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American Airlines extends 737 MAX cancellations through June 5

FILE PHOTO: Employees walk by the end of a 737 Max aircraft at the Boeing factory in Renton
FILE PHOTO: Employees walk by the end of a 737 Max aircraft at the Boeing factory in Renton, Washington, U.S., March 27, 2019. REUTERS/Lindsey Wasson/File Photo

April 7, 2019

(Reuters) – American Airlines said on Sunday it will extend cancellations of 90 flights a day through June 5 because of the grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft following two deadly crashes in five months.

The extended cancellation by the largest U.S. airline is the latest sign that the airplane is not expected to return to service anytime soon. American Airlines said on March 24 it had canceled 90 flights a day through April 24. On Friday, Boeing said it plans to cut its monthly 737 aircraft production by nearly 20 percent.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Source: OANN

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NSA John Bolton: 'ISIS Threat Will Remain'

Amid President Donald Trump's claim of keeping his promise of a 100 percent defeat of the ISIS caliphate in Syria, "the ISIS threat will remain," according to National Security Adviser John Bolton.

"The president has been I think as clear as clear can be when he talks about the defeat of the ISIS territorial caliphate," Bolton told ABC's "This Week." "He has never said that the elimination of the territorial caliphate means the end of ISIS in total. We know that's not the case.

"We know right now that there are ISIS fighters scattered still around Syria and Iraq, and that ISIS itself is growing in other parts of the world. The ISIS threat will remain."

President Trump had attempted to keep a campaign promise to withdraw U.S. troops out of Syria, but he has been persuaded to keep some there to root out lone-wolf attacks from the terrorist organization.

"But one reason that the president has committed to keeping an American presence in Iraq and a small part of an observer force in Syria, is against the possibility that there would be a real resurgence of ISIS, and we would then have the ability to deal with that if that arose," Bolton told host Martha Raddatz. "So, I think people have to be clear."

Bolton added that while the ISIS threat could remain, President Trump would not be wrong to say the caliphate is destroyed, because, by definition, ISIS no longer holds territory in Syria even if the ideology persists in the minds of some terrorists.

"And the importance of the territorial caliphate goes to an ideological point at the center of ISIS's theory of itself, namely that they were a caliphate because under their view of what a caliphate is, you have to control territory," Bolton said.

". . . The ISIS threat, the al-Qaida threat, the terrorist threat is an ideological threat worldwide and it's something that I think we have to be vigilant against for the forseeable future. That's the reality."

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Prosecutor: No charges against Arkansas officer in shooting

Prosecutors have declined to file charges against a Little Rock police officer who fatally shot a man by firing at least 15 times into the windshield as the car was in motion.

Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley announced Friday that Officer Charles Starks won't face charges in the Feb. 22 shooting of 30-year-old Bradley Blackshire, who was black. Police say Starks, who is white, was responding to a call after a detective confirmed the car Blackshire was driving was stolen.

In a video of the incident released last month, various angles showed Starks on the vehicle's hood shooting at Blackshire through the windshield as the car continued to move.

Little Rock police say Starks is still being paid but not performing any departmental duties while they conduct an internal investigation.

Source: Fox News National

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Uncle Sam Wants Your DNA: The FBI’s Diabolical Plan to Create a Nation of Suspects

“As more and more data flows from your body and brain to the smart machines via the biometric sensors, it will become easy for corporations and government agencies to know you, manipulate you, and make decisions on your behalf. Even more importantly, they could decipher the deep mechanisms of all bodies and brains, and thereby gain the power to engineer life. If we want to prevent a small elite from monopolising such godlike powers, and if we want to prevent humankind from splitting into biological castes, the key question is: who owns the data? Does the data about my DNA, my brain and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?”―Professor Yuval Noah Harari

Uncle Sam wants you.

Correction: Uncle Sam wants your DNA.

Actually, if the government gets its hands on your DNA, they as good as have you in their clutches.

Get ready, folks, because the government— helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget)—is embarking on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

As the New York Times reports:

“The science-fiction future, in which police can swiftly identify robbers and murderers from discarded soda cans and cigarette butts, has arrived. In 2017, President Trump signed into law the Rapid DNA Act, which, starting this year, will enable approved police booking stations in several states to connect their Rapid DNA machines to Codis, the national DNA database. Genetic fingerprinting is set to become as routine as the old-fashioned kind.

Referred to as “magic boxes,” these Rapid DNA machines—portable, about the size of a desktop printer, highly unregulated, far from fool-proof, and so fast that they can produce DNA profiles in less than two hours—allow police to go on fishing expeditions for any hint of possible misconduct using DNA samples.

Journalist Heather Murphy explains: “As police agencies build out their local DNA databases, they are collecting DNA not only from people who have been charged with major crimes but also, increasingly, from people who are merely deemed suspicious, permanently linking their genetic identities to criminal databases.”

Suspect Society, meet the American police state.

Every dystopian sci-fi film we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.

By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone communications, the government knows what you say.

By uploading all of your emails, opening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government knows what you write.

By monitoring your movements with the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the government knows where you go.

By churning through all of the detritus of your life—what you read, where you go, what you say—the government can predict what you will do.

By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists—and in turn, the government—will soon know what you remember.

And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

Of course, none of these technologies are foolproof.

Nor are they immune from tampering, hacking or user bias.

Nevertheless, they have become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to render null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Consequently, no longer are we “innocent until proven guilty” in the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crimebehavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometricslicense plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals.

The government’s questionable acquisition and use of DNA to identify individuals and “solve” crimes has come under particular scrutiny in recent years.

Until recently, the government was required to at least observe some basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access someone’s DNA. That has all been turned on its head by various U.S. Supreme Court rulings that pave the way for suspicionless searches and herald the loss of privacy on a cellular level.

Certainly, it was difficult enough trying to protect our privacy in the wake of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Maryland v. King that likened DNA collection to photographing and fingerprinting suspects when they are booked, thereby allowing the government to take DNA samples from people merely “arrested” in connection with “serious” crimes.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Maryland v. King is worth reading not only for the history lesson on the Fourth Amendment but for its clear-sighted rebuke of the police state’s tendency to justify every encroachment on our freedoms as necessary for security.

As Scalia noted:

“Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches… Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason. Today’s judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an airplane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the “identity” of the flying public), applies for a driver’s license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

The Court’s decision to let stand the Maryland Court of Appeals’ ruling in Raynor v. Maryland, which essentially determined that individuals do not have a right to privacy when it comes to their DNA, made Americans even more vulnerable to the government accessing, analyzing and storing their DNA without their knowledge or permission.

Although Glenn Raynor, a suspected rapist, willingly agreed to be questioned by police, he refused to provide them with a DNA sample.

No problem. Police simply swabbed the chair in which Raynor had been sitting and took what he refused to voluntarily provide.

Raynor’s DNA was a match, and the suspect became a convict.

As the dissenting opinion in Raynor for the Maryland Court of Appeals rightly warned, “a person desiring to keep her DNA profile private, must conduct her public affairs in a hermetically sealed hazmat suit…. The Majority’s holding means that a person can no longer vote, participate in a jury, or obtain a driver’s license, without opening up his genetic material for state collection and codification.”

Yet in refusing to hear the case, the U.S. Supreme Court gave its tacit approval for government agents to collect shed DNA, likening it to a person’s fingerprints or the color of their hair, eyes or skin.

Whereas fingerprint technology created a watershed moment for police in their ability to “crack” a case, DNA technology is now being hailed by law enforcement agencies as the magic bullet in crime solving.

It’s what police like to refer to a “modern fingerprint.”

However, unlike a fingerprint, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.”

With such a powerful tool at their disposal, it was inevitable that the government’s collection of DNA would become a slippery slope toward government intrusion.

All 50 states now maintain their own DNA databases, although the protocols for collection differ from state to state. Increasingly, many of the data from local databanks are being uploaded to CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), the FBI’s massive DNA database, which has become a de facto way to identify and track the American people from birth to death.

Even hospitals have gotten in on the game by taking and storing newborn babies’ DNA, often without their parents’ knowledge or consent. It’s part of the government’s mandatory genetic screening of newborns. However, in many states, the DNA is stored indefinitely.

What this means for those being born today is inclusion in a government database that contains intimate information about who they are, their ancestry, and what awaits them in the future, including their inclinations to be followers, leaders or troublemakers.

For the rest of us, it’s just a matter of time before the government gets hold of our DNA, either through mandatory programs carried out in connection with law enforcement and corporate America, by warrantlessly accessing our familial DNA shared with geneological services such as Ancestry and 23andMe, or through the collection of our “shed” or “touch” DNA.

All of those fascinating, geneological ancestral searches that allow you to trace your family tree can also be used against you and those you love. As law professor Elizabeth Joh explains, “When you upload your DNA, you’re potentially becoming a genetic informant on the rest of your family.”

While much of the public debate, legislative efforts and legal challenges in recent years have focused on the protocols surrounding when police can legally collect a suspect’s DNA (with or without a search warrant and whether upon arrest or conviction), the question of how to handle “shed” or “touch” DNA has largely slipped through without much debate or opposition.

Yet as scientist Leslie A. Pray notes:

We all shed DNA, leaving traces of our identity practically everywhere we go. Forensic scientists use DNA left behind on cigarette butts, phones, handles, keyboards, cups, and numerous other objects, not to mention the genetic content found in drops of bodily fluid, like blood and semen. In fact, the garbage you leave for curbside pickup is a potential gold mine of this sort of material. All of this shed or so-called abandoned DNA is free for the taking by local police investigators hoping to crack unsolvable cases. Or, if the future scenario depicted at the beginning of this article is any indication, shed DNA is also free for inclusion in a secret universal DNA databank.

What this means is that if you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name.

As Forensic magazine reports, “As officers have become more aware of touch DNA’s potential, they are using it more and more. Unfortunately, some [police] have not been selective enough when they process crime scenes. Instead, they have processed anything and everything at the scene, submitting 150 or more samples for analysis.”

Even old samples taken from crime scenes and “cold” cases are being unearthed and mined for their DNA profiles.

Today, helped along by robotics and automation, DNA processing, analysis and reporting takes far less time and can bring forth all manner of information, right down to a person’s eye color and relatives. Incredibly, one company specializes in creating “mug shots” for police based on DNA samples from unknown “suspects” which are then compared to individuals with similar genetic profiles.

If you haven’t yet connected the dots, let me point the way.

Having already used surveillance technology to render the entire American populace potential suspects, DNA technology in the hands of government will complete our transition to a suspect society in which we are all merely waiting to be matched up with a crime.

No longer can we consider ourselves innocent until proven guilty.

Now we are all suspects in a DNA lineup until circumstances and science say otherwise.

Of course, there will be those who point to DNA’s positive uses in criminal justice, such as in those instances where it is used to absolve someone on death row of a crime he didn’t commit, and there is no denying its beneficial purposes at times.

However, as is the case with body camera footage and every other so-called technology that is hailed as a “check” on government abuses, in order for the average person—especially one convicted of a crime—to request and get access to DNA testing, they first have to embark on a costly, uphill legal battle through red tape and, even then, they are opposed at every turn by a government bureaucracy run by prosecutors, legislatures and law enforcement.

What this amounts to is a scenario in which we have little to no defense of against charges of wrongdoing, especially when “convicted” by technology, and even less protection against the government sweeping up our DNA in much the same way it sweeps up our phone calls, emails and text messages.

Yet if there are no limits to government officials being able to access your DNA and all that it says about you, then where do you draw the line?

As technology makes it ever easier for the government to tap into our thoughts, our memories, our dreams, suddenly the landscape becomes that much more dystopian.

With the entire governmental system shifting into a pre-crime mode aimed at detecting and pursuing those who “might” commit a crime before they have an inkling, let alone an opportunity, to do so, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine a scenario in which government agents (FBI, local police, etc.) target potential criminals based on their genetic disposition to be a “troublemaker” or their relationship to past dissenters.

Equally disconcerting: if scientists can, using DNA, track salmon across hundreds of square miles of streams and rivers, how easy will it be for government agents to not only know everywhere we’ve been and how long we were at each place but collect our easily shed DNA and add it to the government’s already burgeoning database?

As always there will be those voices—well-meaning, certainly—insisting that if you want to save the next girl from being raped, abducted or killed, then we need to give the government all the tools necessary to catch these criminals before they can commit their heinous crimes.

If you care for someone, you’re particularly vulnerable to this line of reasoning. Of course we don’t want our wives butchered, our girlfriends raped, our daughters abducted and subjected to all manner of atrocities.

But what about those cases in which the technology proved to be wrong, either through human error or tampering? It happens more often than we are told.

For example, David Butler spent eight months in prison for a murder he didn’t commit after his DNA was allegedly found on the murder victim and surveillance camera footage placed him in the general area the murder took place. Conveniently, Butler’s DNA was on file after he had voluntarily submitted it during an investigation years earlier into a robbery at his mother’s home. The case seemed cut and dried to everyone but Butler who proclaimed his innocence. Except that the DNA evidence and surveillance footage was wrong: Butler was innocent.

Moreover, despite the insistence by government agents that DNA is infallible, New York Times reporter Andrew Pollack makes a clear and convincing case that DNA evidence can, in fact, be fabricated. Israeli scientists “fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva,” stated Pollack. “They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.”

The danger, warns scientist Dan Frumkin, is that crime scenes can be engineered with fabricated DNA.

Now if you happen to be the kind of person who trusts the government implicitly and refuses to believe it would ever do anything illegal or immoral, then the prospect of government officials—police, especially—using fake DNA samples to influence the outcome of a case might seem outlandish.

Yet as history shows—and as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People — the probability of our government acting in a way that is not only illegal but immoral becomes less a question of “if” and more a question of “when.”

This article was reprinted with permission from The Rutherford Institute.


Source: InfoWars

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In Halting Calif. Rail Funds, Trump Sends Multiple Messages

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Fiscal conservatives and the fossil-fuel industry are cheering President Trump’s decision to publicly whack California and slash nearly $1 billion in federal funds from what opponents long ago sarcastically dubbed the Golden State’s “high-speed train to nowhere.”

Politically, Trump has hit a 2020 messaging trifecta with the move. First, he escalated his ongoing war of words with lefty California, which launched a 16-state lawsuit challenging the president’s national-emergency declaration for the border wall. Second, he used the state’s admitted failure on the $77 billion rail project against new Democratic governor – and harsh Trump critic -- Gavin Newsom. To round out his ticket, Trump has cast Green New Dealers as fringy socialist spendthrifts whose most vaunted pet projects are so unrealistic and costly they can never get off the ground.

So much for Trump’s State of the Union call to swear off political retribution. With Bernie Sanders’ return to the race for the White House, the 2020 campaign is already shaping up as a prize fight between socialism and nationalism – a contest Trump supporters believe he can win  and the sort of pugilistic fray his allies love.

“The [administration] is absolutely right in ending already scheduled cash flows and seeking taxpayer reimbursement for the funds squandered on the ill-conceived California high-speed rail projects,” said Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government.

The American Energy Alliance, a free-market organization representing oil and gas industry interests, was downright gleeful.

“The Trump administration and [Department of Transportation] Secretary Elaine Chao are right to stop federal funding for the green boondoggle that was the California High Speed Rail project,” said Thomas Pyle, the group’s president. “Not one additional red cent of federal taxpayer money should go towards this liberal pipedream.”

“If the greens can’t get high-speed rail off the ground in liberal California, it is folly to think the Green New Dealers can make it work anywhere else,” Pyle added, referring to the mammoth undertaking as “green pork.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who, as the top California Republican, has lambasted the state’s “bullet-train boondoggle” for years, was equally ecstatic with the announcement, praising the “prudent decision protecting hardworking American taxpayers.”

“At every turn, the California High Speed Rail Authority has mismanaged and misled Californians on the viability of the project. Its budget has ballooned by the billions, projected ridership numbers have proved exaggerated, and the private investment that was promised never materialized,” McCarthy said in a statement. “And throughout it all, the authority has gone to great lengths to keep these facts from California and American taxpayers. … It is time to move on from the broken high-speed rail project and redirect our efforts to infrastructure projects that work for Californians.”

In one fell swoop, the Trump administration move rescinds nearly $929 million in federal grant funds, terminating a 2011 agreement signed by President Obama to provide the money for the system that state Democratic officials envisioned would connect San Diego to San Francisco.

Additionally, the Transportation Department announced that it is also actively exploring “every available legal option” to seek the return of $2.5 billion in funds the federal government previously granted to California for the project.

Particularly troubling for Newsom, who is believed to harbor future presidential ambitions, is Trump’s capitalizing on the newly minted governor’s admission that the eight-year-old train project, with its tens of billions of dollars in cost overruns and endless environmental lawsuits and red tape, had long ago gone off the rails.

The move comes in the wake of Newsom’s announcement in his Feb. 12 State of the State address that the initiative is abusing taxpayer dollars and will not be constructed as planned.

“But let’s be real,” Newsom said in his speech to the mostly Democratic-controlled legislature. “The current project, as planned, would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. There has been too little oversight and not enough transparency. … Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were.”

Instead of getting behind the full rail line, a pet project of his predecessor Jerry Brown, the governor decided to build only a single segment from Bakersfield to Merced in the Central Valley. In doing so, he transformed the plan into one the Trump administration could easily cast as a having a radically different purpose from the original, federally funded award. Moreover, it’s not exactly what liberals who supported the project had in mind. Bakersfield and Merced, noted the New York magazine puckishly, are “two small cities that, it’s fair to say, most coastal metropolitan Californians happily visit rarely or never.”

Rank-and-file Democrats in the state immediately decried Newsom’s high-profile admission, attacking it on Twitter as a disappointing politically expedient move. The Los Angeles Times editorialized that abandoning the project entirely would be a "tragic mistake."

Former Rep. Jeff Denham, a Central Valley California Republican who lost a hard-fought contest to Rep. Josh Harder in November, had chaired the House rail subcommittee that for years tried to find a way to quash the bullet-train project. He ultimately determined it couldn’t be done through an act of Congress.

But with just a few words from the governor, the Trump administration had its opening. The afternoon of Newsom’s remarks, Trump called on the state to return $3.5 billion in funds as the media fueled a narrative that Newsom was completely abandoning the project – a charge his team repeatedly tried to knock down.

Late Tuesday, Ronald Batory, the Trump-appointed chief of the Federal Railroad Administration, the agency that issued the grants in 2009 and 2010, announced that California is not meeting its requirements and deadlines for progress on the project and failed to take corrective actions after regulators raised concerns in 2017 and 2018.

In a letter to California High-Speed Rail Authority Chief Executive Brian Kelly, Batory said the state “has materially failed to comply with the terms of the agreement and has failed to make reasonable progress on the project.”

Newsom vowed late Tuesday to go to federal court to try to halt the administration’s move, arguing that Trump was taking action as retribution for Monday’s announcement that California is leading a 16-state legal battle against the president’s national-emergency declaration to authorize funding of his border wall.

“It’s no coincidence that the administration’s threat comes 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the president’s farcical ‘national emergency,’” Newsom said in a written statement. “The president even tied the two issues together in a tweet this morning. This is political retribution by President Trump, and we won’t sit idly by. This is California’s money, and we are going to fight for it.”

Earlier Tuesday, Trump made no bones about framing the debate as a failed green project vs. law-and-order-boosting border barrier. “The failed Fast Train project in California, where the costs overruns are become world record-setting, is hundreds of times more expensive than the desperately needed Wall!” he tweeted.

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a close friend of Donald Trump Jr., quickly applauded and distilled the multi-layered issued to an us-vs.-them clash over immigration — “them” being radical liberals in California:

“As long as California thinks they can continue to defy federal immigration law and harbor sanctuary cities we shouldn’t fund their stupid, wasteful and horrific high-speed rail project, which is billions over budget and way behind,” Kirk tweeted. “Cancel the funding, bravo @realDonaldTrump!”

Some 8,500 like-minded conservatives nodded in agreement, liking the tweet.

Susan Crabtree is a veteran Washington reporter who has spent two decades covering the White House and Congress.

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Nicaragua talks on hold as both sides trade accusations

Nicaragua's government and opposition are accusing each other of undermining the latest round political dialogue, after police arrested more than 100 people at a weekend protest.

The opposition Civic Alliance condemned the government's "violent repression" of Saturday's protest march. It said some 164 people were arrested.

The government on Monday complained that opposition representatives participating in negotiations had participated in the demonstration, which it labeled a "provocation." It said there were 107 arrests and the detainees were released hours later.

Vatican Ambassador to Nicaragua Waldemar Sommertag has been mediating the talks and he urged patience Monday.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights says at least 325 people have died in protests or related violence since April 2018.

Source: Fox News World

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Axios: Trump Considers Attending WH Journalists' Dinner

President Donald Trump is considering attending the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, an event he has boycotted the last two years, Axios reported on Wednesday.

Trump has not yet decided on whether or not he is attending the April 27 dinner, but some are suggesting that he would go as part of an extended “victory lap” after the Mueller report concluded that Trump did not collude with the Russians during the 2016 election campaign.

Aviso, however, said it is not clear if the president is serious about attending and said it would be awkward for everyone if he did decide to go to the event.

Since Attorney General Bill Barr sent a summary of the Mueller report to Congress, Trump has increased his attacks on the media.

"The Mainstream Media is under fire and being scorned all over the World as being corrupt and FAKE,” Trump tweeted.

“For two years they pushed the Russian Collusion Delusion when they always knew there was No Collusion. They truly are the Enemy of the People and the Real Opposition Party!"

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Traders work on the floor at the NYSE in New York
FILE PHOTO: Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., April 24, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

April 26, 2019

By Sruthi Shankar and Amy Caren Daniel

(Reuters) – U.S. stock index futures were flat on Friday, as investors paused ahead of GDP data, which is expected to show the world’s largest economy maintained a moderate pace of growth in the first quarter.

Gross domestic product probably increased at a 2% annualized rate in the quarter as a burst in exports, strong inventory stockpiling and government investment in public construction projects offset a slowdown in consumer and business spending, according to a Reuters survey of economists.

The Commerce Department report will be published at 8:30 a.m. ET.

The GDP data comes as investors look for fresh catalysts to push the markets higher. The S&P 500 index is about 0.5% below its record high hit in late September, after surging nearly 17% this year.

First-quarter earnings have been largely upbeat, with nearly 78% of the 178 companies that have reported so far surpassing earnings estimates, according to Refinitiv data.

Wall Street now expects S&P 500 earnings to be in line with the year-ago quarter, a sharp improvement from the 2.3% fall expected at the start of April.

Amazon.com Inc rose 0.9% in premarket trading after the e-commerce giant reported quarterly profit that doubled and beat estimates on soaring demand for its cloud and ad services.

Ford Motor Co shares surged 8.5% after the automaker posted better-than-expected first-quarter earnings largely due to strong pickup truck sales in its core U.S. market.

Mattel Inc jumped 8% after the toymaker beat analysts’ estimates for quarterly revenue, as a more diverse range of Barbie dolls powered sales in the United States.

At 6:52 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were down 35 points, or 0.13%. S&P 500 e-minis were down 1.5 points, or 0.05% and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 10.75 points, or 0.14%.

Among decliners, Intel Corp slumped 7.7% after it cut its full-year revenue forecast and missed quarterly sales estimate for its key data center business.

Rival Advanced Micro Devices declined 0.8%.

Oil majors Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp are expected to report results later in the day.

(Reporting by Sruthi Shankar and Amy Caren Daniel in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva)

Source: OANN

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General view of a destroyed building during World War II is pictured in Warsaw
General view of a destroyed building during World War II is pictured in Warsaw, Poland April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

April 26, 2019

By Joanna Plucinska

WARSAW (Reuters) – Germany could owe Poland more than $850 billion in reparations for damages it incurred during World War Two and the brutal Nazi occupation, a senior ruling party lawmaker said.

Some six million Poles, including three million Polish Jews, were killed during the war and Warsaw was razed to the ground following a 1944 uprising in which about 200,000 civilians died.

Germany, one of Poland’s biggest trade partners and a fellow member of the European Union and NATO, says all financial claims linked to World War Two have been settled.

The right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) has revived calls for compensation since it took power in 2015 and has made the promotion of Poland’s wartime victimhood a central plank of its appeal to nationalism.

PiS has yet to make an official demand for reparations but its combative stance towards Germany has strained relations.

“Poland lost not only millions of its citizens but it was also destroyed in an unusually brutal way,” Arkadiusz Mularczyk, who heads the Polish parliamentary committee on reparations, told Reuters in an interview.

“Many (victims) are still alive and feel deeply wronged.”

His comments come a month before European Parliament elections in which populist and nationalist parties are expected to do well. Poland will also hold national elections later this year, with PiS still well ahead of its rivals in opinion polls.

EU LARGESSE

Mularczyk said the reparations figure could amount to more than 10 times the estimated 100 billion euros ($111 billion) that Poland has received so far in European Union funds since it joined the bloc in 2004.

Germany is the biggest net donor to the EU budget and some Germans regard its contributions as generous compensation to recipient countries like Poland which suffered under Nazi rule.

In 1953 Poland’s then-communist rulers relinquished all claims to war reparations under pressure from the Soviet Union, which wanted to free East Germany, also a Soviet satellite, from any liabilities. PiS says that agreement is invalid because Poland was unable to negotiate fair compensation.

Mularczyk said his committee hoped to complete its report on the reparations issue by Sept. 1, the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion.

Accusing Berlin of playing “diplomatic games” over the issue, he said: “The matter is being swept under the rug (by Germany) … until it’ll be wiped from the memory, from people’s awareness.”

His comments come after the Greek parliament voted this month to seek billions of euros in German reparations for the Nazi occupation of their country.

(Additional reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Editing by Justyna Pawlak and Gareth Jones)

Source: OANN

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FILE PHOTO - Otto Frederick Warmbier is taken to North Korea's top court in Pyongyang North Korea
FILE PHOTO – Otto Frederick Warmbier (C), a University of Virginia student who was detained in North Korea since early January, is taken to North Korea’s top court in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this photo released by Kyodo March 16, 2016. Mandatory credit REUTERS/Kyodo/File Photo

April 26, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said the United States did not pay any money to North Korea as it sought the release of comatose American student Otto Warmbier.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Trump had approved payment of a $2 million bill from North Korea to cover its care of the college student, who died shortly after he was returned to the United States after 17 months in a North Korean prison.

(Reporting by Makini Brice and Susan Heavey)

Source: OANN

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Al-Qaida in Yemen is vowing to avenge beheadings carried out by Saudi Arabia this week — an indication that some of the 37 Saudis executed on terrorism-related charges were members of the Sunni militant group.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, as the branch is called, posted a statement on militant-linked websites on Friday, accusing the kingdom of offering the blood of the “noble children of the nation just to appease America.”

The statement says al-Qaida will “never forget about their blood and we will avenge them.”

U.S. ally Saudi Arabia on Tuesday executed 37 suspects convicted on terrorism-related charges. Most were believed to be Shiites but at least one was believed to be a Sunni militant.

His body was pinned to a pole in public as a warning to others.

Source: Fox News World

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For two friends with checkered pasts it was the luck of a lifetime: a 4 million-pound ($5.2 million) lottery win.

But Mark Goodram and Jon-Ross Watson may see their celebrations cut short.

The Sun newspaper reports that Britain’s National Lottery is withholding the payout as it investigates whether the men, who have a string of criminal convictions, used illicit means to buy the winning ticket.

The Sun said neither man has a bank account, leading lottery organizers to investigate how they obtained the bank-issued debit card that paid for the 10 pound ($13) scratch card.

Camelot, which runs the lottery, said Friday it couldn’t confirm details of the story because of winner-anonymity rules. The firm said it holds a “thorough investigation” if there is any doubt about a claim.

Source: Fox News World

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