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Black woman added to jury over protests by officer's lawyer

A judge in the case of a white western Pennsylvania police officer accused of shooting to death a black teenager last year put a black woman on the jury Tuesday over the defense's objections but said he will reconsider the decision.

Allegheny County Judge Alexander Bicket agreed that lawyers for former East Pittsburgh Police Officer Michael Rosfeld had improperly ruled out the woman based on race, but later said he would "revisit" the topic.

Rosfeld, 30, of Verona, is charged with criminal homicide for the June shooting death of Antwon Rose II. Rose, 17, was shot three times, including in the back, as he ran from a vehicle that Rosfeld had stopped.

The shooting prompted a series of protests, including a late night march down a major highway.

The first day of jury selection produced six women and three men for the panel, including two black women and one black man. Jurors are being chosen in Harrisburg because of widespread publicity about the case in the Pittsburgh area.

The trial will begin next week in Pittsburgh and is expected to last more than a week.

Prosecutors and the defense both have challenges they may use to eliminate potential jurors, but those challenges cannot be based on a potential juror's race, gender or ethnicity.

A 55-year-old black woman from Harrisburg was ruled out by Rosfeld defense attorney Patrick Thomassey, prompting a so-called "Batson challenge" from the Allegheny County prosecutors. They said two of the three people Rosfeld's lawyers had eliminated from consideration were black.

Thomassey argued the woman would face pressure from the community where she lives, but when she was called back for more questioning she said that was not the case.

"No, I'm a loner," the woman said. "I don't deal with my neighbors."

Bicket put her on the jury over Thomassey's strenuous objections.

"I will revisit that issue once I look at the case law," the judge said.

The other jurors include a retired railroad worker, a mother of three who works the overnight shift and does not watch much TV, the girlfriend of a retired state trooper and a retired schoolteacher and wrestling coach.

Thomassey has said that Rosfeld was in fear and that the shooting was justified. He has described Rosfeld as remorseful and stunned to learn Rose did not have a gun in his hand.

Rosfeld was charged, investigators said, after his story changed about whether he saw or believed a gun was in Rose's hands.

Video shot from a nearby house captured the shooting.

Rose had been a front-seat passenger in an unlicensed cab that was stopped as part of an investigation into a drive-by shooting.

A prosecutor has said Rose had nothing to do with the drive-by shooting, and had shown his hands when he got out of the unlicensed cab.

Rose was described as a promising student who did charity work. He would have been a high school senior this year.

Officials say two handguns were found inside the car Rose had been riding in. District Attorney Stephen Zappala said an empty gun clip was found in Rose's pocket.

East Pittsburgh, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) east of Pittsburgh, notified state police in November it was closing down its police department.

Source: Fox News National

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Mayor Pete Buttigieg Breaks Out of the 1% Club

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South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg is having a moment. Actually, he’s been having a bunch of moments all over your TVs and on social media for about a month now.

I’ve been a fan of Mayor Pete since 2015 when I first saw him speaking out against Indiana’s cruel religious freedom law. Buttigieg, who had signed a human rights ordinance two years prior, argued – as many critics across the country did – that the law gives businesses the right to discriminate against gay customers.

“The interests of our state and our communities are not being well served when you refuse to budge on very divisive social issues like this. … All it would take to fix the damage would be to reverse the law,” Mayor Pete argued on MSNBC.

I liked what I saw and did some digging. The youngest mayor of a U.S. city? An Afghanistan veteran? A Rhodes scholar? An openly gay executive? Yes, please.

Americans are saying “yes, please” now, too. Mayor Pete is being rewarded in the polls with the latest Quinnipiac survey showing a substantial jump from 1 percent support to 4 percent, which ties him with Sen. Elizabeth Warren for fifth place behind former Vice President Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Kamala Harris.

The increase in support is statistically significant and likely a harbinger of good things to come for Buttigieg’s candidacy.

All of this -- the surge in attention, the Capra-esque charisma he displays, and his plain speaking level headedness -- is playing out against a backdrop of the identity politics debate raging within the Democratic Party. This is what kept me up last night.

One of the things that makes me proudest to be part of the Democratic Party is that we promote candidates who increase representation of traditionally underrepresented groups. Our party sent the first African-American man to the White House. There are now 127 women serving in Congress and only 21 of them are Republicans, a 25-year low for the opposition party. There are 55 African-American lawmakers and only one in the House and one in the Senate is a Republican. We have 36 Latinos in Congress and four in the Senate, majority Democrats once again. There are 13 congressmen and three senators of Asian descent, all Democrats. And of the 10 openly gay or bisexual Americans serving in Washington, all are Democrats.

When we say, “If you can see it, you can be it,” we mean it.  So where is the logic to putting Mayor Pete in a “white guy” category, lumping him in with the rest of the “white guys” (Beto, Biden and Bernie)? We must not risk losing sight of all the distinctive qualities they do not share.  

Of course, they share the same skin color (by no means a disqualifier!), but their experiences make them vividly distinct from one another. And by virtue of the Three B’s being heterosexual, they are unequivocally distinct from Buttigieg.

No one told them that they couldn’t marry the people they love. They weren’t almost five times more likely to have attempted suicide when they were young. They weren’t apt to say they weren’t afforded the same employment opportunities.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

I’m not arguing for Mayor Pete’s candidacy per se, but I am cautioning against broad proclamations about what kind of candidate we want to go up against Donald Trump in 2020. For starters, it’s very early in our process. We have so many interesting and diverse candidates and we have yet to see the full field. But, I think it’s a mistake to let a broad brush backlash against white men swallow Mayor Pete up with it.

Recent polling from Gallup shows that 4.5 percent of Americans identify as LGBT. And the Public Religion Research Institute found that 7 percent of millennials identify as LBGT, a figure that will continue to grow. That’s a real chunk of the U.S. population, especially when you consider that, as a nation, we are 13 percent black and 18 percent Hispanic.

Every dimension of a candidate matters to voters and to our future -- we should do our absolute best to ensure that we don’t oversimplify people who are infinitely complex. 

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AOC suffers social media gaffe by criticizing photo of ‘GOP’ politician who is actually a Democrat

One of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's, D-N.Y., tweets seemed to backfire on Thursday when she tried attacking Republicans over a picture of a politician stood next to a cardboard cutout of her.

"GOP: Let's pose our older male members next to cardboard cutouts of young female legislators," she tweeted. Her tweet included a post from the Republican Party of Kentucky. However, the politician pictured was Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth, Ky., not a Republican as she claimed.

Ocasio-Cortez later deleted the tweet but not before critics pointed out the gaffe on Twitter.

"It literally says in the tweet that she is quoting that Yarmuth is a Democrat," writer Ryan Saavedra tweeted.

"1st grade readers are in fact the worst," Matt Whitlock, a senior advisor to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, tweeted. He was knocking Ocasio-Cortez for one of her earlier tweets in which she called pundits "first graders" for apparently misinterpreting her comments on voting rights for prisoners.

THE MOST MEMORABLE POLITICAL GAFFES OF 2018

This wasn't the first time the freshman congresswoman appeared to mix up her political parties. While appearing in a video with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., she enthusiastically declared that she would turn a Kansas house seat "red" — the color often representing the Republican Party.

In 2018, she also faced criticism after she suggested that the government could pay for a large portion of Medicare-for-all by transferring "$21 trillion" in Pentagon "financial transactions" — a claim that fact checkers disputed.

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Ocasio-Cortez has been portrayed as one of the leaders of the progressive wing in the Democratic Party. She, along with Sanders, has received intense criticism for policy proposals like the "Green New Deal."

Source: Fox News Politics

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Judge blocks Trump’s small-business health insurance plan

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge has struck down a small-business health insurance plan widely touted by President Donald Trump, the second setback in a week for the administration's health care initiatives.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates wrote in his opinion late Thursday that so-called "association health plans" were "clearly an end-run" around consumer protections required by the Obama-era Affordable Care Act.

On Wednesday, another federal judge blocked the Trump administration's Medicaid work requirements for low-income people.

The plans at issue in Bates' ruling Thursday allow groups of small businesses and sole proprietors to band together to offer lower-cost coverage that doesn't have to include all the benefits required by the ACA, often called "Obamacare." They also can be offered across state lines, an attempt to deliver on a major Trump campaign promise.

Trump, a Republican, has eagerly talked up the plans, saying they're doing record business by offering "tremendous health care at very small cost." But the Labor Department regulation authorizing them only took effect last summer, and they don't seem to have made a major impact on the market. Initial estimates said 3 million to 4 million people eventually would enroll, compared with more than 160 million Americans covered by current employer plans.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who joined other Democratic state officials in suing the Trump administration, said the judge "saw past the Trump administration's transparent effort to sabotage our health care system and gut these critical consumer protections in the service of its own partisan agenda."

Many state officials see federal insurance regulation of small-business plans as infringing on their own traditional authority.

The Trump administration, unable to repeal "Obamacare" in Congress, has tried to use its rule-making powers to open up a pathway for alternatives. In the case of small-business plans, the administration's regulation granted them similar flexibility on benefits as enjoyed by big companies. Most large employer plans are not subject to state regulations, and the Obama law did not make major changes to them either.

But Bates wrote that treating small businesses and sole proprietors similarly to major employers "creates absurd results."

Bates was nominated to the federal bench by then-President George W. Bush, a Republican. His ruling seems to signal limits to how far the Trump administration can advance with its strategy of relying on regulations to transform health care.

It wasn't immediately clear how the Trump administration would respond, but officials have said they will keep moving ahead with the president's agenda.

Trump has made a sharp turn back to health care this week, with the administration joining the side of Texas and other GOP-led states seeking to completely overturn "Obamacare" as unconstitutional. At the same time, Trump has been promising a new health care plan that would be much better than "Obamacare," tweeting that Republicans will become "the Party of Great HealthCare!"

But there's no indication that the White House, executive branch agencies like Health and Human Services or Republicans in Congress are working on a comprehensive plan. Many congressional Republicans see the Texas lawsuit as a political land mine. If "Obamacare" is overturned Republicans would be on the hook in the 2020 election year to come up with an alternative.

The GOP turmoil over health care has come as a boon to Democrats, who are looking to change the subject from special counsel Robert Mueller's conclusion that the Trump campaign did not conspire with the Russian government to sway the 2016 election. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week joined in unveiling legislation that would shore up and expand the ACA, allowing many more middle-class households to qualify for assistance paying their premiums.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Alberta opposition makes Canadian PM Trudeau the adversary in provincial election

United Conservative Leader Jason Kenney speaks in front of the Trans Mountain Edmonton Terminal in Edmonton
United Conservative Leader Jason Kenney details the "UCP Fight Back Strategy" against foreign anti-oil special interests, in front of the Trans Mountain Edmonton Terminal in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, March 22, 2019. REUTERS/Candace Elliott

March 28, 2019

By Nia Williams

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – The main opposition party in Alberta’s April election is using Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a proxy foe, analysts say, channeling a long-standing sense of western alienation rather than directly attacking a popular premier.

Polls suggest the United Conservative Party is on course to win power in the province, Canada’s energy center, capitalizing on voter concerns about a struggling economy and lack of progress on new oil export pipelines.

However, UCP leader Jason Kenney, a former federal cabinet minister, polls behind New Democrat Party Premier Rachel Notley on a number of personal attributes such as honesty, likeability and trustworthiness, and is embroiled in a scandal over his successful party leadership bid in 2017.

Notley, whose late father led the NDP from 1968-1984, is polling well ahead of her party and seeking to profit from that edge.

To overcome that, the UCP is focusing on Trudeau, with repeated references to “the Notley-Trudeau alliance,” emphasizing her one-time close relationship with the prime minister, while images of their own leader are less visible.

Trudeau is an unpopular figure in Alberta, where many feel he failed to support the energy industry. The prime minister also faces a political scandal on whether he unduly pressured Canada’s former justice minister.

“If you look at the signs the NDP are putting up, their logos are not very prevalent, it’s all Rachel Notley,” said Gregory Jack, vice president at polling firm Ipsos. “The UCP signs are all about the UCP and their brand, and underplaying their leader to a certain extent.”

The UCP’s focus on Justin Trudeau may be effective with older Alberta voters who remember the unpopular National Energy Program in 1980, an effort by his prime minister father, Pierre Trudeau, that sought to give Ottawa more control over the oil and gas industry and a higher share of revenues.

“(The UCP) spin on it is Alberta has been mistreated by a Liberal government and the son of another prime minister who did not treat Alberta well,” said Jared Wesley, a political science professor at the University of Alberta.

Alberta’s energy industry contributes C$80 billion a year to Canada’s economy, but opposition from other provinces has shut down new pipelines like TransCanada Corp’s Energy East project and helped stall the Trans Mountain expansion plan.

Congestion on existing pipelines out of landlocked Alberta left crude bottlenecked in storage tanks and sent prices spiraling to record lows last year, prompting the NDP to mandate temporary crude production cuts.

Alberta has posted budget deficits since global oil prices started tumbling in 2014, and more than C$20 billion in foreign capital has fled its energy sector since 2017.

Notley and Trudeau came to power in the same year and initially forged a close partnership aimed at pleasing the oil industry and environmental groups with a dual strategy that supported new pipelines and introduced a carbon tax.

They fell out last year over delays to the Trans Mountain expansion project. Notley’s camp downplays the relationship that the UCP is working so hard to highlight.

“The job of premier is to work with anyone who has a stake in projects like pipelines. I wouldn’t call it an alliance,” said NDP campaign spokeswoman Cheryl Oates. “A lot of people feel Jason Kenney is stuck in Ottawa trying to rehash a battle that his party lost.”

Kenney was part of the federal Conservative government defeated by the Liberals in 2015. The UCP campaign declined to discuss its election strategy.

(Reporting by Nia Williams; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Source: OANN

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Trump Backs Off Funding Cuts for Special Olympics

p>President Donald Trump says he is backing off a budget request to cut funding for the Special Olympics, after days of criticism.

Trump told reporters at the White House Thursday, "I've overridden my people for funding the Special Olympics."

The Trump administration's education budget proposal calls for the elimination of $17.6 million in funding for the Special Olympics, roughly 10 percent of the group's overall revenue.

Democrats pressed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on the topic during a Senate budget hearing Thursday, just days after House Democrats grilled her on the proposal and sparked criticism online.

DeVos said she "wasn't personally involved" in pushing for elimination of the funding, but she defended it as her agency seeks to cut $7 billion from the 2020 budget.

Source: NewsMax America

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U.S. producer prices post biggest rise in five months

FILE PHOTO: Shoppers at a Walmart store in Chicago Illinois
FILE PHOTO: A customer shops for a turkey at a Walmart store in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., November 20, 2018. REUTERS/Kamil Krzaczynski/File Photo

April 11, 2019

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – U.S. producer prices increased by the most in five months in March, but underlying wholesale inflation was tame.

The Labor Department said on Thursday its producer price index for final demand rose 0.6 percent last month, lifted by a surge in the cost of gasoline. That was the largest increase since last October and followed a 0.1 percent gain in February.

In the 12 months through March, the PPI rose 2.2 percent after advancing 1.9 percent in February. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the PPI would climb 0.3 percent in March and increase 1.9 percent on a year-on-year basis.

A key gauge of underlying producer price pressures that excludes food, energy and trade services was unchanged last month after ticking up 0.1 percent in February. The so-called core PPI increased 2.0 percent in the 12 months through March. That was the smallest annual increase since August 2017 and followed a 2.3 percent rise in February..

Data on Wednesday showed consumer prices rose by the most in 14 months in March, driven by more expensive gasoline. But core inflation remained muted amid a plunge in the cost of apparel.

Slowing domestic and global growth are keeping inflation contained. Wage inflation has also been moderate despite a tight labor market.

Minutes of the Federal Reserve’s March 19-20 policy meeting published on Wednesday described inflation as “muted,” though officials expected it to rise to or near the U.S. central bank’s 2 percent target. The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, is currently at 1.8 percent.

Last month, wholesale energy prices jumped 5.6 percent, with gasoline prices shooting up 16.0 percent, the most since August 2009. Energy prices rose 1.8 percent in February.

Gasoline accounted for over 60 percent of the 1.0 percent rise in goods prices last month. Goods prices increased 0.4 percent in February.

Wholesale food prices rose 0.3 percent in March, reversing a 0.3 percent drop in the prior month. Core goods prices rose 0.2 percent after edging up 0.1 percent in February.

The cost of services increased 0.3 percent in March after being unchanged in the prior month. Prices for healthcare services fell 0.2 percent last month. There was a sharp drop in the cost of hospital outpatient services. Those healthcare costs feed into the core PCE price index.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani Editing by Paul Simao) ((Lucia.Mutikani@thomsonreuters.com; 1 202 898 8315; Reuters Messaging: lucia.mutikani.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net)

Source: OANN

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Tiger woods celebrates after winning the 2019 Masters
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.”

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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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.

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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.

WHO IS MARIA BUTINA, THE RUSSIAN WOMAN ACCUSED OF SPYING ON US?

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.

Source: Fox News Politics

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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.

SRI LANKA AUTHORITIES SAY EASTER ATTACK LEADER KILLED IN ONE OF NINE HOTEL BOMBINGS

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].”

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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.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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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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