FILE - In this file image taken from video, Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir speaks at the Presidential Palace, Friday, Feb. 22, 2019, in Khartoum, Sudan. Tens of thousands of Sudanese were making their way to the center of the country’s capital on Thursday, April 11, 2019, cheering and clapping in celebration as two senior officials said the military had forced longtime autocratic President Omar al-Bashir to step down after 30 years in power.(AP Photo/Mohamed Abuamrain, File)
BEIRUT – He was the world's only sitting head of state wanted for genocide. He lost a third of his country, a quarter of its population and most of its oil resources when South Sudan broke away.
Yet Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, who came to power in a military coup in 1989, was able to keep his grip on power for 30 years in what proved to be one of Sudan's most brutal chapters.
It was not until months of popular protests erupted against him that the 75-year-old president finally lost the support of his military commanders, who arrested and deposed him Thursday.
In announcing al-Bashir's overthrow, his defense minister, Gen. Awad Mohammed Ibn Ouf, described him all too accurately as "stubborn and persistent."
Famous for breaking out in dance and jabbing his trademark cane in the air, al-Bashir exuded defiance even at the most critical moments of his political career.
When he was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2009 on charges of committing crimes in Darfur, he responded by expelling a dozen aid groups working in the war-plagued region, where up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million driven from their homes by militias he backed. Then, he traveled there, appearing at government-organized rallies brimming with supporters.
"Tell them all, the ICC prosecutor, the members of the court and everyone who supports this court that they are under my shoe," al-Bashir said, brandishing a sword. The army then mobilized troops to confront any threat to him and renewed its allegiance to him.
Since independence in 1956, Sudan has bounced between tumultuous party politics and military rule. But al-Bashir successfully presented himself as the leader of a new wave of "political Islam," based on an alliance between Islamists and the military.
As a young officer, al-Bashir was groomed and trusted by the Islamist movement, which played a key role in propping him up for years.
After leading his coup with a few fellow officers, al-Bashir declared the imposition of Islamic Sharia law. The new rules included stoning and amputations as punishments. Also, Islamic judges were sent to the country's mainly animist, Christian south, fueling the civil war that was already going on for years.
One of his allies, religious scholar Hassan Turabi, invited Osama bin Laden to Sudan in 1991, prompting the U.S. to place Sudan on its list of states sponsoring terrorism. The U.S. later imposed sanctions on the government and carried out an airstrike on a factory in Sudan it said was used by al-Qaida to produce nerve gas.
Al-Bashir disputed the accusations and blamed hostile neighbors. He called bin Laden a businessman undertaking a major infrastructure project in Sudan. (After five years, bin Laden was expelled from Sudan under pressure from the U.S.)
In addition to relying on Islamist ideology, Al-Bashir used the country's oil wealth to boost a class of businessmen faithful to him and created loyal militias to protect his rule, employing them to crack down on rebels in the country's western Darfur region. The resulting atrocities led to the charges of genocide.
The indictment increased his international isolation but didn't prevent him from traveling. The strongman even attended last year's World Cup soccer final in Moscow, taking his place among other heads of state in luxury seating at the stadium. And he paid a surprise visit last December to Damascus, Syria, which has been shunned by other Arab countries because of the civil war there.
After years of promising to hold his country together amid disputes with the oil-rich south, al-Bashir quickly accepted the referendum results in 2010 that created one of the world's newest countries, South Sudan. While criticized, al-Bashir hoped to get concessions from the West in return.
Al-Bashir governed with an iron fist while also zigzagging strategically to divide his opponents. He often shuffled his aides, once firing his presidential adviser after accusing him of plotting a coup in 2012, only to bring him back as intelligence chief last year to deal with growing unrest.
When economic hardship deepened after the split with South Sudan, protests inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings broke out in the country as early as 2012. Al-Bashir at first ridiculed the protests, saying: "They talk of an Arab Spring. Let me tell them that in Sudan we have a hot summer, a burning hot summer that burns its enemies."
Then, when the protests persisted, he promised not to stand for re-election, only to renege and run in 2015.
"He will be remembered as someone who lied his way in power. He lied a lot," said Wasil Taha, a Sudanese editor of an English-language newspaper who emigrated to the U.S.
This time, the protests, combined with the economic downturn, proved to be Al-Bashir's undoing. As the pressure mounted, the genocide charges and the threat of being handed over to the International Criminal Court seemed to limit his options.
A prominent exiled Sudanese cartoonist drew a caricature of al-Bashir sitting on a throne, with one of its broken legs replaced by a brick. The caption: "I will get down, but just tell me where to get down."
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El Deeb covered Sudan from 2008 to 2010. Mike Corder in Amsterdam contributed to this report.
FILE PHOTO: Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell speaks during his news conference after a Federal Open Market Committee meeting in Washington, U.S., December 19, 2018. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
March 15, 2019
By Rahul Karunakar
BENGALURU (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Reserve will remain patient for a little longer than thought just last month, waiting until the third quarter before raising rates once more, and then stay on the sidelines, a Reuters poll of economists showed.
That comes on the heels of a similar Reuters survey which concluded there is a significant risk the European Central Bank goes into the next economic downturn without having raised interest rates at all.
The latest poll of over 100 economists taken March 11-14 also lines up with recent remarks from Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who said the central bank does “not feel any hurry” to change rates again.
But with growth due to slow over the next three years and the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation not expected to show any significant pick up, an increasing number of economists have turned dovish on the U.S. interest rate outlook.
“The Fed is…not in a hurry to raise its target rate again anytime soon,” noted Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at Unicredit. “Accordingly, we have taken the possibility of a June hike off the table. While the Fed may be eyeing a later rise, we continue to expect that the window of opportunity will close in the second half of the year.”
While economists polled unanimously expect the Fed to keep rates unchanged at its March 19-20 meeting, 55 percent of them said it will have hiked at least once by end-September, when the median suggests it will be 25 basis points higher at 2.50-2.75 percent.
Just last month, the consensus predicted a hike in the second quarter.
The latest poll also showed an increasing number of economists predicting no further rate hikes. Financial markets have also priced out further rate rises.
“We no longer expect any rate hike this year…(and) we doubt that the economic data will be strong enough to build a case for a re-start of the hiking cycle,” said Philip Marey, senior U.S. strategist at Rabobank.
Over one-quarter of respondents who provided forecasts going all the way out to end-2020 predicted the Fed would have cut rates at least once by then, including two who forecast that to happen as soon as the third quarter of this year.
U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is forecast to expand at an annualized rate of 1.6 percent this quarter, down from the 2.6 percent in the previous quarter and a cut from 1.9 percent predicted last month.
GDP growth is then forecast in a 2.0-2.5 percent range throughout 2019, slowing to 1.8 percent by mid-2020, according to the consensus.
But the median probability of a U.S. recession in the next 12 months held stable compared with February at 25 percent, with the chances of a recession in the next two years steady at 40 percent.
“The Fed is normally one of the major factors in recession (and so) we just think they will be very careful here,” said Ethan Harris, head of global economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
“We don’t have factors that have been associated with every modern recession in the U.S.,” he said. “It has to be something big, like a major escalation in the trade war causing a freezing up of business investment, a big sell-off in the equity market. That would probably be enough to create a recession.”
(Analysis and polling by Sujith Pai, Tushar Goenka and Anisha Sheth; additional reporting by Manjul Paul and Sujith Pai; Editing by Ross Finley and Chizu Nomiyama)
There is a real crisis in the fertility rate which has fallen to such a low level that all the socialism going forward will simply collapse.
What used to be the Baby Boom is now being called the “Baby Bust,” which means that in all first-world countries there is a real crisis for they have insufficient children to maintain their population size.
This has been one excuse for allowing the refugees into Europe.
As the population dwindles, all the social programs are collapsing for they were NEVER designed properly from the outset. They are based on a Ponzi scheme where they rely on taxing a growing younger population to service the benefits of the older generation. This was the entire scheme behind Obamacare. Force the youth to buy insurance they do not need to reduce the cost for the elderly.
These findings were a huge surprise to those in government. They did not think it was even possible.
The joke is that we will have more grandparents than grandchildren. A study published in the Lancet followed trends in every country from 1950 to 2017. During 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. The fertility rate all but halved to 2.4 children per woman by last year. They compared countries in Africa, such as Niger, where the fertility rate was 7:1 compared to countries like Cyprus where couples had just one child meaning that would be a 50% decline in population.
Even in Britain, the fertility rate has dropped to 1.7, which is similar to most Western European countries. Anything below 2 children per couple means a net population decline.
This data clearly warns that the Ponzi scheme set up first in the New Deal of the Great Depression is no longer sustainable. The cost of childcare has skyrocketed and the rise in taxation has forced women to work, making childcare mandatory, but not affordable for 2 or more children.
This creates an unsustainable future for taxation.
BOSTON – A federal prosecutor says a wealthy drug company founder put patients at risk to guarantee his business' success by directing a scheme to bribe doctors to prescribe a powerful opioid.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathaniel Yeager told jurors in his closing arguments Thursday that John Kapoor and four other former Insys Therapeutics executives who are on trial exploited patients to bring in millions of dollars by bribing doctors and deceiving insurers.
A lawyer for Kapoor sought to poke holes in the government's case and accused prosecutors of targeting the founder just so they can tout a high-profile conviction. Attorney Beth Wilkinson called the government's two star witnesses liars whose stories conflict with one another.
Closing arguments are expected to continue Friday in the trial, which began in January.
Urquhart Castle stands on the banks of Loch Ness near Inverness, Scotland, Britain March 8, 2019. Picture taken March 8, 2019. REUTERS/Russell Cheyne
March 22, 2019
By Elisabeth O’Leary
INVERNESS, Scotland (Reuters) – Glen Mhor Hotel, a picturesque base for tourists hunting Scotland’s Loch Ness monster, is struggling to find staff for the summer season as workers from the European Union snub Brexit Britain.
While Prime Minister Theresa May battles to win support for her plans to leave the EU, a shortage of migrant workers from the bloc is already threatening Scotland’s economy and upsetting its politics.
Migration is a major source of irritation between London and Edinburgh. It is also one reason behind a new drive for Scottish independence from Britain.
EU migrants account for half the hospitality workforce in the city of Inverness, a hub for the Highlands tourist region popular with golfing Americans and whisky-sipping Europeans.
But local cleaning and cooking staff for the 75-room Glen Mhor are proving hard to find. Unemployment in Inverness stands at 3 percent compared with 4.2 percent in Britain as a whole.
With Brexit looming, the Victorian hotel’s manager, Frenchman Emmanuel Moine, is struggling to recruit.
“Last year I advertised for a chef de partie in a specialist French hospitality newspaper and I got 50 resumes in a few days,” Moine said, in an elegant hotel lounge overlooking the River Ness. “I didn’t get one from the UK.”
Potential staff from the EU are put off by the prospect of tougher immigration rules and a weaker pound reducing the amount of money they can send home in euros.
Sparsely populated Scotland is aging rapidly so labor shortages affect its economy more than the rest of Britain. Stemming the inflow of EU workers, as May’s government plans, will be “catastrophic”, Edinburgh says.
“Severe restrictions on immigration pose a genuine risk to the long-term health of our economy and our society,” Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says.
Home to just 5 million of Britain’s 66 million people, Scotland’s vote to remain in the EU was outweighed by the rest of the country.
Scotland’s working age population will only remain stable over the next 25 years if current migration rates persist, a University of Edinburgh study said. Migrants’ taxes and economic activity help to fund public services in areas where the population is falling.
The Scottish Fiscal Commission projected that if the UK government met its target of reducing net migration to the “tens of thousands”, the Scottish economy would shrink by around one fifth more than the rest of the UK by 2040.
Moine, Glen Mhor’s manager, says the Brexit vote had a “brutal, immediate” impact on his attempt to recruit up to 90 workers needed in the summer. He now pays his cooks 15 percent more than in 2016, the year Britain voted for Brexit.
In Britain as a whole 37 percent of workers in hospitality are non-British EU nationals, the Federation of Small Businesses says. In Scotland that number is 45 percent, and in the Highlands local hoteliers say it is about 50 percent.
SEA CHANGE
In densely populated England, many people voted for Brexit because of fears about migration. But in Scotland foreign workers help offset a birthrate at a 150-year low and keep the rural areas economically viable.
Scots rejected independence by a 10 point margin in a 2014 referendum. But many of Sturgeon’s supporters say plans to end free movement of EU citizens as part of Brexit amount to a huge change in Scotland’s circumstances that necessitates another independence vote.
Thousands of volunteers are planning a door-to-door campaign in support of independence. They hope to win over EU nationals living in Scotland who mostly rejected independence in 2014.
“We’re quite confident it will be the opposite next time around and we’ll get a pretty solid majority of EU nationals,” said Ross Greer, a pro-independence Scottish Greens lawmaker, who is involved in the campaign.
EU migration to Britain has fallen since June 2016, and net migration of EU citizens in the country fell to its lowest since 2009 in the year to September. The Scottish government estimates EU nationals in Scotland have fallen 5 percent to 223,000.
Meanwhile some workers at Glen Mhor are waiting see what Brexit actually means for them.
“This is good place to work, money is good and you can live well on the minimum. After Brexit, I don’t know what to tell you,” says Marta Ofiarska, a 41-year-old housekeeper at Glen Mhor who has been in Scotland for 13 years.
But her 21-year-old daughter went back to Poland after the 2016 Brexit vote and at least 20 of her Polish friends have left Scotland since then.
(Reporting by Elisabeth O’Leary; Editing by Giles Elgood)
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin leaves the G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors' meeting at the IMF and World Bank's 2019 Annual Spring Meetings, in Washington, April 12, 2019. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan
April 23, 2019
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Tuesday he cannot comply with a demand by a House of Representatives committee to turn over President Donald Trump’s tax returns “until it is determined to be consistent with law.”
In a letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, Mnuchin said he expected to have an answer to the committee’s demand by May 6 after consulting with the Justice Department. The committee had set a 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) Tuesday deadline for the Internal Revenue Service to turn over Trump’s returns.
(Reporting by David Morgan; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by David Alexander)
FILE PHOTO: The headquarters of Wirecard AG, an independent provider of outsourcing and white label solutions for electronic payment transactions is seen in Aschheim near Munich, Germany April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Michael Dalder
April 26, 2019
BERLIN (Reuters) – Wulf Matthias will not stand for a second term as Wirecard’s chairman in 2020, German daily Handelsblatt said on Friday, citing sources in the financial industry.
For age reasons alone this would not be an option for Matthias, aged 75, Handelsblatt added.
Matthias will keep his mandate until it ends in 2020, the paper quoted a company spokeswoman as saying.
Wirecard was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Reuters.
(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel; Editing by Thomas Seythal)
FILE PHOTO: The Credit Suisse logo is pictured on a bank in Geneva, Switzerland, October 17, 2017. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
April 26, 2019
ZURICH (Reuters) – Shareholders approved Credit Suisse’s 2018 compensation report with an 82 percent majority on Friday, overriding frustrations expressed at its annual general meeting over jumps in executive pay during a year its share price plummeted.
Three shareholder advisers had recommended investors vote against Switzerland’s second-biggest bank’s remuneration report, while a fourth backed the report but expressed reservations about whether management pay matched performance.
The approval marked a slight increase over the 80.8 percent support garnered for the bank’s 2017 compensation report.
(Reporting by Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi; Editing by Michael Shields)
FILE PHOTO: Traders work on the trading floor of Barclays Bank at Canary Wharf in London, Britain December 7, 2018. REUTERS/Simon Dawson/File Photo
April 26, 2019
By Simon Jessop and Sinead Cruise
LONDON (Reuters) – Activist investor Edward Bramson is likely to fail in his attempt to get a board seat at Barclays’ annual meeting next week, even though shareholders are dissatisfied with performance of the group’s investment bank.
New York-based Bramson’s Sherborne Investors and the board of the British bank have been sparring for months over Barclays’ strategy.
Bramson wants to scale back Barclays’ investment bank to reduce risk and boost shareholder returns. Barclays Chief Executive Jes Staley remains staunchly committed to growing the business out of trouble.
After failing to persuade Staley to change course since he began building a 5.5 percent stake in the bank in March last year, Bramson hopes a board seat will rachet up the pressure.
Both sides have written to shareholders pitching their case and Bramson has courted investors in one-on-one meetings, although none have publicly backed him yet.
Interviews by Reuters with five institutional investors in Barclays suggest Bramson has failed to persuade them.
Sherborne declined to comment.
Mirza Baig, head of investment stewardship at top-40 shareholder Aviva Investors, said Bramson was welcome on the bank’s register but the boardroom was a step too far.
“He has created a lot of value at other businesses, but, generally, when he has come in as executive chair and taken full control. This would be a different case where he would just be one lone voice on the board,” he said.
A second Barclays shareholder said he backed Bramson’s goal of improving returns but via an “evolutionary” approach.
“If you look at banks that have tried to restructure their operations in investment banking – you look at Natwest Markets, Deutsche Bank – I struggle to think of an example where a roughshod restructuring has been accretive to shareholder value.”
A third, top-30 investor said he had been impressed by incoming Chairman Nigel Higgins’ grasp of the challenge in hand, and felt investors would give him time.
“Management know they have to execute and deliver improved returns… [Higgins] will continue to re-shape the board but obviously he didn’t feel that having someone with a diametrically opposed view on it would be helpful.”
A fourth, top-30 investor agreed: “We voted for the chairman to come in and it would be crazy to allow an activist to join the board (at this time).”
Jupiter Fund Management, the 24th largest investor, said it also planned to vote against Bramson.
Barclays has nearly 500 institutional shareholders, Refinitiv data showed.
Since Staley joined Barclays in 2015, the investment bank returns relative to capital invested have increased but are still underperforming the overall business.
Barclays’ first-quarter figures showed the investment bank posted a 6 percent drop in income from its markets business and a 17 percent fall in banking advisory fees.
Returns in the investment bank fell to 9.5 percent from 13.2 percent a year ago.
Famed for successful campaigns against smaller British companies in sectors from chemicals to advertising, Bramson’s board seat pitch has been rebuffed by shareholder advisory firms.
Institutional Shareholder Services, the world’s biggest, said Bramson’s proposal “falls short of what can reasonably be expected from a shareholder trying to address issues at a 28 billion pounds, systemically important bank”.
Glass Lewis also flagged concern about Bramson’s lack of banking experience and “questionable” shareholding structure, referring to Sherborne’s use of derivative contracts to hedge losses should its strategy fail.
Critics said the arrangement meant his interests are not truly aligned with those of other long-term shareholders.
British advisory firm Pirc, however, said it recommended that investors abstain in the vote on Bramson’s proposal as a challenge to the board to do better in the year ahead – or face a similar contest in 2020.
After an over 15-month pregnancy, “Akuti,” a 7-year-old Greater One Horned Indian Rhinoceros, gave birth as a result of induced ovulation and artificial insemination at Zoo Miami, April 23, 2019.
FILE PHOTO: A Chevron gas station sign is seen in Del Mar, California, in this April 25, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
April 26, 2019
(Reuters) – U.S. oil and natural gas producer Chevron Corp reported a 27 percent fall in quarterly earnings on Friday, hit by lower crude prices and weaker margins in its refining and chemicals businesses.
Net income attributable to the company fell to $2.65 billion, or $1.39 per share, for the first quarter ended March 31, from $3.64 billion, or $1.90 per share, a year earlier.
Earlier in the day, larger rival Exxon Mobil Corp reported earnings well below analysts’ estimates, as margins in its refining business were hurt by higher Canadian prices and heavy scheduled maintenance.
(Reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
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