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U.S.’s trade war with China poses ‘largest risk’ to global stability: IMF Lipton

IMF forum on dealing with booms and busts
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Deputy Managing Director David Lipton participates in the forum on dealing with booms and busts during the IMF/World Bank spring meeting in Washington, U.S., April 21, 2018. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

March 25, 2019

LISBON (Reuters) – A trade war between the United States and China poses the largest risk to global stability, IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton said on Monday, adding that fiscal stabilization is needed to respond to macroeconomic shocks in Europe.

“Obviously, this is not a matter for Europe alone. The United States needs to get its fiscal house in order as well. U.S.-China trade tensions pose the largest risk to global stability,” Lipton said during a conference in Lisbon.

The ongoing trade war, which started around eight months ago, has affected the flow of billions of dollars of goods between the two countries.

((Reporting by Catarina Demony; Editing by Axel Bugge and Paul Day)

Source: OANN

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Charges at Minnesota cop’s trial offer jury range of options

When a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed an unarmed woman who approached his squad car after calling 911, it was catastrophic. But was it murder?

Prosecutors have given jurors hearing the case against Mohamed Noor multiple options: second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The jury will ultimately decide whether any of the counts fit what happened the night of July 15, 2017, when Noor fatally shot Justine Ruszczyk Damond just minutes after the dual citizen of the U.S. and Australia who had phoned in a report of a possible sexual assault behind her home.

As Noor's trial prepares to enter its third week, defense attorneys not connected to the case see a larger and commonly used strategy to overcharge the case in a way that could make it easy for jurors to convict on the lesser manslaughter count.

"Juries like to be King Solomon," said Earl Gray, an attorney on the team that successfully defended former Minnesota officer Jeronimo Yanez against a manslaughter charge in the 2016 shooting death of Philando Castile during a traffic stop. "They want to split the baby and give each side half."

"Prosecution is like hunting," said another defense attorney, Marsh Halberg, who has been sitting in on some of the key testimony. "You throw a lot of pellets up in the air and you don't care which one brings down the bird. Obviously you would always like to get (a conviction on) the highest charge but you want to leave at the end of the day with some conviction."

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman was under intense community pressure and international scrutiny as he decided whether to charge Noor in Damond's death, which had led to a police chief's resignation. Freeman let it slip in an unguarded moment captured on video in December 2017 that he didn't have enough evidence at that point to charge Noor, saying investigators "haven't done their job." When Freeman finally filed charges in March 2018, he said the evidence clearly fit the legal definitions of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

But Noor's legal team and other local defense attorneys said the third-degree murder charge was an overreach. Prosecutors added the second-degree murder charge late last year. The presumptive sentences vary from four years for the manslaughter charge to 12½ years for third-degree murder to 25½ years for second-degree murder.

Neither Halberg nor Gray think the jury is likely to convict Noor of third-degree murder, because the state statute requires jurors to find that someone acted with a "depraved mind, without regard for human life," a term so ill-defined and potentially confusing that prosecutors rarely use the charge.

In Noor's case, the prosecution's proposed jury instructions specifically avoid the term, and call it instead "an act eminently dangerous to others" and "performed without regard for human life ... committed in a reckless or wanton manner with the knowledge that someone may be killed and with a heedless disregard of that happening." The defense's proposed instructions do use the term "depraved mind." Judge Kathryn Quaintance has yet to rule.

Halberg was in court Thursday for testimony from Noor's partner, Officer Matthew Harrity, and viewed Harrity's body camera video as it was shown to the jury. Besides the heartache of seeing her dying on camera, Halberg said he was "touched by the humaneness of the two officers. They held her up and lowered her to the ground. Noor is doing chest compressions and they were yelling encouragement to her."

The care they showed her "really flies in the face of the depraved mind argument," he said.

Under Minnesota law, second-degree murder involves intentionally causing the death of another person, without premeditation. Second-degree manslaughter requires a finding that the defendant acted with "culpable negligence" in taking the chance of causing death or great bodily harm.

Halberg said it will be hard overcoming the defense that Noor's team has invoked that police can legally shoot if they have a reasonable fear that they're in danger. Noor's attorneys have argued that he heard a loud noise and feared an ambush. But prosecutors say there is no evidence of any threat to justify deadly force.

But some of the circumstances — Noor was in the passenger seat and fired his gun across Harrity through the driver's side window in a dark alley — may give the jury reasons to find him guilty of manslaughter, Halberg said.

"That's the charge that would fit the case," Gray said.

___

Check out the AP's complete coverage of Mohamed Noor's trial.

Source: Fox News National

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Shift in Fed dot plot overstated: Harker

FILE PHOTO: Federal Reserve Board building on Constitution Avenue is pictured in Washington
FILE PHOTO: Federal Reserve Board building on Constitution Avenue is pictured in Washington, U.S., March 19, 2019. REUTERS/Leah Millis/File Photo

March 26, 2019

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The shift in the U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate projection at its March meeting was not dramatic and the significance of the move is sometimes overstated, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Patrick Harker said on Tuesday.

“My dot… didn’t come down that much because I wasn’t up where everybody else was,” Harker told a business meeting about the Fed’s so called “dot plot” of interest rate views. “The median did shift down but it shifted down by one notch; sometimes we overstate how much of a shift that was.”

(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi, Editing by William Maclean)

Source: OANN

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Shell exits Gazprom-led LNG project in Russia

File photo of passenger plane flies over a Shell logo at a petrol station in west London
FILE PHOTO: A passenger plane flies over a Shell logo at a petrol station in west London, in this January 29, 2015 file photo. REUTERS/Toby Melville/Files

April 10, 2019

By Vladimir Soldatkin and Shadia Nasralla

ST PETERSBURG/LONDON, Russia (Reuters) – Royal Dutch Shell has decided to exit a Baltic liquefied natural gas (LNG) project led by Russian state gas major Gazprom on the Russian Baltic coast.

The development comes as Western firms struggle to expand in Russia because of pressure from sanctions imposed by the United States, while for Gazprom it could mean limited access to Shell’s technology as well as the need to fund the project without the help of the Anglo-Dutch major.

Shell, which has a long history of energy cooperation with Russia, said earlier it was studying the possible implications of a recent decision by Gazprom to move toward the full integration of its Baltic LNG and gas processing plants.

“Following Gazprom’s announcement on March 29 regarding the final development concept of Baltic LNG, we have decided to stop our involvement in this project,” Cederic Cremers, Shell Russia’s chairman, said in a statement.

“We have a number of other ongoing projects with Gazprom, including as part of the Strategic Alliance established between the two companies in 2015, which are not impacted by this decision,” Cremers added.

Gazprom declined to comment.

Shell remains a shareholder in the Gazprom-led Sakhalin-2 plant, which produces LNG on the Russian Pacific island of Sakhalin. Shell has been struggling to increase output of the frozen gas at the project for a number of reasons.

Its decision to leave the Baltic LNG project leaves open a question about the availability of technology needed for this project as Shell will not be providing it.

Shell had developed a technology specifically for the Sakhalin Energy LNG plant, and in February said it had created a 50/50 venture with Gazprom that would use Shell’s LNG know-how to develop Russia’s own technology for supercooling gas.

KEY TECHNOLOGY

The venture was expected to effectively insulate Russia from any new U.S. sanctions on LNG, a sector in which key technology belongs to a handful of players – mainly global majors such as Shell, Exxon and Total.

Russia, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, has been under Western sanctions since 2014 due to its role in the Ukraine crisis.

While the production of seaborne LNG is not directly affected by the sanctions, the sales and marketing of it, as well as foreign participation, have become more complicated due to the restrictions.

Shell previously suspended some shale oil and gas projects due to the introduction of sanctions on Moscow.

On March 29, Gazprom said in a statement that together with its partner RusGazDobycha it had made a decision on the final configuration of the project for a large-scale complex that would process ethane-containing gas and produce LNG in the Leningrad region. That statement did not mention Shell.

Shell said on Wednesday that its representations and those of Gazprom had not discussed the Baltic LNG project at their meetings in the Hague on Tuesday and Wednesday. These were their regular annual meetings to discuss progress on projects which are part of the strategic alliance, Shell added.

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Shadia Nasralla; Writing by Tom Balmforth and Polina Devitt; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and David Holmes)

Source: OANN

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Trump says he’s prepared to close Mexico border if necessary

FILE PHOTO: President Donald Trump participates in the Prison Reform Summit
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the 2019 Prison Reform Summit and First Step Act Celebration at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

April 2, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was prepared to close the U.S. southern border if necessary but that Mexico has apprehended thousands of people in recent days and its actions have made a big difference in the immigration situation.

Trump threatened on Friday to close the border with Mexico this week unless Mexico took steps to help the United States with illegal immigration, a move which had threatened to overload U.S. ports of entry in the region.

The administration softened its tone on the issue on Tuesday, saying Mexico was taking greater responsibility for dealing with the immigration flows.

“They have started to do a significant amount more. We’ve seen them take a larger number of individuals” and hold those who have asylum claims in Mexico while they are being processed in the United States, White House spokeswoman Sanders told reporters at the White House.

“We’ve also seen them stop more people from coming across the border so that they aren’t even entering into the United States. So those two things are certainly helpful and we’d like to see them continue,” Sanders said.

Trump hinted at a softening earlier in a Twitter post on Tuesday. “After many years (decades), Mexico is apprehending large numbers of people at their Southern Border, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador,” he said.

He also told reporters at the White House he was still prepared to do that if necessary but that Mexico had apprehended thousands of people in recent days, having a big impact on the border situation.

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by David Alexander; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Source: OANN

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Labor Secretary Alex Acosta on Very Shaky Ground

The White House refused to voice "full confidence" in embattled Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta on Monday.

In fact, the lukewarm response by press secretary Sarah Sanders to Newsmax's question about Acosta's status in the president's Cabinet fueled ongoing speculation the secretary of labor was on the way out.

The president's top spokeswoman did not specifically mention widespread reports of then-U.S. Attorney Acosta's involvement in a 2007 plea deal for Florida billionaire Jeffrey Epstein on sex trafficking and alleged sex offenses.

Sanders did say, however, "[t]hose things [a reference to Acosta's work for Epstein] are currently under review. When we have an update, we'll let you know."

As for Acosta's present status in the Cabinet, Sanders simply said "I'm not aware of any personnel changes."

Late last year, the Miami Herald reported that as a top federal prosecutor, Acosta permitted Epstein to plead guilty to two felony prostitution charges and serve 13 months in the county jail (a sentence which permitted him to spend up to twelve hours a day in his Palm Beach office) and a year of probation.

Democrats in Congress, along with The New York Times' and the Miami Herald, have called on Acosta to resign as labor secretary.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Trump Slams Jussie Smollett's 'Racist and Dangerous Comments'

President Donald Trump weighed in on the arrest of Jussie Smollett Thursday, calling out the actor for "racist and dangerous comments."

The "Empire" actor was taken into police custody for allegedly filing a false police report. During a press conference shortly after his arrest, Chicago police asserted that Smollett set up a hate crime hoax because he was "dissatisfied with his salary" on the Fox show.

Trump took to Twitter, writing, "@JussieSmollett -- What about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments!? #MAGA."

Source: NewsMax Politics

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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 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)

Source: OANN

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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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A remote controlled robot for the 'Isotopium: Chernobyl' game is seen at the game's location in Brovary
A remote controlled robot for the ‘Isotopium: Chernobyl’ game is seen at the game’s location in Brovary, Ukraine April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

April 26, 2019

By Margaryta Chornokondratenko

KIEV (Reuters) – A Ukrainian computer game that brings to life a town abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster may not sound like everyone’s idea of fun but has attracted 60,000 people globally since its launch in October.

Players of “Isotopium: Chernobyl” drive tanks around the ghost town of Prypyat near Chernobyl, knocking out competitors as they search for an energy source called isotopium and collecting points every time they find some.

While the game takes its theme from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in northern Ukraine, which marked its 33rd anniversary on Friday, it was also inspired by the 2009 science fiction film “Avatar”.

Newcomers to the game think they have entered a virtual world when in fact they are controlling a real robot, equipped with a camera and computer, which makes its way around a model of the town rendered down to the tiniest detail.

“When playing our game, for the first 5-10 minutes many players don’t understand that it is not fictional,” said the game’s co-founder Sergey Beskrestnov. “They message us saying: ‘You have cool texture, you have good graphics, your designer is good, well done. You have a cool operating system.’

“People then reply: ‘It is not an operating system, it is real,’ and the player can’t believe it is real,” said Beskrestnov, speaking mid-game from Prypyat city square as he towers over surrounding five-storey buildings.

Kiev-born Beskrestnov was just 12 years old when on April 26, 1986 a botched test at the nuclear plant in the then Soviet Union sent clouds of smoldering nuclear material across large swathes of Europe, forced over 50,000 people, including Beskrestnov’s family, to evacuate and poisoned unknown numbers of workers involved in its clean-up.

Beskrestnov and his partner Alexey Fateyev used Google maps and hundreds of pictures from the Chernobyl area to recreate Prypyat landmarks, including residential buildings, a hotel, concert hall, amusement park and a stadium.

The game’s real-scale model occupies a 180 square meter (1,938 sq. ft) basement of a residential building in the Ukraine city of Brovary, just 150 km (93 miles) from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and 30 km east of Kiev.

Miniature radioactivity warning signs, graffiti on the walls of abandoned buildings and tables and chairs left scattered inside a small cafe all add to the creepy atmosphere of a once lively town.

“It’s a really neat concept …,” Shaun Prescott wrote in a review of the game published by PC Gamer magazine in January. “Controlling the tanks is kinda cumbersome, but they are tanks, after all.”

An attentive player will notice at least one inaccuracy – the real Chernobyl nuclear power plant is not located in town as it is in the game.

It costs $9 to immerse in the atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic town for an hour but only 20 people at a time can play simultaneously. Beskrestnov’s company, Remote Games, said 62,615 people around the world have registered to play the game, including around 15,000 in France and 10,000 in the United States.

A camera fixed on top of a moving tank broadcasts high quality signal in real time, allowing players from as far apart as Australia and Canada enjoy the game without facing any time delay in delivering video signals.

Its creators next ambition is to devise a game featuring the colonization of Mars in which 1,000 people will be able to simultaneously control robots on different missions involved in the operation.

“Many people advise us to contact Elon Musk directly because it resonates his dreams and ideas,” Beskrestnov jokes.    

(Editing by Susan Fenton)

Source: OANN

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