People cross a road under flags marking Tibetan Serfs' Emancipation Day on March 28, in Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China March 26, 2019. Picture taken March 26, 2019. REUTERS/Stringer
March 27, 2019
By Ben Blanchard
BEIJING (Reuters) – Those who criticize China over human rights in Tibet have been “bewitched” by the Dalai Lama, a senior Chinese official said on Wednesday, days before the 60th anniversary of the Tibetan spiritual leader’s flight into exile in India.
China says it “peacefully liberated” Tibet in 1950 and has since exerted enormous effort to bring the remote region into the modern era, abolishing feudal practices while protecting its Buddhist people’s right to freely practise their religion and maintain their culture.
Critics, including the United States, say China rules with an iron fist and has overseen widespread rights abuses.
Deputy Tibet governor Norbu Dondrup said Tibetan society was “very dark and very cruel” before Communist Party rule. He was speaking in Beijing on the release of a policy paper marking six decades since China began what it calls “democratic reforms” in Tibet.
He said ordinary people – or “serfs” – could be bought and sold, thrown in jail, or even killed at will when the Dalai Lama was in charge in Tibet.
“The Dalai Lama attacking our human rights totally has ulterior motives. He tramples on human rights, and has no right, no qualifications, and is unworthy of talking about human rights,” Norbu Dondrup said.
“As for some countries slamming our human rights, they either don’t understand or believe the Dalai clique’s rumors and bewitchments,” he said.
The human rights situation in Tibet was extremely good, he said, listing examples such as free medical care and an abundance of food.
Asked whether China would ever allow an independence referendum in Tibet, as has happened in Scotland and Quebec, Norbu Dondrup said Tibet has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times.
“We have never recognized Tibet independence, and neither has any other country,” he said. “Moreover, the peoples of Tibet in the extended family of the peoples of the motherland now have very happy lives.”
China reviles the Dalai Lama, who crossed the border into exile in India on March 31, 1959, after a failed uprising against Chinese rule.
Seen by Beijing as a dangerous separatist, he says he seeks merely genuine autonomy for his mountainous homeland and denies espousing violence.
The Dalai Lama told Reuters last week it was possible that, once he dies, his incarnation could be found in India and warned that any other successor named by China would not be respected.
The officially atheist Communist Party says it must approve his and other reincarnations of Tibetan lamas.
The Tibet issue has also become another irritant in China-U.S. ties after President Donald Trump signed into law a Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act in December.
That seeks to press China to open the region by denying U.S. entry to officials deemed responsible for restricting access to Tibet. China has denounced the law.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Paul Tait)
Parker Solar Probe has successfully completed its second close approach to the Sun, called perihelion, and is now entering the outbound phase of its second solar orbit.
At 6:40 p.m. EDT on April 4, 2019, the spacecraft passed within 15 million miles of our star, tying its distance record as the closest spacecraft ever to the Sun; Parker Solar Probe was traveling at 213,200 miles per hour during this perihelion.
The Parker Solar Probe mission team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, or APL, in Laurel, Maryland scheduled a contact with the spacecraft via the Deep Space Network for four hours around the perihelion and monitored the health of the spacecraft throughout this critical part of the encounter. Parker Solar Probe sent back beacon status “A” throughout its second perihelion, indicating that the spacecraft is operating well and all instruments are collecting science data.
“The spacecraft is performing as designed, and it was great to be able to track it during this entire perihelion,” said Nickalaus Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at APL. “We’re looking forward to getting the science data down from this encounter in the coming weeks so the science teams can continue to explore the mysteries of the corona and the Sun.”
Parker Solar Probe began this solar encounter on March 30, and it will conclude on April 10. The solar encounter phase is roughly defined as when the spacecraft is within 0.25 AU — or 23,250,000 miles — of the Sun. One AU, or astronomical unit, is about 93 million miles, the average distance from the Sun to Earth.
Will Johnson presents a video and breaks down how a female was attacked by a leftist simply for wearing her ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.
FILE - In this June 4, 2018 file photo, Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif. Apple is expected to announce Monday, March 25, 2019, that it’s launching a video service that could compete with Netflix, Amazon and cable TV itself. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)
BEIJING – Apple CEO Tim Cook says he's "extremely bullish" about the global economy based on the amount of innovation being carried out, and he's urging China to continue to "open up."
In a speech at an economic forum in Beijing on Saturday, Cook said Apple is less concerned with the short term economic outlook because the tech giant makes investments looking ahead years or decades.
His remarks come as China and the U.S. prepare to meet again to resolve their trade dispute, which has roiled global markets, and as Apple is expected to announce that it's launching a video service.
The iPhone has long been Apple's marquee product and main money maker, but sales are starting to decline. The company is pushing digital subscriptions as it searches for new growth.
FILE PHOTO: A man reads a newspaper outside a branch of Punjab National Bank (PNB) in Ahmedabad, India, March 20, 2018. REUTERS/Amit Dave
February 18, 2019
By Chris Thomas and Krishna V Kurup
(Reuters) – One year after being hit by a $2 billion scam, India’s Punjab National Bank (PNB) is set to return to annual profits and strong loan growth in fiscal 2020 even as investigations continue into the country’s biggest banking fraud.
State-run PNB has already surprised markets with an earlier-than-expected profit for the quarter ended Dec. 31 as it completed setting aside funds to cover for the scam and its bad loan levels eased.
(GRAPHIC: Punjab National Bank on track for recovery – https://tmsnrt.rs/2TR2ZLW)
While the lender is still likely to post a loss of 59.84 billion rupees ($837.16 million) for this fiscal year ending March 31, analysts expect PNB to return to a full-year profit in the next fiscal, according to Refinitiv data.
The bank is expected to clock a net profit of 22.66 billion rupees for the year ending March 2020, which would be its highest annual profit in five years.
“The way the bank is shaping up, it is quite clear FY20 promises to be a much cleaner and better year for them,” said Abhinesh Vijayaraj, vice president equity research for Spark Capital Advisors (India).
PNB’s loan growth is estimated to be 8.33 percent for fiscal 2020, its highest in 4 years, as per the mean of analysts’ estimates from Refinitiv. Its total assets are projected to grow at the highest rate in three years.
(GRAPHIC: Loan growth at PNB and SBI – https://tmsnrt.rs/2UYopa5)
The lender said in February 2018 two jewelry groups used fake bank guarantees issued by rogue staff to raise credit overseas, triggering a plunge in its stock and driving it to three straight quarterly losses due to fraud-related provisions.
PNB’s loss for the quarter following the scam’s discovery was also a massive $1.90 billion – the biggest ever for an Indian lender.
INDUSTRY TREND
Market participants believe fiscal 2020 will likely be good for other lenders as well.
“It’s going to be a good period for corporate lenders on the whole in FY20 as credit growth has picked up and asset quality-related problems are largely behind us,” said Alpesh Mehta, an analyst with Mumbai-based brokerage Motilal Oswal Securities.
In FY20, State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender by assets, and smaller peer Bank of Baroda are expected to report their best annual profits since at least 1998.
(GRAPHIC: Punjab National Bank PE – https://tmsnrt.rs/2TPXptk)
PNB’s shares have fallen about 56 percent since mid-Feb last year. That plunge makes its shares undervalued compared to their valuation in previous years. It currently trades at a 12-month forward price to earnings ratio (PE) of 9.29 in comparison with the last five years’ average of 15.7 and last two years’ average of 31.9.
Analysts too feel the stock is currently undervalued after multiple infusions of capital by the Indian government. Since Jan. 2018, the government has infused close to $2 billion into PNB to help shore up capital and revive loan growth.
Some analysts, though, are cautious about PNB’s prospects.
“The major concern is how has PNB changed their systems and processes following the scam, as it was unimaginable that such a big fraud could take place at one bank,” said Asutosh Mishra, head of research of institutional equity at Ashika Stock Broking Ltd.
“Where will the bank be in three years is really the question,” Spark Capital’s Vijayaraj said.
For an interactive graphic on loan growth and profit trajectory, click – https://tmsnrt.rs/2EaoFNS
(Reporting by Chris Thomas and Krishna V Kurup in Bengaluru; Graphics and additional reportng by Gaurav Dogra in Bengaluru; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
The mainstream media isn’t ready to give up the Russia collusion narrative even if the looming release of Robert Mueller’s report won’t contain anything damaging to President Trump.
That's according to Gary Abernathy, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, who penned an piece titled “Admit it: Fox News has been right all along.”
The piece, published Monday, argued that while liberal networks seemingly got the Russia story wrong, they are unlikely to give up even when the report is published on Thursday.
“I have been critical of president trump. There are a lot of issues that the Democrats and those who don't like Trump can go after him on in 2020. And rightfully so. Legitimate political questions,” Abernathy said on "Fox & Friends."
“But, Russian collusion, that's done. I'm interested to see the Mueller report tomorrow. That's going to be interesting reading. But we know the bottom line conclusion.”
— Gary Abernathy, contributing columnist for The Washington Post
“But, Russian collusion, that's done. I'm interested to see the Mueller report tomorrow. That's going to be interesting reading. But we know the bottom line conclusion,” he said, noting that Attorney General William Barr announced that there was no collusion.
Abernathy said he was prompted to write the column after the media flipped on the credibility of Barr after his summary of the Mueller report was released.
“Ever since he did the summary on the Mueller report, you see people accusing him of being Donald Trump’s toady and now all of the sudden the 68-year-old career professional has become a political animal trying to protect the president,” he said.
“Frankly the facts don't back that up. That's ridiculous. I said all along when the report comes out you will not see any daylight between Barr, Rosenstein or Mueller on what the conclusions are.”
“Frankly the facts don't back that up. That's ridiculous. I said all along when the report comes out you will not see any daylight between Barr, Rosenstein or Mueller on what the conclusions are.”
— Gary Abernathy, contributing columnist for The Washington Post
Abernathy concluded that the mainstream media networks aren’t ready to give up on covering the Russia collusion angle as they heavily invested in it since Trump’s election.
“They have invested a lot of time in the Russian collusion narrative and just not ready to give it up,” the columnist said. “Again, if there was something here, that would be understandable.”
“I'm anxious to seat the Mueller report because I think a lot of people who think it's going to – they are going to find something there to call a bombshell revelation, I really expect the Mueller report to even go further in explaining point by point why all these little meetings and all these little, you know, dots that didn't connect, you know, why they didn't connect,” he added.
“I think the Mueller report will do a really good service to explain why that -- and, you know, why they didn't conclude collusion happened.”
CHICAGO – An internal email from the office of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, obtained by Fox News on Wednesday, asked assistant state's attorneys to dig for any examples to bolster Foxx’s claim that the dropped charges in the Jussie Smollett case weren’t as uncommon or shocking as they seemed.
The email read in part, “We are looking for examples of cases, felony preferable, where we, in (exercising) our discretion, have entered into verbal agreements with defense attorneys to dismiss charges against an offender if certain conditions were met...”
The email added, “Nobody is in trouble, we are just looking for further examples of how we, as prosecutors, use our discretion in a way that restores the victim…”
It was not clear who sent it, and exactly when it was sent. Foxx recused herself from the case last February but defended her office offering Smollett “an alternative prosecution model” in a series of interviews Wednesday.
An internal email from Kim Foxx’s office obtained by Fox News asked workers to dig for examples bolstering Foxx’s claim that the dropped charges in the Jussie Smollett case weren’t as uncommon or shocking as they seemed. (Getty, File)
Illinois Attorney Rod Drobinski told Fox News that because a special prosecutor was not appointed in the Smollett case, there were appearances of impropriety on behalf of Foxx's office. “Even the prosecutor said it was a strong case. That makes it even more unusual that they didn’t demand that he admit to what he did as part of this dismissal.”
Foxx has been defending the decision by her staff to drop charges against the “Empire” actor after investigators revealed he allegedly staged a racist, anti-gay attack.
Foxx told Fox 32 on Wednesday she believed the matter was handled properly for a case of its kind. She pointed to Smollett forfeiting his $10,000 bond and doing community service.
“When we look at similarly situated people charged with this offense, without a background, I think in this case, justice was, um, appropriate,” Foxx told Fox 32 Chicago. “He was availed to an alternative prosecution model that anyone without these riches, without this fame, would also be availed to.”
Cook County prosecutors dismissed all charges but still maintained Smollett lied about being attacked in downtown Chicago on Jan. 29. And Mayor Rahm Emanuel has called the dropping of charges “a whitewash.”
Smollett’s attorney, Patricia Brown Holmes, said in a statement: “We are disappointed the local authorities have continued their campaign against Jussie Smollett after the charges against him have been dropped. The facts are clear. The Assistant State’s Attorney appeared in court and dismissed the charges. Mr. Smollett forfeited his bond. The case is closed. No public official has the right to violate Mr. Smollett’s due process rights. Mr. Smollett, like every citizen, is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Mr. Smollett is entitled to the same Constitutional protections as any citizen charged by the government with a crime— including the right to speak freely about his innocence, the right to be viewed as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and the right to hold the State to its burden of proving him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. None of that has occurred in this case.”
The National District Attorneys Association, which claims to represent roughly 2,700 prosecutors’ offices around the country, heavily criticized Foxx in a statement to Fox News.
“First, when a chief prosecutor recuses him or herself, the recusal must apply to the entire office, not just the elected or appointed prosecutor. This is consistent with best practices for prosecutors’ offices around the country,” the statement began.
It added, “Second, prosecutors should not take advice from politically connected friends of the accused. Each case should be approached with the goal of justice for victims while protecting the rights of the defendant. Third, when a prosecutor seeks to resolve a case through diversion or some other alternative to prosecution, it should be done so with an acknowledgement of culpability on the part of the defendant. A case with the consequential effects of Mr. Smollett’s should not be resolved without a finding of guilt or innocence.”
The statement concluded: “Fourth, expunging Mr. Smollett’s record at this immediate stage is counter to transparency. Law enforcement will now not be able to acknowledge that Mr. Smollett was indicted and charged with these horrible crimes and the full record of what occurred will be forever hidden from public view. Finally, we believe strongly that hate crimes should be prosecuted vigorously but the burden of proof should not be artificially increased due to the misguided decisions of others.”
Oh, how their heads hurt. After two intoxicating years, the Mueller Investigation & Media Tequila Party is over. Morning has come, and Democrats have opened their eyes to a pounding headache. Liquor bottles held high the night before now litter the floor: Democrats even ate the Michael Cohen worm.
Inconveniently, the special prosecutor found no collusion. Those who imbibed most have been left stumbling, trying to explain how Donald Trump covered up the crime no one committed. But the feast was moveable, and the partygoers celebrated each other. They are convinced it was not overindulgence that caused their hangover; merely that they stopped drinking. A little hair-of-the dog is all we need. Pour us another Margarita, and let’s get this party started again.
In the confusion, more sober leaders reasserted control. Old pro Nancy Pelosi determined Democrats are not going to raise the flag of impeachment now, understanding it will become even less likely as the 2020 election grows closer. Delay, delay, delay, Pelosi believes, until the mystic chords of impeachment become memories that never again swell.
Pelosi did have to throw her caucus’s fine young radicals a bone: Madam Speaker gave them impeachment without impeachment. Democrats will be allowed to hold hearings and pursue investigations. That will keep Trump in the spotlight, Democratic activists motivated, and MSNBC fed.
Pelosi has even gotten most of her 2020 presidential candidates on board. With the notable exceptions of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, most Democratic contenders are calling it closing time. It is a remarkable display of the speaker’s power, considering the Democratic field has expanded to 20 candidates, requiring at least two clown cars. Poor Joe Biden is just entering the race.
Sen. Harris, who tells us she is not a socialist, just another Democrat who supports Bernie Sanders’ socialist agenda, would like to party on. Shehas said, “I believe Congress should take the steps toward impeachment.” California’s junior senator is sinking in the polls despite or, perhaps,becauseof her powerful socialist/impeachment one-two punch. She has dropped 6 points in New Hampshire,falling to 4% support, the survey’s margin of error. Technically, Harris may have erased herself.
Warren, who has been defined by her war with Trump over her illusory Native American heritage, has also worked her way down to near nothing in the same survey, notching only 5%. The Massachusetts senator, too, would like to extend impeachment festivities and she embraces every possible radical orthodoxy, includingreparations for oppressed minorities, confiscating billionaires’ wealth, and canceling student debt. How would you like to be the last generous soul to pay off his or her student loan, just before Warren erases everyone else’s?
Harris and Warren provide lessons for Democrats who hear “Hail to the Chief” every time they rouse crowds with molten, anti-Trump rhetoric: Voters who don’t support Donald Trump aren’t looking for a Democratic Trump replica. They are looking for analternative. Hot Democrats who balance Trump's fire with their own aren't different from our current president. They are just the other side of Trump's coin. One of his great gifts is magnetism: The Donald drags his adversaries into no-rules-barred combat on the muddy turf where he fights best.
Yet, the Democrat gaining momentum is not a rabid, anti-Trump fanatic, nor a radical, collectivist zealot. Pete Buttigieg is the calm to Trump’s storm, the still waters to this president's tempest. As others have noted in the now obligatory veneration, the gay, 37-year-old, left-handed Mayor of Smallville is an articulate polymath who speaks numerous languages, quotes Scripture, plays piano, and has studied history, philosophy, and ethics. If Buttigieg’s resume is a contrast to the president’s, so is his joyful maturity, which stands in staggering contrast to the cheerless and substanceless knife fights that pass for Republican and Democrat debate these days, ravenously merchandized by our sensationalist news media. When Bernie Sanders flies into space, for example, endorsing the right ofconvicted terrorists, rapists, and pedophiles to vote while in prison, it is the young mayor who plays grown-up, elegantly distancing himself from Sanders’s enflamed radicalism by saying, simply, “No, I don’t think so.”
Cool as an after-dinner mint, Buttigieg uncommonly resorts toreasonto explain his positions, avoiding name-calling, charges of senility, or accusations of treason. "Part of the punishment when you are convicted of a crime and you're incarcerated is you lose certain rights. You lose your freedom," Buttigieg told a town-hall audience. "And I think during that period, it does not make sense to have an exception for the right to vote."
Often, voters want in their next president what they didn’t find in their last one. That’s trouble for Sanders who, in many ways, parallels Trump, a fellow radical, white-hot populist who aims to overthrow the corrupt Washington establishment. Sanders, we might argue,isDonald Trump with a smaller balance sheet, no experience leading anything, and a college sophomore’s naïveté.
Joe Biden is calmer than Donald Trump, but the dead often are. Having lost twice, Biden 2020 is the sequel to movies no one went to see in 1988 and 2008. He is #YesterdaysCandidate, the old, white male that today’s Democrats crave to run against. Biden still owns a 1967 Corvette. It is an antique everyone admires, but no one would drive today.
No Democratic candidate provides a brighter alternative to Donald Trump than Pete Buttigieg. Could he give the incumbent a real run for his billions? Maybe, but Trump is still the odds-on favorite for re-election.
First, he’s doing a good job delivering growth, jobs, and higher wages, and Democrats admit as much when they openly hope the economy won’t be in as good a shape in 2020. Desperate prayers for an economic downturn do not usually evolve into promising strategy. Second, Buttigieg is a self-described democratic capitalist and a voice of reason, but only in comparison to the rest of his left-lurching party. He is at home in a party that has swallowed Sanders’ socialist agenda whole. Behind his moderate appearance, he embraces the tenets of the global elite, including a carbon tax. That is the tax that alienated the working class from the cognoscenti in Emmanuel Macron’s France. Third, Buttigieg is young and untested, and newbie challengers often get beat when the economy is doing well. Adversaries don’t have to persuade people to vote against them, just to put them back in the pantry until they have time to ripen. Lastly, Democrats have control of the House and a reasonable shot of taking the Senate in 2020, when Republicans will defend 22 of the 34 seats contested.
A turbulent Donald Trump may make the case that he is actually the candidate of stability and restraint, the indispensable counterbalance to a rabid and socialist Democratic Party, proving that God does have a sense of irony, if not humor. So party on, Democrats. As someone once wrote, “There is a great independence, and a confident immunity to risk, in all drinks made out of cactus.”
Alex Castellanos is a Republican strategist, a founder of Purple Strategies and a political analyst for ABC News.
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.”
The U.S. government say Butina was part of an unofficial influence campaign that overlapped with the 2016 presidential election and targeted conservatives; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports from the U.S. district court in Washington.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].”
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.
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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, 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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