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UK public finances hit record monthly surplus due to strong income tax revenue

A view of the London skyline shows the City of London financial district, seen from St Paul's Cathedral in London
A view of the London skyline shows the City of London financial district, seen from St Paul's Cathedral in London, Britain February 25, 2017. REUTERS/Neil Hall

February 21, 2019

Britain’s public finances showed a record surplus last month as a surge in income tax payments put finance minister Philip Hammond on a strong footing for his final fiscal statement before Brexit.

Britain ran a budget surplus of 14.895 billion pounds in January, the highest since monthly records began in 1993 and above all economists’ forecasts in a Reuters poll, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Thursday.

Britain’s budget deficit now looks on track to fall to its lowest since 2001/02 at just over 1 percent of national income this financial year, down from nearly 10 percent just after the depths of the global banking crisis in 2009/10.

January is typically a surplus month for Britain’s public coffers because of seasonal flows of income tax, and the latest data showed income and capital gains tax receipts up 14 percent, twice their average growth rate earlier in the year.

Borrowing in the first 10 months of the financial year came to 21.2 billion pounds, 47 percent less than at the same point in the 2017/18 tax year and the lowest since the 10 months to January 2001.

For the full year, the government aims to limit borrowing to 25.5 billion pounds, 39 percent less than in 2017/18.

Hammond will give a half-yearly budget update to parliament on March 13, just over two weeks before Britain is due to leave the European Union.

But government budget forecasters predict borrowing will rise during the financial year starting in April as the economy slows and the government faces pressure to increase real-terms spending on areas such as public health.

A disruptive no-deal Brexit would be likely to hurt tax revenues further and boost the need for public spending.

Prime Minister Theresa May has so far failed to win parliament’s support for the deal she brokered with Brussels last year. Without a Brexit deal, British importers and exporters face the risk of lengthy customs delays.

Hammond has said he has set aside money to help the economy if it suffers a Brexit shock.

The ONS said Thursday’s data showed strong increases for tax revenue on income and capital gains, and also for taxes on corporate profits, a smaller source of government revenue.

However, property transaction tax revenue fell, reflecting a slowing housing market.

Stripping out investment spending, Britain is already running a budget surplus. But lawmakers criticized Hammond earlier this month for appearing to have abandoned an aim to run an outright budget surplus by the middle of the next decade.

(Reporting by David Milliken and William Schomberg; uk.economics@reuters.com; +44 20 7542 7947)

Source: OANN

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Virginia Republicans want Democrat’s sex assault accusers to testify

FILE PHOTO: Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax presides over the state's senate in Richmond
FILE PHOTO: Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax presides over the state's senate in Richmond, Virginia, U.S., February 11, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake/File Photo

February 22, 2019

By Katharine Jackson

(Reuters) – Virginia Republican lawmakers on Friday said they plan a hearing where two women who have accused the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor of sex assault can testify about their allegations.

The hearing would keep alive a series of scandals that enveloped three top state Democrats. Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax was accused of sex assault while Governor Ralph Northam and the state’s attorney general admitted to having appeared in blackface in the 1980s.

The accusations, which hit on hot-button themes that have become a central part of Democratic politics, rattled the party establishment in a swing state that is expected to play a key role in deciding the 2020 presidential election.

Virginia state Delegate Rob Bell during Friday’s session said he would schedule a committee hearing at which Fairfax and his two accusers could testify, local media reported. Bell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meredith Watson, who accused Fairfax of raping her at Duke University in 2000 when they were both students, on Friday said in a statement released by her attorney, Erika Smith, that she “looks forward to testifying.”

The second woman, Stanford University academic Vanessa Tyson alleged that Fairfax had forced her to perform oral sex on him in 2004. A Tyson attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Fairfax, who has denied both allegations, on Friday called the hearings “political theater.”

“House Republicans want to pursue this historically unprecedented course of action because the accused is a popularly elected Democrat,” Fairfax spokeswoman Lauren Burke said in a statement.

Reuters does not normally name victims of sex assault, but identified Fairfax’s two accusers because each has come forward publicly.

The scandal erupted when a conservative media outlet published Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page, which showed a photo of a person in blackface next to another wearing the robes of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.

Northam denied appearing in the photo but admitted to dressing that year in blackface, which traces its history to 19th-century minstrel shows that mocked African-Americans and is seen as offensive by many Americans.

An Ipsos/University of Virginia Center for Politics poll this week showed Virginia residents were divided on Northam and Fairfax’s futures. A plurality, 35 percent, said they believed Fairfax should resign, with 25 percent saying he should not.

Some 43 percent said Northam should not resign, compared with 31 percent who said he should.

(Reporting by Katharine Jackson in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Cynthia Osterman)

Source: OANN

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Athletics: U.N.-backed Semenya optimistic of CAS success in battle with IAAF

Athletics - Diamond League - Monaco
FILE PHOTO: Athletics - Diamond League - Monaco - Stade Louis II, Monaco - July 20, 2018 South Africa's Caster Semenya wins the Women's 800m REUTERS/Eric Gaillard

March 22, 2019

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – Double Olympic 800-metres champion Caster Semenya is “optimistic” of success in her appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) over eligibility regulations in athletics for female classification.

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) contends that Semenya and other female athletes that are classed as having differences in sexual development (DSDs) gain an unfair advantage due to their higher testosterone levels, but only in races between 400 and 1,000-metres.

Under its new rules, which are currently suspended pending the outcome of the CAS case, athletes classed as having DSDs must medically reduce their blood testosterone level for a continuous period of six months before they can compete.

“Caster Semenya remains optimistic that CAS will declare the IAAF’s Regulations unlawful, invalid and of no effect,” Semenya’s lawyers said in a statement on Friday, confirming at the same time that the athlete had made additional submissions to CAS following “post-hearing communications from the IAAF”.

They did not go into detail as to what those submissions were in relation to.

Semenya received support from the United Nations this week as they adopted a resolution tabled by South Africa “aimed at eliminating discrimination against women and girls in sport, giving significant global weight from a human rights perspective to Caster Semenya’s case”, according to a media release from the South African government.

The resolution was co-sponsored by Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland), Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Burundi, India, Iceland and Canada.

“The international campaign to preserve Caster’s right to participate in global sports is a struggle for all women in the world against discrimination, sexism, and patriarchy,” South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, Lindiwe Sisulu, said.

CAS has called the hearing one of its most pivotal cases that could have a wide reaching consequence, not just for the future of athletics, but sport in general.

The court postponed its verdict from the five-day hearing in February, due to be delivered next week, until the end of April, with no fixed date set.

The IAAF has said that, given the delay, it would alter the six-month rule for the world championships in Qatar in September and introduce a “special transitional period” so that affected athletes could still compete.

It added that, assuming its new regulations were upheld, affected athletes who comply with the new limit from one week after the final CAS decision until the start of the world championships in September would be allowed to take part.

(Reporting by Nick Said; Editing by Toby Davis)

Source: OANN

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Wreckage confirmed to be from crashed Japanese F-35 fighter

A Japan Air Self-Defense Force's F-35A stealth fighter jet is seen at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Komaki Minami factory in Toyoyama, Japan
A Japan Air Self-Defense Force's F-35A stealth fighter jet, which Kyodo says is the same plane that crashed during an exercise on April 9, 2019, is seen at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Komaki Minami factory in Toyoyama, Aichi Prefecture, Japan, in this photo taken by Kyodo June 2017. Mandatory credit Kyodo/via REUTERS

April 10, 2019

By Tim Kelly

TOKYO (Reuters) – Search and rescue teams found wreckage belonging to a Japanese Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter that disappeared on Tuesday over the Pacific Ocean close to northern Japan, a military spokesman said on Wednesday.

“We recovered the wreckage and determined it was from the F-35,” a spokesman for the Air Self Defense Force (ASDF) said, adding that the pilot of the aircraft was still missing.

The advanced, single-seat jet was flying about 135 km (84 miles) east of the Misawa air base in Aomori Prefecture at about 7:27 p.m. (1027 GMT) on Tuesday, when it disappeared from radar, the Air Self Defense Force said.

The aircraft was less than a year old and was delivered to the ASDF in May last year, the spokesman said. Japan’s first squadron of F-35s has just become operational at Misawa and the government plans to buy 87 of the stealth fighters to modernize its air defenses as China’s military power grows.

The crash marks only the second time an F-35 has gone down since the plane began flying almost two decades ago. It was also the first crash of an A version of the fifth-generation fighter, which is designed to penetrate enemy defenses by evading radar detection.

Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the aircraft, said it was standing by to support the Japanese Air Self Defense Force as needed. The Pentagon said it was monitoring the situation.

A U.S. military short take off and landing (STOVL) F-35B crashed near the Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina in September prompting a temporary grounding of the aircraft. Lockheed Martin also makes a C version of the fighter designed to operate off carriers.

Japan’s new F-35s will include 18 short take off and vertical landing (STOVL) B variants that planners want to deploy on its islands along the edge of the East China Sea.

The F-35s are shipped to Japan by Lockheed Martin and assembled by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd at a plant near Nagoya in central Japan. Each costs around $100 million, slightly more than the cost of buying a fully assembled plane.

A representative for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said the company had no immediate comment.

(Additional reporting by Chris Gallagher, Chang-Ran Kim and Takashi Umekawa in Tokyo, and Idrees Ali and Chris Sanders in Washington; Editing by Michael Perry & Simon Cameron-Moore)

Source: OANN

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China to cut coal from new green bond standards: sources

FILE PHOTO: Worker walks past coal piles at a coal coking plant in Yuncheng
FILE PHOTO: A worker walks past coal piles at a coal coking plant in Yuncheng, Shanxi province, China January 31, 2018. Picture taken January 31, 2018. REUTERS/William Hong/File Photo

March 21, 2019

By David Stanway and Andrew Galbraith

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Chinese regulators are close to releasing new “green bond” standards that would exclude polluting fossil fuel projects from corporate financing channels designed to lift environmental standards, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Beijing has in recent years promoted new green financing methods to help industry pay for its transition to cleaner modes of growth.

But China’s inclusion of “clean coal” in a 2015 central bank list of technologies eligible for green bonds has put the country at odds with global standards, a point of contention for some international investors and many environmental groups.

Two sources with direct knowledge of the situation say China’s central bank, which regulates financial institution debt issuance and whose 2015 guidelines were adopted by other market regulators, has already revised the eligibility list. One of the people said the list is due to be published later this month. The People’s Bank of China did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

“If confirmed, ending the policy of financing coal with green bonds would be a much-needed step in the right direction,” said Liu Jinyan, senior campaigner with environmental group Greenpeace in Beijing.

“With no new coal projects taking money from the green bonds market, those funds can actually accelerate China’s energy transition and green development,” she said.

Of the $42.8 billion worth of green bonds issued in China last year, only $31.2 billion would have met global criteria, according to a report published at the end of February by the Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI), a non-profit group backing green bond standards.

The share of what CBI calls “internationally aligned” green bonds has been steadily increasing as China’s institutions move to align themselves more with global markets.

The PBOC’s revised criteria, however, would not apply to green “enterprise bonds”, which are regulated by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the state planner, and are primarily issued by state-owned enterprises and unlisted companies.

In its “green industry” catalog of approved environmental sectors, the NDRC in February still included the production and utilization of “clean coal”, allowing coal companies to issue “green enterprise bonds” to finance the installation of low-emission technology.

The NDRC did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Green bonds have already financed a number of big coal projects in China. Tianjin SDIC Jinneng Electric Power Co Ltd issued 200 million yuan ($29.81 million) in commercial paper on the interbank market in mid-2017 to finance a low-emissions coal-fired power plant.

Coal-to-chemical plants have also received billions of yuan in financing through green bonds, despite criticism from environmental groups.

Industry experts say the two-tiered regulatory framework – one under the PBOC and one under the NDRC – means some coal-related projects could still issue green bonds, although access to the most active green finance markets would be restricted.

“Many of the international investors and financiers have publicly announced plans to reduce their coal portfolio,” said Herry Cho, head of sustainable finance for Asia Pacific at ING.

She said the NDRC catalog is already “largely aligned” with international standards, and even includes some categories, such as equipment related to renewable energy and resource recycling, that are not yet included in global guidelines.

Shengzhe Wang, counsel at Hogan Lovells in Shanghai, who has worked on green bonds in the U.K.-China Green Finance Taskforce, said it was unrealistic to expect the sudden exclusion of coal from all green financing in China.

“For the time being perhaps we have to put up with, make a compromise with clean coal,” she said.

While that compromise may limit foreign involvement in the market, Peter Corne, managing partner at legal firm Dorsey & Whitney in Shanghai said green financing was still required to help clean up China’s coal sector.

“I don’t think it necessarily means there will be more coal projects because of it, because there has already been a moratorium for quite some time,” said Corne, who follows China’s environmental policies.

“Coal’s not going to go away, and it will greatly accelerate our progress towards achieving emission goals if we do clean up the coal sector.”

(Reporting by Andrew Galbraith and David Stanway; Editing by Sam Holmes)

Source: OANN

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Georgia Sen. Perdue’s Campaign Fined $30,000 for Violations

The campaign of U.S. Sen. David Perdue paid a $30,000 fine to federal regulators for violations discovered in the Georgia Republican's fundraising reports from the 2014 election.

The civil penalty to the Federal Election Commission was disclosed Monday in Perdue's campaign finance report for the first three months of 2019.

FEC documents show the fine stemmed from violations uncovered by an audit of Perdue's fundraising and expenditures from five years ago, when the former Dollar General and Reebok CEO was first elected to the Senate. Now an outspoken ally of President Donald Trump, Perdue will seek reelection in 2020.

"After undergoing an exhaustive four-year-long random audit process, we reached a reasonable settlement agreement regarding some typical bookkeeping errors that occur on a campaign of this size in order to bring this matter to close," Perdue campaign consultant Derrick Dickey said.

The settlement says an FEC auditor found Perdue's campaign took more than $117,000 in prohibited contributions during the previous campaign, as well as more than $325,000 that exceeded legal limits on campaign donations. The FEC also found Perdue's campaign failed to disclose $128,972 in debts and obligations.

The document says Perdue's campaign disputed the amount of illegal contributions and presented documentation that "reduced the amount of apparent excessive contributions." But it doesn't say by how much. The agreement also says the campaign amended its financial disclosures to account for the unreported debt.

Perdue raised more than $14 million for the 2014 election in which he defeated Democrat Michelle Nunn, the daughter for former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn.

Former Columbus Mayor Teresa Tomlinson has filed paperwork with the FEC to position herself as a potential Democratic challenger to Perdue. Democrat Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the race for Georgia governor last year, has also been weighing a 2020 Senate campaign. Abrams has not announced a decision.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Hundreds protest again in Algeria, demanding Bouteflika resign

FILE PHOTO: Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika looks at journalists after casting his ballot during the parliamentary election in Algiers
FILE PHOTO: Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika looks at journalists after casting his ballot during the parliamentary election in Algiers, Algeria, May 4, 2017. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra/File Photo

March 22, 2019

ALGIERS (Reuters) – Hundreds of Algerians took to the streets of the capital on Friday to demand President Abdelaziz Bouteflika quit immediately and the numbers were expected to swell after Friday noon prayers.

Protesters gathered in the city center defying rain, carrying Algerian flags and pamphlets, gathering in the same spot where a wave of demonstrations erupted a month ago.

“Rain will not stop us from continuing our pressure,” said 23-year old Ahmed Khoudja.

Bouteflika, who has ruled for 20 years, bowed to the protesters last week by reversing plans to stand for a fifth term. But he has stopped short of stepping down and said he would stay in office until a new constitution is adopted, effectively extending his present term.

His move has failed to appease Algerians, who want veterans of the 1954-62 independence war against France who dominate the establishment to quit so a new generation of leaders can take over and begin to create jobs, fight corruption and introduce greater freedoms.

Protest numbers have grown dramatically after prayers on the three previous Fridays during the series of demonstrations that kicked off on Feb 22.

“We stay here until the whole system goes,” said Mahmoud Timar, a 37-year old teacher.

Leaders have emerged from the protest movement, offering an alternative to Bouteflika’s political roadmap to what he says will be a new Algeria. But they have not yet built up enough momentum to force him to quit or make more concessions.

The military, which wields enormous power from behind the scenes, has remained on the sidelines, and is seen as unlikely to intervene as long as the protests remain peaceful.

(Reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed; Writing by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: OANN

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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)

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A Wells Fargo logo is seen in New York City
FILE PHOTO: A Wells Fargo logo is seen in New York City, U.S. January 10, 2017. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith

April 26, 2019

By Jessica DiNapoli and Imani Moise

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wells Fargo & Co’s board has retained executive search firm Spencer Stuart to hunt for a new chief executive, ideally a woman who can tackle its regulatory and public perception issues, two people familiar with the matter said.

Wells Fargo’s ambition to become the only major U.S. bank with a female CEO underscores the need to restore its image with a wide range of constituents, including customers, shareholders, regulators and politicians, after it became mired in a scandal in 2016 for opening potentially millions of unauthorized accounts.

Former CEO Tim Sloan left abruptly last month, becoming the second CEO to leave the bank in the scandal’s fallout.

The board plans to approach Citigroup Inc’s Latin America chief Jane Fraser, one of the sources said. During Fraser’s 15-year tenure at Citigroup, she has gained experience running consumer and commercial businesses as well as its private bank.

Fraser could not be immediately reached for comment.

The board also discussed approaching JPMorgan Chase & Co’s Marianne Lake, but after the bank named her to run JPMorgan’s consumer lending business last week, that option became less viable, the source added. The board wants someone who can convince regulators, employees, investors and customers that the bank has fixed problems underpinning the sales scandal, the sources said.

The bank’s board feels that choosing a woman might please lawmakers in Washington who have been critical not only of Wells Fargo’s misbehavior, but of the broader banking industry for a lack of diversity and gender equality, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It also believes that such a move could bolster Wells Fargo’s image with the households of customers where women play a leading role in managing finances, one of the sources added.

The new CEO will also have to resolve litigation and regulatory matters. There are 14 outstanding consent orders with government entities, as well as probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice.

To be sure, Spencer Stuart will approach and consider several male candidates for the CEO job as well, one of the sources said. The top priority is to find an external candidate who can navigate the bank’s regulatory issues, the source added.

Finding an outsider who meets all those qualifications and wants the job will be difficult, the sources said. There are few people with the necessary experience, even fewer of those who are women, and it is not clear if any of the obvious candidates would be open to taking the role.

The sources asked not to be identified because Wells Fargo’s board deliberations are confidential.

Spokespeople for Wells Fargo and Spencer Stuart declined to comment.

Wells Fargo’s board has not made any public statements about its requirements for a new CEO, beyond Chair Betsy Duke saying the job should attract the “top talent in banking.”

The board wants to complete the search within the next three to six months, one of the sources said.

STALLED SHARES

After Sloan’s ouster, Wells Fargo’s board appointed Allen Parker, who had been general counsel, as interim CEO. The board has said it is looking for an external candidate as a permanent replacement. It is not clear whether Parker will stay at the bank.

Others whose names have been mentioned by analysts, recruiters and industry sources as perspective CEO candidates include Alphabet Inc finance chief Ruth Porat and Bank of America Corp’s chief technology officer Cathy Bessant.

Wells Fargo shares have stalled since Sloan’s departure on March 29th, while the KBW Bank index has rallied more than 7 percent.

Wells Fargo would be “the best stock on earth to buy” if it had the right CEO, said Greg Donaldson, chairman of Donaldson Capital Management in Indiana.

Donaldson held about 50,000 Wells Fargo shares, but sold the stake last year as problems mounted. The CEO change could convince him to re-invest, depending on who it is, he told Reuters.

“It would be very smart for them to get a woman,” he said.

(Reporting by Jessica DiNapoli and Imani Moise in New York; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra, Greg Roumeliotis and Susan Thomas)

Source: OANN

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A worker walks on the roof of a new home under construction in Carlsbad
FILE PHOTO: A worker walks on the roof of a new home under construction in Carlsbad, California September 22, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Blake

April 26, 2019

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. economy is growing at a 2.08% annualized pace in the second quarter based on upbeat data on durable goods orders and new home sales in March, the New York Federal Reserve’s Nowcast model showed on Friday.

This was faster than the 1.92% growth rate calculated by the N.Y. Fed model the week before.

(Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Source: OANN

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Extraordinary European Union leaders summit in Brussels
FILE PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte arrives at an extraordinary European Union leaders summit to discuss Brexit, in Brussels, Belgium April 10, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman

April 26, 2019

(Reuters) – Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Friday he had assured China’s Huawei Technologies that it would not face discrimination in the rollout of Italy’s 5G telecoms network.

Conte was speaking on a visit to China where he said he met Huawei’s chief executive, Ren Zhengfei. The prime minister’s comments were carried in Italy by TV broadcaster Sky Italia.

“I told him that we have adopted some precautions, some measures to protect our interests that demand very high levels of security … not only from Huawei but any company entering into the 5G arena,” he said.

Huawei, the world’s biggest producer of telecoms equipment, is under intense scrutiny after the United States told allies not to use its technology because of fears it could be a vehicle for Chinese spying. Huawei has categorically denied this.

(Writing by by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Angelo Amante)

Source: OANN

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U.S. President Trump departs for travel to Indianapolis from the White House in Washington
U.S. President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he departs for travel to Indianapolis, Indiana from the White House in Washington, U.S., April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

April 26, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Friday was expected to announce his intention to revoke the United States’ status as a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, which was signed in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama but never ratified by Congress, two U.S. officials said.

Trump was expected to announce the decision in a speech in Indianapolis, to the National Rifle Association, the officials said. The NRA, a powerful gun lobby group, has long been opposed to the treaty, which was negotiated at the United Nations.

(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Bill Trott)

Source: OANN

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