Casey Viner of Ohio, one of the three men accused of orchestrating a swatting call that ended with a 28-year-old man being killed by a Wichita, Kan., police officer last December, was in federal court in Wichita on Wednesday, June 13, 2018.
An Ohio man pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice in a bizarre and tragic scheme known as “swatting,” in which pranksters make a fake emergency phone call to law enforcement as a hoax.
Casey Viner, 19, asked a known “swatter” to make a bogus emergency call that resulted in an innocent man being killed by Kansas police.
A measly $1.50 bet between two online gamers turned deadly for the innocent Kansas man, Andrew Finch, and has already resulted in a 20-year sentence for the main suspect and now this additional guilty plea for one of two indicted co-conspirators.
Viner changed his plea from not guilty to guilty as part of a deal that recommends two years of probation and that Viner be barred from online gaming for two years.
The case stems from a game of Call of Duty: WWII. Police say Viner solicited Tyler Barriss to “swat” his opponent, Shane Gaskill, in Wichita, Kansas since he was refusing to pay up.
Known for his online reputation of “swatting,” Barriss called police from his home base in Los Angeles – 1,300 miles away—to report a fake shooting and kidnapping at a Wichita address for Gaskill.
Gaskill and his family used to live at the address but were evicted in 2016, according to local reports.
A SWAT team showed up at the home where Andrew Finch, 28, was now living. Police shot him and killed him. Finch’s family has since sued Wichita police.
Viner tried to destroy communications he had with Barriss, part of the obstruction charge, when he realized he was caught up in the failed, deadly hoax.
"I did, I literally said you're gonna be swatted. Not thinking at all, so I'm going to prison," Viner texted to a friend known as J.D.
When J.D. apparently tried to reassure him by pointing out that Viner himself didn't call the hoax in, Viner replied, "Does t (sic) even matter?????? I was involved I asked him to do it in the first place," according to the indictment.
Viner is scheduled to be sentenced June 26.
Tyler Barriss, seen here in 2018, was sentenced last week. (Bo Rader/The Wichita Eagle via AP, File)
FILE PHOTO: People walk by a Ford Escape SUV displayed during the media day for the Shanghai auto show in Shanghai, China April 16, 2019. REUTERS/Aly Song
April 16, 2019
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s China Changan Automobile Group expects sales at its joint venture with Ford Motor Co to rebound at the end of this year as the U.S. automaker boosts its China product line, Changan’s president said on Tuesday.
Zhu Huarong made the comment to Reuters on the sidelines of the Shanghai Autoshow.
Ford earlier this month announced that it plans to launch more than 30 new models in China over the next three years as it seeks to reverse slumping sales in the world’s biggest auto market.
Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini holds a news conference during a meeting as part of the Interior ministers of G7 nations meeting in Paris, France, April 4, 2019. REUTERS/Charles Platiau
April 4, 2019
PARIS (Reuters) – Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, on Thursday praised the collaboration with France’s interior minister over immigration issues, in a sharp change of tone after months of acrimonious exchanges between Italy and France.
Ties between the two traditional allies had grown increasingly tense since Salvini’s decision to close Italian ports to migrant ships last year, culminating with France briefly recalling its ambassador to Rome in February.
“On these topics, I found myself absolutely in sync with Minister (Christophe) Castaner,” Salvini told reporters on the sidelines of a G7 meeting of interior ministers in Paris, citing illegal immigration and counter-terrorism in particular.
However, Salvini – leader of the far-right League party, and who is also in charge of Italy’s interior ministry – said nationalist leader Marine Le Pen remained his main ally in France and that he would meet her in Paris on Friday.
Asked about his relationship with President Emmanuel Macron, who has vowed to fight nationalists in upcoming European parliament elections, Salvini said: “I have never met Macron. We have different histories, different interests.”
(Reporting by Michel Rose, Editing by Sarah White)
FILE PHOTO: A logo of the Brazilian mining company Vale SA is seen in Brumadinho, Brazil January 29, 2019. REUTERS/Adriano Machado/File photo
April 8, 2019
SAO PAULO (Reuters) – A group of minority shareholders in Brazilian iron ore maker Vale SA have proposed an alternative board member to challenge the independent members within the group of 13 candidates presented by the company’s board, newspaper Valor Economico reported.
Broker Vic DTVM and fund Geracao Futuro Lpar proposed Patricia Bentes as an independent member and proposed the election be held using a cumulative voting system. Bentes has been a board member of different Brazilian listed power companies and is currently on the board of Cemig as well as a business professor at a Rio de Janeiro university.
That would mean board members would be elected independently and not in a single vote approving all names proposed by the board. Cumulative voting can only be required by shareholders holding at least 5 percent of the company’s capital. The matter will be put to a vote at an April 30 shareholders meeting.
The pressure from minority shareholders reflects skepticism toward Vale’s board and management after a mining dam burst in the town of Brumadinho, killing some 300 people, in the second such disaster in the region in recent years.
The board elected this year will oversee the last year of an agreement overseeing controlling shareholder group Litel, which holds the stakes of pension funds, holding company Bradespar SA and Japan’s Mitsui & Co Ltd, set to expire in November 2020.
Vale did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)
FILE PHOTO: A cosmetic display of French cosmetics group L'Oreal is seen at a duty free shop at the Nice International Airport, in Nice, France, October 10, 2018. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard
April 17, 2019
PARIS (Reuters) – L’Oreal’s shares rose on Wednesday after the French cosmetics group beat first-quarter sales forecasts.
The stock was up around 1.5 percent in early trading, among the biggest gains on Paris’ benchmark CAC-40 index.
L’Oreal reported late on Tuesday higher-than-expected first-quarter sales growth. Across the group, sales rose 11.4 percent to 7.6 billion euros ($8.6 billion), and were up 7.7 percent on a like-for-like basis.
“2019 like for like sales off to a strong start, boosted by Asia,” wrote brokerage Liberum, keeping a “hold” rating on L’Oreal shares.
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Sarah White; Editing by Mark Potter)
Fox Business Network host Elizabeth MacDonald took a sharp jab Monday at the spiritual leader of more than 1 billion Catholics, chastising Pope Francis as "weak" on communism, socialism, and border walls.
The diss during "Varney & Co." came a day after the pope told reporters that those who build border walls would "become prisoners of the walls they put up," adding: "This is history," The Hill reported.
"When you see the pope making statements about a border wall, it has to be taken in the context of how the pope approaches all of Central America and South America," MacDonald said.
"It's very weak in his response to communism and socialism in the other parts of the world. And he is weak on the border wall as well."
Fellow Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney interpreted the pope's Sunday admonition as a shot at President Donald Trump, with MacDonald calling it an example of the pope getting "political."
MacDonald later added that her point was the pope is failing to criticize "the governments that cause these migrant outflows."
"Right?" she asked. "That's the issue. He's not doing that. It's after-the-fact refereeing."
During the 2016 presidential election, Pope Francis said it was "not Christian" for a person to think "only about building walls." And Trump responded by calling the remarks "disgraceful."
President Trump is FINALLY turning his focus on on-line censorship, and Joe Rogan joins Alex live in studio to discuss what we can do to ensure the continued existence of the free marketplace of ideas.
The president signed an executive order defunding universities which do not respect the First Amendment, which is ironic because, throughout history, universities were the birthplace of new ideas and progressive speech.
Infowars’ 50-Hour Save the First Amendment Broadcast: LIVE NOW
Below is the schedule for Infowars’ emergency 50-hour broadcast intended to bring attention to Big Tech censorship in order to save the First Amendment.
FILE PHOTO: Golf – Masters – Augusta National Golf Club – Augusta, Georgia, U.S. – April 14, 2019 – Tiger Woods of the U.S. celebrates on the 18th hole after winning the 2019 Masters. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
April 26, 2019
Tiger Woods is sending a message that he thinks he still has enough left, emotionally and physically, to win three more major championships to tie Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 titles.
Speaking to GolfTV in his first sit-down interview since the Masters, Woods said he has taken some time off since his victory at Augusta National, which still doesn’t feel real.
“Honestly, it’s hard to believe,” Woods said. “I was texting one of my good friends last night … that I couldn’t believe that I won the tournament. That it really hasn’t sunk in. I haven’t started doing anything. I’ve just been laying there. And every now and again, I’ll look over there on the couch and there’s the jacket.”
That’s the fifth green jacket for the 43-year-old Woods, who hadn’t won a major tournament since the 2008 U.S. Open. Along the way, four back surgeries, a divorce and other personal issues derailed him.
He said he has been spending time with his children – daughter Sam, 11, and son Charlie, 10 – who weren’t born when their father was the most dominant golfer on the planet.
“They never knew golf to be a good thing in my life and only the only thing they remember is that it brought this incredible amount of pain to their dad and they don’t want to ever want to see their dad in pain,” Woods said. “And so to now have them see this side of it, the side that I’ve experienced for so many years of my life, but I had a battle to get back to this point, it feels good.”
He said he hopes – maybe expects — they’ll see this side again.
And no one will take Woods for granted at the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black Course on Long Island, N.Y., which starts May 16.
Woods said he’ll be ready for a course he already conquered once in a major: the 2002 U.S. Open.
“I’m doing all the visual stuff, but I haven’t put in the physical work yet. But it’s probably coming this weekend,” he said.
Before Woods encountered health and personal problems, it was expected that topping Nicklaus’ major mark was “when” and not “if.” Then the certainty went away, but Woods thought he still had a chance.
“I always thought it was possible, if I had everything go my way. It took him an entire career to get to 18, so now that I’ve had another extension to my career – one that I didn’t think I had a couple of years ago – if I do things correctly and everything falls my way, yeah, it’s a possibility. I’m never going to say it’s not.
“Now I just need to have a lot of things go my way, and who’s to say that it will or will not happen? That’s what the future holds, I don’t know. The only thing I can promise you is this: that I will be prepared.”
The U.S. government say Butina was part of an unofficial influence campaign that overlapped with the 2016 presidential election and targeted conservatives; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports from the U.S. district court in Washington.
Maria Butina, the Russian woman who was accused of being a secret agent for the Russian government, was sentenced to 18 months in prison Friday by a federal judge in Washington after pleading guilty last year to a conspiracy charge.
Butina, who has already served nine months behind bars, will get credit for time served and can possibly get credit for good behavior, the judge said. She will be removed from the U.S. promptly on completion of her time, the judge added, and returned to Russia.
An emotional and apologetic Butina said in court Friday she is “truly sorry” and regrets not registering as a foreign agent.
“I feel ashamed and embarrassed,” she said, adding that her “reputation is ruined.”
Butina has been jailed since her arrest in July 2018. She entered the court Friday wearing a dark green prison jumpsuit and spoke in clear English, with a slight Russian accent.
“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.
Butina’s lawyer, Robert Driscoll, said after the sentencing they had hoped for a “better outcome,” but expressed a desire for Butina to be released to her family by the fall.
Prosecutors had claimed Butina used her contacts with the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast to develop relationships with U.S. politicians and gather information for Russia.
Prosecutors also have said that Butina’s boyfriend, conservative political operative Paul Erickson, identified in court papers as “U.S. Person 1,” helped her establish ties with the NRA.
In their filings, prosecutors claim federal agents found Butina had contact information for people suspected of being employed by Russia’s Federal Security Services, or FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. Inside her home, they found notes referring to a potential job offer from the FSB, according to the documents.
Investigators recovered several emails and Twitter direct message conversations in which Butina referred to the need to keep her work secret and, in one instance, said it should be “incognito.” Prosecutors said Butina had contact with Russian intelligence officials and that the FBI photographed her dining with a diplomat suspected of being a Russian intelligence agent.
Fox News’ Jason Donner, Bill Mears, Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
An official Sri Lankan police Twitter account was deleted after it misidentified an American human rights activist as a suspect in the country’s Easter Sunday terrorist attacks.
On Thursday, police posted the names and photos of six people that they said were at-large suspects in the bombings that killed more than 250 people.
However, one of the names on the list was Muslim U.S. activist Amara Majeed, who quickly tweeted that she had been falsely identified.
“I have this morning been FALSELY identified by the Sri Lankan government as one of the ISIS terrorists that committed the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka. What a thing to wake up to!” she wrote.
She wrote in a follow-up tweet that the claim was “obviously completely false” and asked social media users to “please stop implicating and associating me with these horrific attacks.”
“And next time, be more diligent about releasing such information that has the potential to deeply violate someone’s family and community,” she continued.
Later, she wrote an update saying police apologized for wrongly mistaking her as a suspect.
Police said in a statement: “However, although one of the released images was identified as one Abdul Cader Fathima Khadhiya in the information provided by the CID, the CID has now informed that a) the individual whose image was labeled as Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya is not in fact Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya b) the individual pictured is not wanted for questioning c) Abdul Cader Fathima is the correct name of the suspect wanted by the CID.”
On Friday, the account, @SriLankaPolice2 was deleted with no explanation. Police did not release more information regarding the mistake.
Majeed, who founded “The Hijab Project” when she was 16 years old, told the Baltimore Sun that it was hurtful to be linked to the attacks.
“Sri Lanka is my motherland,” the Brown University student said. “It’s very painful to be associated with [the bombings].”
Mohamed Zahran, the suspected leader of the attacks which targeted six hotels and churches, killed himself in a suicide bombing at the Shangri-La hotel. Police also said they had arrested the second-in-command of the group, called National Towheed Jamaat. Catholic churches in Sri Lanka canceled all Sunday Masses until further notice over concerns that they remain a top target of Islamic State-linked extremists.
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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, 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)
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