian athletics officials as part of an investigation of doping cover-ups, a legal source said on Tuesday.

The source named the two as Valentin Balakhnichev, the former president of the Russian athletics federation, and former head distance coach Alexei Melnikov.

Both were banned for life in January 2016­, two months after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) published a report containing evidence of widespread, state-sponsored doping in Russian athletics.

The report led to the suspension of the Russian athletics federation, which remains in effect to this day.

Balakhnichev, who also served as treasurer of global athletics body IAAF from 2011 to 2014, told Reuters that he had not been notified of the decision by French authorities. Melnikov did not answer multiple phone calls on Tuesday afternoon.

The French probe began in November 2015 with former IAAF chief Lamine Diack being put under formal investigation on suspicion of corruption and money laundering. He had been accused of receiving bribes to cover up doping violations by Russian athletes.

France’s financial prosecutor has said that Senegalese Papa Massata Diack, Lamine Diack’s son, had been at the heart of a corruption scheme in international sports, an accusation he has denied.

Although the Russian athletics federation has been banned since November 2015, some Russians have been cleared to compete internationally as neutrals if they demonstrate they are competing in a doping-free environment.

(Reporting by Simon Carraud; Additional reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber in Moscow; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Source: OANN

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Joe Biden and Progressive Hypocrisy

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Source: InfoWars

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Alex Jones – Info Wars

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FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Easter Sunday, in Colombo
FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, five days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Catholic churches and luxury hotels across the island on Easter Sunday, in Colombo, Sri Lanka April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

KATTANKUDY, Sri Lanka (Reuters) – Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran was 12 years old when he began his studies at the Jamiathul Falah Arabic College. He was a nobody, with no claim to scholarship other than ambition.

Zahran and his four brothers and sisters squeezed into a two-room house with their parents in a small seaside town in eastern Sri Lanka; their father was a poor man who sold packets of food on the street and had a reputation for being a petty thief.

“His father didn’t do much,” recalled the school’s vice principal, S.M. Aliyar, laughing out loud.

The boy surprised the school with his sharp mind. For three years, Zahran practiced memorizing the Koran. Next came his studies in Islamic law. But the more he learned, the more Zahran argued that his teachers were too liberal in their reading of the holy book.

“He was against our teaching and the way we interpreted the Koran – he wanted his radical Islam,” said Aliyar. “So we kicked him out.”

Aliyar, now 73 with a long white beard, remembers the day Zahran left in 2005. “His father came and asked, ‘Where can he go?’.”

The school would hear again of Mohamed Zahran. And the world now knows his name. The Sri Lankan government has identified him as the ringleader of a group that carried out a series of Easter Sunday suicide bombings in the country on April 21.

The blasts killed more than 250 people in churches and luxury hotels, one of the deadliest-ever such attacks in South Asia. There were nine suicide bombers who blew apart men, women and children as they sat to pray or ate breakfast.

Most of the attackers were well-educated and from wealthy families, with some having been abroad to study, according to Sri Lankan officials.

That description does not, however, fit their alleged leader, a man said to be in his early 30s, who authorities say died in the slaughter. Zahran was different.

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

Sri Lanka’s national leadership has come under heavy criticism for failing to heed warnings from Indian intelligence services – at least three in April alone – that an attack was pending. But Zahran’s path from provincial troublemaker to alleged jihadist mastermind was marked by years of missed or ignored signals that the man with a thick beard and paunch was dangerous.

His increasingly militant brand of Islam was allowed to grow inside a marginalized minority community – barely 10 percent of the country’s roughly 20 million people are Muslim – against a backdrop of a dysfunctional developing nation.

The top official at the nation’s defense ministry resigned on Thursday, saying that some institutions under his charge had failed.

For much of his adult life, Zahran, 33, courted controversy inside the Muslim community itself.

In the internet age, that problem did not stay local. Zahran released online videos calling for jihad and threatening bloodshed.

After the blasts, Islamic State claimed credit and posted a video of Zahran, clutching an assault rifle, standing before the group’s black flag and pledging allegiance to its leader.

The precise relationship between Zahran and Islamic State is not yet known. An official with India’s security services, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that during a raid on a suspected Islamic State cell by the National Investigation Agency earlier this year officers found copies of Zahran’s videos. The operation was in the state of Tamil Nadu, just across a thin strait of ocean from Sri Lanka.

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

Back in 2005, Zahran was looking to make his way in the world. His hometown of Kattankudy is some seven hours’ drive from Colombo on the other side of the island nation, past the countless palm trees, roadside Buddha statues, cashew hawkers and an occasional lumbering elephant in the bush. It is a town of about 40,000 people, a dot on the eastern coast with no clear future for an impoverished young man who’d just been expelled.

Zahran joined a mosque in 2006, the Dharul Athar, and gained a place on its management committee. But within three years they’d had a falling out.

“He wanted to speak more independently, without taking advice from elders,” said the mosque’s imam, or spiritual leader, M.T.M. Fawaz.

Also, the young man was more conservative, Fawaz said, objecting, for instance, to women wearing bangles or earrings.

“The rest of us come together as community leaders but Zahran wanted to speak for himself,” said Fawaz, a man with broad shoulders lounging with a group of friends in a back office of the mosque after evening prayers. “He was a black sheep who broke free.”

Mohamed Yusuf Mohamed Thaufeek, a friend who met Zahran at school and later became an adherent of his, said the problems revolved around Zahran’s habit of misquoting Islamic scriptures.

The mosque’s committee banned him from preaching for three months in 2009. Zahran stormed off.

“We treated him like a spoiled child, a very narrow-minded person who was always causing some trouble,” said the head of the committee, Mohamed Ismail Mohamed Naushad, a timber supplier who shook his head at the memory.

Now on his own, Zahran began to collect a group of followers who met in what Fawaz described as “a hut”.

At about that time, Zahran, then 23, married a young girl from a small town outside the capital of Colombo and brought his bride back to Kattankudy, according to his sister, Mathaniya.

“I didn’t have much of a connection with her – she was 14,” she said.

Despite being “a bit rough-edged”, Zahran was a skilled speaker and others his age were drawn to his speeches and Koranic lessons, said Thaufeek. He traveled the countryside at times, giving his version of religious instruction as he went.

Also, Zahran had found a popular target: the town’s Sufi population, who practice a form of Islam often described a mystical, but which to conservatives is heresy.

Tensions in the area went back some years. In 2004, there was a grenade attack on a Sufi mosque and in 2006 several homes of Sufis were set afire. Announcements boomed from surrounding mosques at the time calling for a Sufi spiritual leader to be killed, said Sahlan Khalil Rahman, secretary of a trust that oversees a group of Sufi mosques.

He blamed followers of the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam that some locals say became more popular after funding from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Wahhabism, flowed to mosques in Kattankudy.

It was, Rahman said, an effort “to convert Sufis into Wahhabis through this terrorism”. Rahman handed over a photograph album showing charred homes, bullet holes sprayed across an office wall and a shrine’s casket upended.

ONLINE RADICAL

It was an ideal backdrop for Zahran’s bellicose delivery and apparent sense of religious destiny.

He began holding rallies, bellowing insults through loudspeakers that reverberated inside the Sufis’ house of worship as they tried to pray.

In 2012, Zahran started a mosque of his own. The Sufis were alarmed and, Rahman said, passed on complaints to both local law enforcement and eventually national government offices. No action was taken.

The then-officer in charge of Kattankudy police, Ariyabandhu Wedagedara, said in a telephone interview that he couldn’t arrest people simply because of theological differences.

     “The problem at the time was between followers of different Islamic sects – Zahran was not a major troublemaker, but he and followers of other sects, including the Sufis, were at loggerheads,” Wedagedara said.

Zahran found another megaphone: the internet. His Facebook page was taken down after the bombings, but Muslims in the area said his video clips had previously achieved notoriety.

His speeches went from denouncing Sufis to “kafirs”, or non-believers, in general. Zahran’s sister, Mathaniya, said in an interview that she thought “his ideas became more radical from listening to Islamic State views on the Internet”.

In one undated video, Zahran, in a white tunic and standing in front of an image of flames, boomed in a loud voice: “You will not have time to pick up the remains of blown-up bodies. We’ll keep sending those insulting Allah to hell.”

“HARD TO TAKE”

Zahran spoke in Tamil, making his words available to young Muslims clicking on their cellphones in Kattankudy and other towns like it during a period when, in both 2014 and 2018, reports and images spread of Sinhalese Buddhists rioting against Muslims in Sri Lanka.

In 2017, Zahran’s confrontations boiled over. At a rally near a Sufi community, his followers came wielding swords. At least one man was hacked and hospitalized. The police arrested several people connected to Zahran, including his father and one of his brothers. Zahran slipped away from public view.

That December, the mosque Zahran founded released a public notice disowning him. Thaufeek, his friend from school, is now the head. He counted the places that Zahran had been driven away from – his school, the Dharul Athar mosque and then, “we ourselves kicked him out, which would have been hard for him to take”.

The next year, a group of Buddha statues was vandalized in the town of Mawanella, about five hours drive from Kattankudy. There, in the lush mountains of Sri Lanka’s interior, Zahran had taken up temporary residence.

“He was preaching to kill people,” said A.G.M. Anees, who has served as an imam at a small mosque in the area for a decade. “This is not Islam, this is violence.”

Zahran went into hiding once more.

On the Thursday morning before the Easter Sunday bombings, Zahran’s sister-in-law knocked on the door of a neighbor who did seamstress work near Kattankudy. She handed over a parcel of fabric and asked for it to be sewn into a tunic by the end of the day.

“She said she was going on a family trip,” said the neighbor, M.H. Sithi Nazlya.

Zahran’s sister says that her parents turned off their cellphones on the Friday. On Sunday, when she visited their home, they were gone.

She does not know if Zahran arranged for them to be taken somewhere safe. Or why he would have carried out the bombing.

But now in Kattankudy, and in many other places, people are talking about Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran.

(Reporting by Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam; Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani, Shihar Aneez and Alasdair Pal; Editing by John Chalmers and Alex Richardson)

Source: OANN

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A Wells Fargo logo is seen in New York City
FILE PHOTO: A Wells Fargo logo is seen in New York City, U.S. January 10, 2017. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith

April 26, 2019

By Jessica DiNapoli and Imani Moise

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wells Fargo & Co’s board has retained executive search firm Spencer Stuart to hunt for a new chief executive, ideally a woman who can tackle its regulatory and public perception issues, two people familiar with the matter said.

Wells Fargo’s ambition to become the only major U.S. bank with a female CEO underscores the need to restore its image with a wide range of constituents, including customers, shareholders, regulators and politicians, after it became mired in a scandal in 2016 for opening potentially millions of unauthorized accounts.

Former CEO Tim Sloan left abruptly last month, becoming the second CEO to leave the bank in the scandal’s fallout.

The board plans to approach Citigroup Inc’s Latin America chief Jane Fraser, one of the sources said. During Fraser’s 15-year tenure at Citigroup, she has gained experience running consumer and commercial businesses as well as its private bank.

Fraser could not be immediately reached for comment.

The board also discussed approaching JPMorgan Chase & Co’s Marianne Lake, but after the bank named her to run JPMorgan’s consumer lending business last week, that option became less viable, the source added. The board wants someone who can convince regulators, employees, investors and customers that the bank has fixed problems underpinning the sales scandal, the sources said.

The bank’s board feels that choosing a woman might please lawmakers in Washington who have been critical not only of Wells Fargo’s misbehavior, but of the broader banking industry for a lack of diversity and gender equality, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It also believes that such a move could bolster Wells Fargo’s image with the households of customers where women play a leading role in managing finances, one of the sources added.

The new CEO will also have to resolve litigation and regulatory matters. There are 14 outstanding consent orders with government entities, as well as probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice.

To be sure, Spencer Stuart will approach and consider several male candidates for the CEO job as well, one of the sources said. The top priority is to find an external candidate who can navigate the bank’s regulatory issues, the source added.

Finding an outsider who meets all those qualifications and wants the job will be difficult, the sources said. There are few people with the necessary experience, even fewer of those who are women, and it is not clear if any of the obvious candidates would be open to taking the role.

The sources asked not to be identified because Wells Fargo’s board deliberations are confidential.

Spokespeople for Wells Fargo and Spencer Stuart declined to comment.

Wells Fargo’s board has not made any public statements about its requirements for a new CEO, beyond Chair Betsy Duke saying the job should attract the “top talent in banking.”

The board wants to complete the search within the next three to six months, one of the sources said.

STALLED SHARES

After Sloan’s ouster, Wells Fargo’s board appointed Allen Parker, who had been general counsel, as interim CEO. The board has said it is looking for an external candidate as a permanent replacement. It is not clear whether Parker will stay at the bank.

Others whose names have been mentioned by analysts, recruiters and industry sources as perspective CEO candidates include Alphabet Inc finance chief Ruth Porat and Bank of America Corp’s chief technology officer Cathy Bessant.

Wells Fargo shares have stalled since Sloan’s departure on March 29th, while the KBW Bank index has rallied more than 7 percent.

Wells Fargo would be “the best stock on earth to buy” if it had the right CEO, said Greg Donaldson, chairman of Donaldson Capital Management in Indiana.

Donaldson held about 50,000 Wells Fargo shares, but sold the stake last year as problems mounted. The CEO change could convince him to re-invest, depending on who it is, he told Reuters.

“It would be very smart for them to get a woman,” he said.

(Reporting by Jessica DiNapoli and Imani Moise in New York; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra, Greg Roumeliotis and Susan Thomas)

Source: OANN

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A worker walks on the roof of a new home under construction in Carlsbad
FILE PHOTO: A worker walks on the roof of a new home under construction in Carlsbad, California September 22, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Blake

April 26, 2019

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. economy is growing at a 2.08% annualized pace in the second quarter based on upbeat data on durable goods orders and new home sales in March, the New York Federal Reserve’s Nowcast model showed on Friday.

This was faster than the 1.92% growth rate calculated by the N.Y. Fed model the week before.

(Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Source: OANN

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Extraordinary European Union leaders summit in Brussels
FILE PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte arrives at an extraordinary European Union leaders summit to discuss Brexit, in Brussels, Belgium April 10, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman

April 26, 2019

(Reuters) – Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Friday he had assured China’s Huawei Technologies that it would not face discrimination in the rollout of Italy’s 5G telecoms network.

Conte was speaking on a visit to China where he said he met Huawei’s chief executive, Ren Zhengfei. The prime minister’s comments were carried in Italy by TV broadcaster Sky Italia.

“I told him that we have adopted some precautions, some measures to protect our interests that demand very high levels of security … not only from Huawei but any company entering into the 5G arena,” he said.

Huawei, the world’s biggest producer of telecoms equipment, is under intense scrutiny after the United States told allies not to use its technology because of fears it could be a vehicle for Chinese spying. Huawei has categorically denied this.

(Writing by by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Angelo Amante)

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U.S. President Trump departs for travel to Indianapolis from the White House in Washington
U.S. President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he departs for travel to Indianapolis, Indiana from the White House in Washington, U.S., April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

April 26, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Friday was expected to announce his intention to revoke the United States’ status as a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, which was signed in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama but never ratified by Congress, two U.S. officials said.

Trump was expected to announce the decision in a speech in Indianapolis, to the National Rifle Association, the officials said. The NRA, a powerful gun lobby group, has long been opposed to the treaty, which was negotiated at the United Nations.

(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Bill Trott)

Source: OANN

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