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Former Connecticut school worker caught on video making racist remarks has home burglarized, police say

A former Connecticut public school worker caught on video yelling racial epithets to black shoppers inside a grocery store has had her home burglarized in the wake of the incident, police say.

One or more people broke into Corinne Magoveny-Terrone’s home in broad daylight Monday and stripped it of its copper piping, causing damage to its garage and walls, investigators told the New Haven Register.

Magoveny-Terrone, who is white, made headlines two weeks ago after a viral video emerged of her using racial epithets and spitting at black customers inside a ShopRite store in East Haven, while shopping with two young children.

“Online video appears to show an HPS employee behaving abhorrently in another town,” Hamden Public Schools, where she reportedly worked as a clerk in its central office, said in a statement.

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“Such behavior, exhibited in public or private, is completely unacceptable and in conflict with the values of Hamden Schools,” the statement added. “The employee has separated from employment effective immediately.”

Magoveny-Terrone, in a racially-charged phone call to police, claims she was spit on and threatened by a man leading up to it.

Source: Fox News National

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Sheriff: Man killed, shot at police for more than 30 minutes

Authorities say a man fired on police officers for more than 30 minutes before officers fatally shot him in South Carolina.

Berkeley County Sheriff Duane Lewis says no officers were hit by gunfire Tuesday afternoon, although one deputy was pinned down behind his sheriff's SUV.

Lewis says the suspect yelled he was going to finish the deputy off as he kept firing shots at the vehicle. The sheriff's office sent a picture on Twitter of a police SUV with a dozen bullet holes in the windshield.

Lewis said at a news conference that an officer was called to a neighborhood in Huger to investigate someone speeding.

Lewis says the suspect had a handgun, rifle and shotgun.

Huger is 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Charleston.

The man's name wasn't released.

Source: Fox News National

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Fed Policy Proves How Wrong They Were in Past – Peter Schiff

Ever since the beginning of the “Powell Pause,” Peter Schiff has been saying it won’t be enough.

“If the Fed doesn’t want to upset the markets, soon it will be forced to go back to QE and zero percent interest rates.”

Peter isn’t alone in saying this. After the most recent FOMC meeting, Ryan McMaken at the Mises Institute echoed Peter’s message.

“Put simply: the days of quantitative easing are back, and we’re not even in a recession yet.”

Of course, a lot of people in the mainstream are cheering the Fed, saying the central bank is making the right move. The stock market certainly likes the dovish Fed. But as Peter said after the last FOMC meeting, “The Fed is not getting it right.”

“What the Fed is doing now just proves how much they got wrong in the past. The reason the Fed had to abort the process prematurely is because they couldn’t finish it. The reason they had to stop raising rates was because they couldn’t keep raising them because we have too much debt. The reason they had to call off the reduction of their balance sheet was because they can’t do it. The Fed can’t do what they were pretending they were going to be able to do the entire time.”

McMaken also asserts that the Federal Reserve has got it all wrong. He focuses on two consequences of the Fed’s easy-money policy: inflation and wealth inequality.


Mike Adams exposes the agenda of the private Fed as a war against the prosperity of Americans that simply want to make America great.

The following article by Ryan McMaken was originally published at the Mises Wire. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold.

The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee voted unanimously to keep the federal funds rate unchanged. Overall, the FOMC signaled it has made a dovish turn away from the promised normalization of monetary policy which the Fed has promised will be implemented “someday” for a decade.

Although the Fed began to slowly raise rates in late 2016 — after nearly a decade of near-zero rates — the target rate never returned to even three percent, and thus remains well below what would have been a more normal rate of the sort seen prior to the 2008 financial crisis.

Much of the Fed’s continued reluctance to upset the easy-money apple cart comes from growing concerns over the strength of the economy. Although job growth numbers have been high in recent years — and this has been assumed to be proof of a robust economy — other indicators point toward less strength. Workforce participation numbers, wage growth, net worth numbers, auto-loan delinquencies and other indicators suggest many Americans are in a more precarious position than headlines might suggest.

The Fed’s refusal to follow through on raising rates, however, has highlighted this economic weakness, and today’s front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal reads: “Growth Fears to Keep Fed on Hold”

Abandoning Plans to Reduce the Balance Sheet

For similar reasons, the Fed has also signaled it won’t be doing much about its enormous balance sheet which ballooned to over four trillion dollars in the wake of the financial crisis. Faced with enormous amounts of unwanted assets such as mortgage-backed securities, the Fed began buying up these assets both to prop up — and bail out — banks and to produce an artificially high price for debt of all sorts.

This kept market interest rates low while increasing asset inflation — all of which is great for both Wall Street and for the US government which pays hundreds of billions in interest on federal debt.

At best, “total balance sheet will be around $3.8 trillion, down from $4.5 trillion at its peak.” Moreover, “the Fed will soon be a net buyer of Treasurys once again,” analysts said, and some estimate “the Fed is on course to be buying $200 billion of net new Treasurys by the second half of 2020.”

Put simply: the days of quantitative easing are back, and we’re not even in a recession yet.

Some observers might simply respond with “big deal, the economy’s growing, and better yet, the Fed has given us both growth and little inflation.”

But things are not all as pleasant as they seem.

Problems with Easy-Money Policy

First of all, even by the Fed’s own measures, inflation isn’t as subdued as the headline “core inflation” or CPI measure suggests. According to the Fed’s “Underlying Inflation Gauge” which takes a broader view beyond the small basket of consumer goods used for the CPI, inflation growth over the past year has returned to the elevated levels found back in 2005 and 2006.

This hasn’t been great for consumers, and it’s been especially problematic when coupled with ultra-low interest rates. The low interest rates are a problem because people of ordinary means — i.e., the non-wealthy — don’t have the ability to access the high yield investments that wealthier investors do.

Rising Inequality

Earlier this week, finance researcher Karen Petrou explained the problem that comes from ultra-low rates which lead to yield-chasing for the wealthy:

When interest rates are ultra-low, wealthy households with asset managers acting on their behalf can play the stock market to beat zero or even negative returns. We’ve shown in several recent blog posts how wide the wealth inequality gap is and how disparate wealth sources help to make it so. However, even where low-and-moderate income households can get into the market, their investment advisers should not and often cannot chase yields. As a result, ultra-low rates mean negligible or even negative return.

Thus, ordinary people are faced with rising asset prices — driven in part by the Fed’s balance sheet purchases — while also finding themselves unable to save in a way that keeps up with inflation.

Meanwhile, the wealthy reap the most benefits from Fed policy as they’re able to more effectively engage in yield-chasing.

Ordinary people get the short end of the stick from Fed policy in other ways. Petrou continues:

“Historically, pension funds and insurance companies have invested only in the safest assets. These are now in scarce supply due in large part to QE and comparable programs by central banks around the world. Pension plans and life-insurance companies increasingly have two terrible choices: to play it safe and become increasingly unable to honor benefit obligations or to make big bets and hope for the best. Under-funded pension plans are so great a concern in the U.S. that the agency established to protect pensioners from this risk, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, faces its own financial challenges. Yield-chasing life insurers are also a prime source of potential systemic risk.”

Middle-class people who have been told for decades to rely on pensions are now imperiled by Fed policy as well.

Not surprisingly, this has led to rising income inequality. While some free-market advocates tend to dismiss inequality as an unimportant metric, this is not a good approach when we’re talking about public policy. Fed policy — and resulting inequality — does not reflect natural trends arising from market transactions. Monetary policy is something imposed on markets by policymakers. And that’s what’s going on when we witness rising inequality due to the Fed’s monetary policy.

This has been going on since the late 1980s when Alan Greenspan relentlessly opened the easy-money spigot to spur economic growth throughout the 1990s. But, there were problems that resulted, as noted by Daniell DiMartino-Booth:

[A]t the National Association for Business Economics recent annual conference, University of California-Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman presented his findings on the widening divide between the “haves” and “have nots” in the U.S. His conclusion: “Both surveys and tax data show that wealth inequality has increased dramatically since the 1980s, with a top 1 percent wealth share around 40 percent in 2016 vs. 25 – 30 percent in the 1980s.” Zucman also noted that increased wealth concentration has become a global phenomenon, albeit one that is trickier to monitor given the globalization and increased opacity of the financial system.

(Photo by Andrew Czap, Flickr)

Defenders of ultra-low policy tend to claim low rates aren’t the real culprit here because even middle-class buyers can take advantage of easy money.

But experience suggests this hasn’t been the case. Part of the problem is that banking regulations handed down by the Fed and other federal regulators make loaning to smaller enterprises and lower-income households less attractive. Writes Petrou:

“But, wasn’t there a burst of lower-rate mortgage refinancings that allowed households to reduce their debt burden and thus accumulate wealth? Did low rates allow higher-risk households at least to reduce their mortgage debt through refinancings? Again, low-and-moderate income households were left behind. They continued to seek refis after the financial crisis ebbed, but subprime borrowers current on their loans regardless of loan-to-value (LTV) ratios were less likely than prime or super-prime borrowers to receive refi loans even though higher-scored borrowers may or may not have been current and lower rates enhance repayment potential.”

The overall effect suggests the accelerating reliance on quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates has been great for some Wall Street hedge fund managers — but for those at the low end of the lending and saving apparatus, things are even more constraining than ever. It’s hard to get a loan, and it’s also hard to save.

But at least the aggregate numbers are great, right?

Well, the Fed can’t brag about even that. A policy that favors billionaires might work on paper, of course, so long as the aggregate numbers point toward sizable growth. But even those numbers are so iffy as to prompt growth fears at the FOMC, and to ensure that the Fed puts an end to its promises to return policy to something that might be called normal.

As it is, it looks like we should expect a continuation of the policies which have coincided with both an unimpressive economy and rising inequality.

If that’s not evidence of the Fed’s failure, it’s hard to imagine what is.


Gerald Celente reveals on what’s ahead as the Federal Reserve crashes the debt & real estate bubble it created worldwide.

Source: InfoWars

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Belarusian investigators raid independent TV channel

Investigators in Belarus have searched the office of a leading independent satellite channel as part of a criminal probe.

Tuesday's search of the Belsat office in Minsk was the latest episode in an official crackdown on independent media in the ex-Soviet nation.

Belarus' state investigative agency said the search was part of a slander probe looking into a Belsat report about the arrest of corruption suspects that proved erroneous.

Belsat, which broadcasts from Poland, said its computers were confiscated during the search. It said Belarusian authorities are trying to muzzle independent voices ahead of next year's presidential election.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has ruled the ex-Soviet nation of 10 million for a quarter-century, cracking down on dissent and free media and maintaining Soviet-style control over its economy.

Source: Fox News World

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Boeing says successfully tested new 737 MAX software in CEO flight

FILE PHOTO: Dennis Muilenburg, CEO, Boeing speaks during a roundtable discussion on defense issues with U.S. President Donald Trump at Luke Air Force Base
FILE PHOTO: Dennis Muilenburg, CEO, Boeing speaks during a roundtable discussion on defense issues with U.S. President Donald Trump at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, U.S., October 19, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

April 3, 2019

(Reuters) – Boeing Co said on Wednesday its chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, had joined a test flight on a 737 MAX 7 jetliner for a demonstration of updated MCAS anti-stall software. 

The software is at the center of investigations in the crash of Ethiopian Flight 302 last month and a Lion Air accident in Indonesia five months earlier. Both involved the slightly larger 737 MAX 8 model, which features the same cockpit.

During Wednesday’s test flight, the flight crew performed different scenarios to test failure conditions, Boeing said.

“The software update worked as designed, and the pilots landed safely at Boeing Field (near Seattle),” it said in a statement.

“Boeing will conduct additional test and demo flights as we continue to work to demonstrate that we have identified and appropriately addressed all certification requirements. We will submit the update for FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) review once that work has been completed in the coming weeks.”

(Reporting by Tim Hepher; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Source: OANN

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Low prices spark interest in latest U.S. Gulf oil, gas lease sale

FILE PHOTO: Men in construction hats are seen aboard Chevron's Petronius oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico
FILE PHOTO: Men in construction hats are seen aboard Chevron's Petronius oil platform, located 100 miles (161 km) off the coast of New Orleans, in the Gulf of Mexico June 3, 2008. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi

March 20, 2019

By Nichola Groom

(Reuters) – The Trump administration’s fourth major auction for oil and gas leases in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico received $244 million in high bids on Wednesday, reflecting an uptick in interest from drillers attracted to the region’s low prices.

Of the 78.5 million acres (31.77 million hectares) offered, companies submitted bids on 1.26 million acres, or about 1.6 percent of the total, an increase from two sales last year when about 1 percent of acreage offered received bids.

“We’re on a positive slope,” Mike Celata, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s regional director for the Gulf of Mexico, said on a conference call with reporters.

Despite the higher revenue and acreage, the price per acre was below that of the last sale held in August, about $193 an acre compared with $222 an acre.

“We saw a modest increase in overall spend, but it was outpaced by the increase in acreage leading to lower amount per acre, furthering our hypothesis that it is a buyer’s market in the Gulf of Mexico,” William Turner, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement.

High bids of $244.3 million were higher than the 2018 sales but were still far short of the revenue generated by Central Gulf sales between 2013 and 2015, which ranged from $538 million to $1.2 billion.

Oil major Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Norway’s Equinor were among the winning bidders, with Shell taking 87 tracts, BOEM said. Equinor had the highest bid of nearly $24.5 million for a single tract.

Of the 227 tracts that received bids, 213 has been previously leased but were released back to the government since 2014 when the price of oil <CLc1> dropped.

“What you are seeing is companies looking at prospects that had been identified in the past and deciding it was time to pick up some more acreage,” Celata said.

The outcome of the lease sale was the latest signal from the industry about their interest in U.S. waters as President Donald Trump’s Interior Department prepares to release a long-awaited proposal to expand offshore drilling, possibly to new areas of the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic.

Offshore drilling is a crucial part of the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” agenda to open up more federal land and waters to energy exploration.

But most of the recent U.S. boom in oil production has been focused onshore, where it is cheaper to drill than in deepwater.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom; editing by Marguerita Choy and Lisa Shumaker)

Source: OANN

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Winner of $768 million Powerball jackpot coming forward

The winner of Powerball lottery ticket worth an estimated $768 million will soon be revealed.

Lottery officials scheduled a news conference Tuesday in Wisconsin where the ticket was sold last month. Wisconsin lottery officials said a person coming forward to claim the third-largest jackpot in U.S. lottery history will attend the news conference. They didn't indicate whether it is one individual winner or a person representing a group of people.

The winning ticket was sold at a Speedway gas station in the Milwaukee suburb of New Berlin, a city of about 40,000 people roughly 14 miles (23 kilometers) southwest of Milwaukee. The ticket has a cash option of $477 million.

The gas station will receive $100,000 for selling the winning ticket.

Source: Fox News National

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Members of The Cranberries, bassist Mike Hogan, drummer Fergal Lawler and guitarist Noel Hogan speak to Reuters during an interview in London
Members of The Cranberries, bassist Mike Hogan, drummer Fergal Lawler and guitarist Noel Hogan speak to Reuters during an interview in London, Britain, April 24, 2019. REUTERS/Gerhard Mey

April 26, 2019

By Hanna Rantala

LONDON (Reuters) – Irish rockers The Cranberries are saying goodbye with their final album released on Friday, a poignant tribute to lead singer Dolores O’Riordan who died last year.

“In the End” is the eighth studio album from the band that rose to fame in the early 1990s with hits likes “Zombie” and “Linger”, and includes the final recordings by O’Riordan, who drowned in a London hotel bath in January 2018 due to alcohol intoxication.

Work on the album began during a 2017 tour and by that winter, O’Riordan and guitarist Neil Hogan had penned and demoed 11 tracks.

With O’Riordan’s vocals recorded, Hogan, bassist Mike Hogan and drummer Fergal Lawler completed the album in tribute to her.

“When we realized how strong the songs were, that was the deciding factor really… There was no point… trying to ruin the legacy of the band,” Noel Hogan said in an interview.

“It was obvious that Dolores wanted this album done because when you hear the album, you hear the songs and how strong they are, and she was very, very excited to get in and record this.”

The Cranberries formed in Limerick in 1989 with another singer. O’Riordan replaced him a year later and the group went on to become Ireland’s best-selling rock band after U2, selling more than 40 million records.

O’Riordan, known for her strong distinctive voice singing about relationships or political violence, was 46 when she died.

“She was actually in quite a good place mentally. She was feeling quite content and strong and looking forward to a new phase of her life,” Lawler said.

“A lot of the lyrics in this album are about things ending… people might read into it differently but it was a phase of her personal life that she was talking about.”

The group previously announced their intention to split after the release of “In The End”.

“We are absolutely gutted we can’t play (the songs) live because that’s something that’s been a massive part of this band from day one,” Noel Hogan said.

“A few people have said to us about maybe even doing a one off where you have different vocalists… as kind of guests of ours. A year ago that’s definitely something we weren’t going to entertain but I don’t know, I think it’s something we need to go away and take time off for the summer and have a think about.”

Critics have generally given positive reviews of the album; NME described it as “(seeing) the band’s career go full-circle” while the Irish Times called it “an unexpected late career high and a remarkable swan song for O’Riordan”.

Their early songs still play on the radio. This week, “Dreams” was performed at the funeral of journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot dead in Londonderry last week as she watched Irish nationalist youths attack police following a raid.

“We wrote them as kids, as a hobby and 30 years later they are on radio and on TV, like all the time… That’s far more than any of us ever thought we would have,” Noel Hogan said.

“That would make Dolores really happy because she was very precious about those songs. Her babies, she called them and to have that hopefully long after we’re gone… that’s all any band can wish for.”

(Reporting by Hanna Rantala; additoinal reporting by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Editing by Susan Fenton)

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2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren participates in the She the People Presidential Forum in Houston
2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren participates in the She the People Presidential Forum in Houston, Texas, U.S. April 24, 2019. REUTERS/Loren Elliott

April 26, 2019

By Joshua Schneyer and M.B. Pell

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Senator Elizabeth Warren will introduce a bill Friday that offers new protections for U.S. military families facing unsafe housing, following a series of Reuters reports revealing squalid conditions in privately managed base homes.

The Reuters reports and later Congressional hearings detailed widespread hazards including lead paint exposure, vermin infestations, collapsing ceilings, mold and maintenance lapses in privatized base housing communities that serve some 700,000 U.S. military family members.

(View Warren’s military housing bill here. https://tmsnrt.rs/2Dy5aht)

(Read Reuters’ Ambushed at Home series on military housing here. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/usa-military)

The Massachusetts Democrat’s bill would mandate both regular and unannounced spot inspections of base homes by certified, independent inspectors, holding landlords accountable for quickly fixing hazards. The military’s privatization program for years allowed real estate firms to operate base housing with scant oversight, Reuters found, leaving some tenants in unsafe homes with little recourse against landlords.

The bill would also require the Department of Defense and its private housing operators to publish reports annually detailing housing conditions, tenant complaints, maintenance response times and the financial incentives companies receive at each base. The provisions aim to enhance transparency of housing deals whose finances and operations the military had allowed to remain largely confidential under a privatization program since the late 1990s.

The measure would also require private landlords to cover moving costs for at-risk families, and healthcare costs for people with medical conditions resulting from unsafe base housing, ensuring they receive continuing coverage even after they leave the homes or the military.

“This bill will eliminate the kind of corner-cutting and neglect the Defense Department should never have let these private housing partners get away with in the first place,” Warren said in a statement Friday.

The proposed legislation comes after February Senate hearings where Warren, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 U.S. presidential election, slammed private real estate firms for endangering service families, and sought answers about why military branches weren’t providing more oversight.

Her legislation would direct the Defense Department to allow local housing code enforcers onto federal bases, following concerns they were sometimes denied access. Warren’s office said a companion bill in the House of Representatives would be introduced by Rep. Deb Haaland, Democrat of New Mexico.

In response to the housing crisis, military branches are developing a tenant bill of rights and hiring hundreds of new housing staff. The branches recently dispatched commanders to survey base housing worldwide for safety hazards, resulting in thousands of work orders and hundreds of tenants being moved. The Defense Department has pledged to renegotiate its 50-year contracts with private real estate firms.

Congress has been quick to take its own measures. Earlier legislation proposed by senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris of California, along with Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia, would compel base commanders to withhold rent payments and incentive fees from the private ventures if they allow home hazards to persist.

(Editing by Ronnie Greene)

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FILE PHOTO: Offices of Deloitte are seen in London
FILE PHOTO: Offices of Deloitte are seen in London, Britain, September 25, 2017. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By Noor Zainab Hussain and Tanishaa Nadkar

(Reuters) – Deloitte quit as Ferrexpo’s auditor on Friday, knocking its shares by more than 20 percent, days after saying it was unable to conclude whether the iron ore miner’s CEO controlled a charity being investigated over its use of company donations.

Blooming Land, which coordinates Ferrexpo’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program, came under scrutiny after auditors found holes in the charity’s statements.

Ferrexpo on Tuesday said findings of an ongoing independent investigation launched in February indicated some Blooming Land funds could have been “misappropriated”. It did not provide any details or publish its findings.

Shares in Ferrexpo, the third largest exporter of pellets to the global steel industry, were 23.4 percent lower at 206.1 pence at 1022 GMT following news of Deloitte’s resignation.

“Ferrexpo’s shares are deeply discounted vs peers … following the resignation of Deloitte, we expect downside risks to dominate Ferrexpo’s shares near term.” JP Morgan analyst Dominic O’Kane said in a note on Friday.

Swiss-headquartered Ferrexpo did not provide a reason for the resignation of Deloitte, which declined to comment, while Blooming Land did not respond to a request for comment.

Funding for Blooming Land’s CSR activities is provided by one of Ferrexpo’s units in Ukraine and Khimreaktiv LLC, an entity ultimately controlled by Ferrexpo’s CEO and majority owner Kostyantin Zhevago, Ferrexpo said on Tuesday.

Ferrexpo’s board has found that Zhevago did not have significant influence or control over the charity, but Deloitte said it was unable reach a conclusion on this.

Reuters was not immediately able to contact Zhevago.

In a qualified opinion, a statement addressing an incomplete audit, Deloitte said it had been unable to conclude whether $33.5 million of CSR donations to Blooming Land between 2017 and 2018 was used for “legitimate business payments for charitable purposes”.

Deloitte said on Tuesday that total CSR payments made to Blooming Land by Ferrexpo since 2013 total about $110 million.

Ferrexpo, whose major mines are in Ukraine, has said that the investigation was ongoing and new evidence pointed to potential discrepancies.

Zhevago, 45, who ranked 1,511 on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires for 2019 with a net worth of $1.4 billion, owns the FC Vorskla soccer club and has been a member of Ukraine’s parliament since 1998.

(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain and Tanishaa Nadkar in Bengaluru and additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk in Kiev; editing by Gopakumar Warrier, Bernard Orr)

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Children walk past a damaged building in the aftermath of the Cyclone Kenneth in Pemba
Children walk past a damaged building in the aftermath of the Cyclone Kenneth in Pemba, Mozambique April 26, 2019 in this still image obtained from social media. SolidarMed via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES

April 26, 2019

By Emma Rumney and Stephen Eisenhammer

JOHANNESBURG/LUANDA (Reuters) – Cyclone Kenneth killed at least one person and left a trail of destruction in northern Mozambique, destroying houses, ripping up trees and knocking out power, authorities said on Friday.

The cyclone brought storm surges and wind gusts of up to 280 km per hour (174 mph) when it made landfall on Thursday evening, after killing three people in the island nation of Comoros.

It was the most powerful storm on record to hit Mozambique’s northern coast and came just six weeks after Cyclone Idai battered the impoverished nation, causing devastating floods and killing more than 1,000 people across a swathe of southern Africa.

The World Food Programme warned that Kenneth could dump as much as 600 millimeters of rain on the region over the next 10 days – twice that brought by Cyclone Idai.

One woman in the port town of Pemba died after being hit by a falling tree, the Emergency Operations Committee for Cabo Delgado (COE) said in a statement, while another person was injured.

In rural areas outside Pemba, many homes are made of mud. In the main town on the island of Ibo, 90 percent of the houses were destroyed, officials said. Around 15,000 people were out in the open or in “overcrowded” shelters and there was a need for tents, food and water, they said.

There were also reports of a large number of homes and some infrastructure destroyed in Macomia district, a mainland district adjacent to Ibo.

A local group, the Friends of Pemba Association, had earlier reported that they could not reach people in Muidumbe, a district further inland.

Mark Lowcock, United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, warned the storm could require another major humanitarian operation in Mozambique.

“Cyclone Kenneth marks the first time two cyclones have made landfall in Mozambique during the same season, further stressing the government’s limited resources,” he said in a statement.

FLOOD WARNINGS

Shaquila Alberto, owner of the beach-front Messano Flower Lodge in Macomia, said there were many fallen trees there, and in rural areas people’s homes had been damaged. Some areas of nearby Pemba had no power.

“Even my workers, they said the roof and all the things fell down,” she said by phone.

Further south, in Pemba, Elton Ernesto, a receptionist at Raphael’s Hotel, said there were fallen trees but not too much damage. The hotel had power and water, he said, while phones rang in the background. “The rain has stopped,” he added.

However Michael Charles, an official for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said heavy rains over the next few days were likely to bring a “second wave of destruction” in the form of flooding.

“The houses are not all solid, and the topography is very sandy,” Charles said.

In the days after Cyclone Idai, heavy inland rains prompted rivers to burst their banks, submerging entire villages, cutting areas off from aid and ruining crops. There were concerns the same could happen again in northern Mozambique.

Before Kenneth hit, the government and aid workers moved around 30,000 people to safer buildings such as schools, however authorities said that around 680,000 people were in the path of the storm.

(Reporting by Emma Rumney and Stephen Eisenhammer; Writing by Emma Rumney; Editing by Janet Lawrence and Alexandra Zavis)

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A worker holds a nozzle to pump petrol into a vehicle at a fuel station in Mumbai
FILE PHOTO: A worker holds a nozzle to pump petrol into a vehicle at a fuel station in Mumbai, India, May 21, 2018. REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas

April 26, 2019

By Manoj Kumar and Nidhi Verma

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Surging global oil prices will pose a first big challenge to India’s new government, whoever wins an election now under way, especially as domestic prices have been allowed to lag, meaning consumers are in for a painful surge as they catch up.

For oil-import dependent India, higher global prices could lead to a weaker rupee, higher inflation, the ruling out of interest rate cuts and could further weigh on twin current account and budget deficits, economists warned.

But compounding the future pain, state-run fuel suppliers and retailers have held off passing on to consumers the higher prices during a staggered general election, which began on April 11 and ends on May 23, according to sources familiar with the situation.

That delay is expected to be unwound once the election is over. And there could be additional price increases to make up for losses or profits missed during the period of delayed increases, the sources said.

In some major Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, pump prices are adjusted periodically so they move largely in tandem with international crude prices.

That was what was supposed to happen in India but the election means there have been many days when pump prices have been unchanged.

In New Delhi, for example, while crude oil prices have gone up by nearly $9 a barrel, or about 12 percent, in the past six weeks, gasoline prices have only risen by 0.47 rupees a liter, or 0.6 percent.

State-controlled fuel suppliers and retailers declined to say why they had delayed price increases, or discuss whether there has been any pressure from the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A government spokesman declined to comment.

The opposition Congress party said Modi’s government was violating its own policy of daily price revision by advising the state oil companies to hold prices steady.

“The government should cut fuel taxes otherwise consumers will have to pay much higher oil prices once the elections are over,” said Akhilesh Pratap Singh, a senior leader of the Congress party.

(GRAPHIC: India Polls: Fuel price hike lags crude surge – https://tmsnrt.rs/2XLlxik)

Nitin Goyal, treasurer at the All India Petroleum Dealers Association, representing fuel stations in 25 states, said prices were similarly held down for 19 days in the southern state of Karnataka last year, when it held state assembly elections.

Only for them to surge after the vote.

“Consumers should be ready for a rude shock of a massive jump in retail prices, similar to the level we have seen in the Karnataka state election,” Goyal said.

‘CREDIT NEGATIVE’

Sri Paravaikkarasu, director for Asia oil at Singapore-based consultancy FGE, said retail prices of gasoline and gasoil prices would have been up to 6 percent, or about 4 rupee, higher if they had been allowed to rise in line with global prices.

“Indian pump prices have failed to keep up with the recent uptrend in crude prices,” Paravaikkarasu said.

“With the country’s general elections underway, the incumbent government has been keeping pump prices relatively unchanged.”

India had switched to a daily price revision in June 2017 from a revision every two weeks, as the government allowed retailers to set prices.

But the government faced protests last October when retailers raised prices by up to 10 rupees a liter after the crude oil price went above $80 a barrel, forcing it to cut fuel taxes.

Global prices rose to their highest level in 2019 on Thursday, days after the United States announced all Iran sanction waivers would end by May, pressuring importers including India to stop buying Tehran’s oil. [O/R]

Higher oil prices will mean Asia’s third largest economy is likely to see growth of less than 7 percent rate this fiscal year, economists said. Growth slowed to 6.6 percent in the October-December quarter, the slowest in five quarters.

Rating agency CARE has warned that a 10 percent rise in global oil prices could increase demand for dollars, putting pressure on the rupee and widening the current account deficit.

India’s oil import bill rose by nearly one-third in the fiscal year ending March 31 to $140.5 billion, against $108 billion the previous year.

“The increase in international oil prices is a credit negative for the Indian economy,” ICRA, the Indian arm of the Fitch rating agency, said in a note.

“Every $10/ bbl increase in crude oil prices increases the fiscal deficit by about 0.1 percent of GDP.”

Any big price rise would also build a case for the central bank to keep rates steady, or even raise them.

The Reserve Bank of India’s Monetary Policy Committee, which cut the benchmark policy repo rate by 25 basis points this month, warned that rising oil and food prices could push up inflation.

Policymakers are worried that a sustained increase in the oil price in the range of $70-75/barrel or higher can move the rupee down by 3-4 percent on an annual basis.

The rupee has depreciated by 1.24 percent against the dollar since a year high in mid-March.

($1 = 70.1800 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Manoj Kumar and Nidhi Verma; Editing by Martin Howell and Rob Birsel)

Source: OANN

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