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How Asset Inflation Will End — This Time

Life after death for asset inflation: this is what happens when “speculative fever” remains high even after monetary inflation has paused.

This may well have been the situation in global markets during 2019 so far. But history and principle suggest that life after death in this monetary sense is short.

Readers may find it odd to be talking about a pause in monetary inflation at a time when the Fed has cancelled programmed rate rises and the ECB has embarked (March 7) on yet further “radical” policy moves. Moreover, the “core” US inflation rate (as measured by PCE) is still at virtually 2 per cent year-on-year.

Yet we know from past cycles that in the early stages of recession many market participants — and, crucially, central banks — mistakenly view a stall in rate rises or actual rate cuts as stimulatory. Later with the benefit of hindsight these policy moves turn out to be insufficient to prevent a tightening of monetary conditions already in process but unrecognized.

Even had monetary conditions been easing rather than tightening, it is highly dubious whether this difference would have meant the powerful momentum behind the business cycle moving into its recession phase would have lessened substantially.

(As a footnote here: under a gold standard regime there is no claim that monetary conditions will evolve perfectly in line with contracyclical fine-tuning. Both in principle and fact monetary conditions could tighten there at first as recessionary forces gathered. Under sound money, however, contracyclical forces would emerge strongly into the recession as directed by the invisible hand.)

Under a fiat money regime, monetary tightening can occur in the transition of a business cycle into recession, despite the opposite intention of the central bank policy-makers, due to endogenous factors such as an undetected increase in demand for money or a fall in the underlying “money multipliers.” Quite possibly, what the markets first celebrated as a seeming Fed put eventually turns out to be a sick joke.

Like the policy of the central bank, the reported trend of officially measured inflation in goods and services market is a notoriously poor indicator of turning points in monetary inflation.

Fluctuations up and down in goods prices sometimes have nothing to do with monetary inflation. Students of Austrian school economics know that under sound money, prices would fluctuate in both directions for sustained periods. For example, there could have been a sustained period of falling prices under the influence of accelerated digitalization and globalization.

In the late stage of a business cycle expansion an upward drift of prices can form under the hypothesized sound money conditions and this may be happening in the present even as monetary inflation has waned.

Labor market normalization (return to balance) goes along with some pick-up of wages and productivity growth may coincidentally slow (perhaps related to a breather in the hectic pace of new technology application. In this cycle we could argue that the pace of globalization has slowed somewhat (of especially as the US confronts Chinese abuse of free market order in international economy). Maybe also the pace of digitalization has slackened (the “online” revolution surely does not proceed forever at the same hectic pace).

In sum, a late cycle rise of prices could be a false positive test of monetary inflation.

Moreover, just as official inflation data can be a lagging indicator of monetary inflation, so it is with the continuing symptoms of monetary inflation in the asset markets. Indeed, a Fed put may have inflamed those symptoms.

In searching for the presence (or not) of asset inflation we look for evidence of irrational forces under such banners as “search for yield” or “positive feedback loops.” A key focus is the carry trade, especially in currencies and credit. Alongside, we focus on the spread speculative narratives about which investors would be highly skeptical in sober rational mood (but monetary inflation erodes such skepticism). These characteristics can all outlive for some time monetary inflation, especially if the Fed has sought to exercise a put.

Even so, in this late stage the discerning monetary analysts can detect some tiredness about the narrative-telling. The chickens are coming home to roost from growing cumulative mal-investment – translating into pre-tax earnings peaking or going into reverse. Some disturbing counter narratives have emerged concerning the one-time hot speculations.

In many past business cycles, analysts in search of when the expansion and asset inflation are set to wane look for areas of unsustainable rises for key economic aggregates. In the last cycle, one example was residential construction in the USA. In other cycles it has been business spending overall — which would be broadly in line with Austrian School literature on the business cycle focusing on how monetary inflation distorts the relative price of capital goods in terms of consumer goods.

In this cycle though there has been no obvious such overall unsustainability at the level of broad economic aggregate in the US economy. In the emerging market economies by contrast, including China, that would be an easier case to make. In Europe or Japan, we could talk of the unsustainability of export sector growth based on emerging market bubble and their own manipulated cheap currencies.

Back to the US, the lack of obvious non-sustainability in a broad spending aggregate does not mean there is no recession danger — just the searchers for this must dig deeper. In particular, the overall mal-investment might be even greater than usual but concentrated in a few sectors where the speculative narratives have been intense — whether Silicon Valley or shale oil and gas. Mal-investment only shows up in many cases once the asset inflation and cycle expansion have come to an end.

In talking about main economic aggregates, the case can be made across the advanced economies that consumer spending might be in for a big fall once households realize that all was fantasy. Specifically, the high returns during the asset inflation from risk-assets including booming carry trades while they lasted made them tolerant of the manipulated low and widely negative returns on safe assets. Once gone, alarm sets in.

Even so there is a paradox to address about the present cycle. How has it been that such monetary wildness has gone along with apparent real economic moderation (no obvious unsustainable rise of broad economic aggregates)?

Fearing the Long Term

A plausible part-answer is that everyone and their dog know what the Federal Reserve and other central banks have been up to and all along have feared the eventual crash and great recession. Hence there has been a tendency for business owners to eschew long-gestation investments and focus on generating high returns via financial engineering instead (camouflaged leverage, momentum trading, carry trades).

Another part answer is the growth of monopoly power across the US economy as described by the star firm literature or more specifically in accounts of Big Tech. Specifically, the star firm theorists tell us that there is something about present technological advance — most likely its high specificity of investment much of which is intangible to the given firm with little scope for selling in a secondary market — which retards the percolation of progress beyond.

Monopolists respond often more sluggishly in their capital spending plans to manipulations down in the cost of capital than would firms in a competitive setting. Limiting supply is the name of their game.

Whatever the causes for subdued business capital investment overall in this cycle and more broadly for “real economic moderation” there is every reason to expect the real economic moderation which has coexisted with a wild monetary environment to end in immoderation. The illusion of economic moderation has fanned the carry trade into high yield credit and more broadly equity market valuations – and so the fall will be all the greater.



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Source: InfoWars

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Rep. Meadows: Mueller report subpoena not about the truth, it’s about hurting Trump ahead of 2020

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., has accused House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., of creating "political theater" in an attempt to hurt President Trump's chances of winning re-election in 2020.

"This was not a transparency subpoena. This was a 2020 subpoena,” Meadows told “America’s Newsroom.

“It's all political theater. It has nothing to do with really getting to the truth.”

The House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full report after the Justice Department missed a Democrat-imposed deadline Tuesday.

HOUSE DEMS PREPARE FOR SUBPOENA BATTLE OVER MUELLER REPORT

The authorization of subpoenas does not mean the committee will issue them but gives Democrats on the panel the option to do so.

Attorney General William Barr has previously said his team must first redact sensitive information but Nadler made it clear Democrats want to see the entire unredacted report.

Meadows believes Democrats are motivated by wanting to do damage to the president and his attorney general.

“This is all about trying to disparage the president of the United States when his attorney general, Attorney General Barr… he's working with warp speed to get information to the American people,” Meadows said.

“It's really unprecedented… in terms of his willingness to work with Congress and yet this is how he gets rewarded. It's a sad day for Congress and I would say it's a sad day for the American people.”

BARR TO RELEASE MUELLER REPORT TO CONGRESS BY 'MID-APRIL, IF NOT SOONER' 

Fox News's Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Crazed Leftist Calls For UKIP Candidate to be Tortured to Death

A crazed leftist uploaded a YouTube video in which she said a UKIP MEP candidate should be “forcefully lobotomized” and tortured to death because he sent a politically incorrect tweet.

The video was in response to re-ignited controversy over Carl Benjamin’s 2016 tweet in which he said he “wouldn’t rape” feminist MP Jess Phillips.

Benjamin said he made the comment in response to Phillips making fun of male suicide.

The YouTuber, popularly known as Sargon of Akkad, is now standing to become an MEP for the South West for UKIP in the European elections on May 23.

In the threatening video, the woman falsely accuses Benjamin of being a “well known advocate of rape” before going on to assert that every rapist should receive the death penalty.

She also erroneously claims that one in three women worldwide have been raped.

“As for the rape advocates, I think they deserve the death penalty too, including Carl Benjamin!” states the woman.

She goes on to demand that Benjamin be “institutionalized and forcefully lobotomized – full frontal lobotomy, leave him as a complete vegetable, unable to utter a word.”

She then explains her “best case scenario” for Benjamin’s fate, which would involve him being killed.

“Torture, agony, long agony, long suffering and death,” the woman states before proclaiming, “death to Carl Benjamin!” three times while displaying a thumbs down hand gesture.

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Ilhan Omar to Keynote CAIR Fundraiser in Southern California

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As Breitbart news has noted:

In 2007-8, CAIR was namedan unindicted co-conspirator in the terror financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That case, in turn, led the FBI to discontinue its work with the organization. In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the government “produced ample evidence to establish” the ties of CAIR with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization. The United Arab Emirates labeled CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014 (a decision that the Obama administration opposed).

The political action committee of CAIR in California donated the maximum of $5,000 to Omar’s 2018 campaign.

The event will be held in the San Fernando Valley community of Woodland Hills, and comes on the heels of Omar’s controversial remarks about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), alleging that the organization had paid members of Congress to support Israel. AIPAC does not donate to candidates.

Democrat leaders condemned Omar’s remarks as antisemitic, and she apologized — but did not take down the offending tweets.

CAIR issued a statement defending Omar in the controversy:

Anti-Semitism is real, and real anti-Semites pose a serious threat to our Jewish neighbors.
That’s why politicians must stop disingenuously using accusations of anti-Semitism to silence legitimate criticism of a foreign nation’s discriminatory policies.

We applaud Congresswoman Ilhan Omar & Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, and others for courageously speaking the truth about the Israeli government’s policies of racial, religious and ethnic segregation against Christian and Muslim Palestinians, among others.

Criticizing Israeli government policies–and the lobby groups which advocate for those policies on Capitol Hill, like AIPAC–is not anti-Semitic, just as criticizing Saudi government policies–and the lobby groups which advocate for those policies on Capitol Hill–is not Islamophobic.

In 2015, CAIR’s Los Angeles director suggested that the U.S. was partly to blame for the San Bernardino terror attack, in which 14 people were killed, due to American foreign policy. CAIR also offered legal assistance to the family of the terrorists who carried out the attack.

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Nadler claims there is ‘open collusion’ between Trump and Russia despite Mueller findings

Despite Attorney General William Barr saying that Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of wrongdoing regarding the Trump campaign’s contact with Russian operatives, Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., concluded on Sunday that there is still evidence of “open collusion.”

Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said that the meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Russian associates in 2016 at Trump Tower signified that “there was in plain sight open collusion with the Russians.”

In a four-page letter sent late last month, Barr wrote that Mueller's investigation did not find evidence that President Trump's campaign "conspired or coordinated" with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.

The letter to Congress also said Mueller's report "does not exonerate" the president on obstruction and instead "sets out evidence on both sides of the question." Barr said there was not sufficient evidence to determine an obstruction of justice offense against Trump.

HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE DEMOCRATS AUTHORIZE SUBPOENAS FOR MUELLER REPORT

Nadler called Barr a “very biased person” who serves the interests of the White House and called on the attorney general to release the full, un-redacted version of Mueller’s report to the judiciary committee. He argued that his committee has a solid track record of making sure no sensitive information is leaked to the public.

"The committee has a very good record of protecting information which it decides to protect,” he said.

Nadler also addressed Republican complaints over his calls for the release of the Mueller report, despite vehemently opposing the release of the Starr report in 1998.

Nadler was one of the 17 lawmakers still serving in the lower house of Congress today, who back in 1998 voted against release of Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s report on his investigation into President Bill Clinton.

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The Starr Report began in 1994 under Independent Counsel Robert Fiske as a probe into “Whitewater,” a land deal involving President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas. But it eventually morphed into questions of obstruction of justice involving Clinton over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

The House voted 363-63 to release the Starr Report on Sept. 11, 1998, with all 63 no votes coming from Democrats.

Nadler called the comparison “apples and oranges,” and argued that the Starr report concerned the release of grand jury information to the public rather than to Congress.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Swedish Schoolgirls Beaten, Called “Whores” by Migrant Students – Report

Swedish girls are being kept home from school after newly-arrived migrant students turned the environment into "anarchy," according to independent journalist Joakim Lamotte.

Lamotte says he was contacted by multiple parents from Halmstad, Sweden, after their children were threatened, beaten, and called "whores" at a school where migrants are allegedly dealing drugs and carrying weapons.

"In recent days I have been contacted by parents of children at the Österledskolan outside Halmstad," Lamotte reports. "They describe a school where insecurity escalated and many now choose therefore to keep their children at home because the school cannot guarantee the children's safety. According to the parents, it is a group of new arrivals who harass their daughters."

Lamotte quotes the testimonies of anonymous parents who say accusations of "racism" are flying freely, hindering free discussion about the issues at hand.

"Threats and violations occur daily at school," said one parent. "Our daughter, who goes to eighth grade, has been exposed since the second week of the seventh grade. She has been called, for example, 'whore' and threatened several times that she should get beaten."

"The police have been summoned many times. Last week, the police were in place on three occasions. An ambulance has also been called to the school during assaults."

Parents say they believe management are not taking the problems seriously, instead attacking those who raise concerns about conditions at the school.

"Right now, it is anarchy at the school and they have lost control completely," said another parent. "At the same time, school management wants to silence what is happening and blame the events on racism. Racism certainly occurs, but I and many others do not see it as the problem."

"The reason for this is special treatment and that the newly arrived young people are not integrated. On Friday, two girls were hit and kicked by the new arrivals."

Lamotte says the head of school has hung the phone up on him during multiple attempts to contact him.

Europe appears lost as reports emerge that German police are actually covering up migrant crimes to push the narrative that migrants are never violent or break the law and should be welcomed with open arms.

(PHOTO: David Ramos/Getty Images)

Source: InfoWars

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Saudi Aramco shifts strategy in China to boost oil sales

FILE PHOTO: An oil tanker is being loaded at Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura oil refinery and oil terminal in Saudi Arabia
FILE PHOTO: An oil tanker is being loaded at Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura oil refinery and oil terminal in Saudi Arabia May 21, 2018.REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah/File Photo

March 14, 2019

By Rania El Gamal, Chen Aizhu and Min Zhang

DUBAI/SINGAPORE/BEIJING (Reuters) – Rising Russian and U.S. competition has pushed Saudi Aramco to find new buyers for its oil in China, encouraging a shift toward independent refiners and newcomers to the business.

It reflects a new strategy for the Saudi Arabian oil giant after years of dealing almost exclusively with major state-owned Chinese energy firms, industry sources say.

But the change in tack may not offer the same returns. Aramco’s new partners lack the scale and marketing reach of PetroChina and Sinopec Corp, the state-run firms that dominate China’s refining, petrochemical and retail fuel business, analysts say.

Aramco had been talking to PetroChina for years about a refining venture in Yunnan province in the southwest, but industry sources said the plans had been effectively shelved due to poor economics and disagreement over marketing rights.

Aramco, which did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment for this report, has instead turned to new and independent players in China’s refining and petrochemical industry.

In February, it agreed to form a venture with Chinese defense conglomerate Norinco to develop a $10 billion refining and petrochemicals complex in the city of Panjin, in the northeast province of Liaoning.

It also signed memorandums of understanding to expand its activities in Zhejiang province in the east. The plans include buying 9 percent of Zhejiang Petrochemical to secure a stake in a 800,000 barrel per day (bpd) refinery and petrochemicals complex in the city of Zhoushan, south of Shanghai.

The deals are part of a strategy shift to court new buyers, including smaller, independently run refiners, known as “teapots”, industry sources say.

“The private players are more open and entrepreneurial. They also need the oil and the experience,” said one source familiar with the recent deals in China.

CATCHING UP

The strategy has helped put Saudi Arabia on track to lift oil exports to China to 1.5 million bpd in the first quarter, catching up with Russia which has been China’s No. 1 supplier for three years in a row.

In 2018, Russia exported the equivalent of 1.43 million bpd to China, while Saudi Arabia exported 1.135 million bpd, customs data showed. U.S. shipments are still much smaller but have risen fast, surging 25 percent in 2018 to just under 250,000 bpd, although a trade row made them stall in December.

A change of management in Chinese state-run PetroChina and Sinopec, as well as tougher competition from rival crude suppliers, have made it harder for Aramco to secure deals, such as the Yunnan refining venture, industry sources said.

Aramco signed a memorandum of understanding in 2011 with PetroChina to supply oil to the Yunnan plant. But talks on the deal hit a roadblock in mid-2018, the sources said.

“Yunnan went on for five years and it is dead now,” one of the industry sources said. The deal was undermined by the cost of sending crude by pipeline across Myanmar and because PetroChina was not keen to share its marketing rights with Aramco, the sources said.

Aramco aims to expand refining and petrochemical output in China through long-term contracts and access to retail and marketing rights with other firms. But analysts say its new partners may not offer the same reach as the big, state players.

“Independents have a smaller footprint across the value chain and less experience in trading,” said Michal Meidan of Energy Aspects. “The challenge of partnering with independents is precisely the limits of access to the retail market.”

MARKET SHARE

Sinopec and PetroChina control about two-thirds of retail sales in China, while independents together have about a quarter, industry experts say. The Norinco deal includes a plan to set up a fuel retail business and a marketing venture between Aramco, North Huajin and Liaoning Transportation Construction Investment Group Co. The refining complex is in a region dominated by PetroChina and has one of China’s slowest economic growth rates. But it lies close to North Korea, offering scope in future to expand beyond China, sources familiar with the deal say.

Liaoning Transportation leases fuel stations to PetroChina and Sinopec, so the new venture might still need to buy the Chinese majors out or wait until the leases end, said a Huajin oil executive, who asked not to be named.

Norinco declined to comment.

In Zhejiang, alongside taking a stake in a refining and petrochemical complex, Aramco would utilize an oil storage facility to serve Aramco’s Asian customers and set up a retail network in the province with Zhejiang Energy.

Securing retail rights proved a challenge for Aramco when dealing with state firms.

Zhejiang Energy was not immediately available for comment.

A Zhejiang-based executive, who asked not to be named, said Zhejiang Petrochemical had similar memorandums of understanding for retail cooperation with Western energy firms, suggesting Aramco faced competition in the market.

The executive also said the Chinese partners had yet to pick a site for setting up the storage facility and associated crude terminal.

Zhejiang Petrochemical declined to comment.

(Editing by Edmund Blair)

Source: OANN

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Tiger woods celebrates after winning the 2019 Masters
FILE PHOTO: Golf – Masters – Augusta National Golf Club – Augusta, Georgia, U.S. – April 14, 2019 – Tiger Woods of the U.S. celebrates on the 18th hole after winning the 2019 Masters. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

April 26, 2019

Tiger Woods is sending a message that he thinks he still has enough left, emotionally and physically, to win three more major championships to tie Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 titles.

Speaking to GolfTV in his first sit-down interview since the Masters, Woods said he has taken some time off since his victory at Augusta National, which still doesn’t feel real.

“Honestly, it’s hard to believe,” Woods said. “I was texting one of my good friends last night … that I couldn’t believe that I won the tournament. That it really hasn’t sunk in. I haven’t started doing anything. I’ve just been laying there. And every now and again, I’ll look over there on the couch and there’s the jacket.”

That’s the fifth green jacket for the 43-year-old Woods, who hadn’t won a major tournament since the 2008 U.S. Open. Along the way, four back surgeries, a divorce and other personal issues derailed him.

He said he has been spending time with his children – daughter Sam, 11, and son Charlie, 10 – who weren’t born when their father was the most dominant golfer on the planet.

“They never knew golf to be a good thing in my life and only the only thing they remember is that it brought this incredible amount of pain to their dad and they don’t want to ever want to see their dad in pain,” Woods said. “And so to now have them see this side of it, the side that I’ve experienced for so many years of my life, but I had a battle to get back to this point, it feels good.”

He said he hopes – maybe expects — they’ll see this side again.

And no one will take Woods for granted at the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black Course on Long Island, N.Y., which starts May 16.

Woods said he’ll be ready for a course he already conquered once in a major: the 2002 U.S. Open.

“I’m doing all the visual stuff, but I haven’t put in the physical work yet. But it’s probably coming this weekend,” he said.

Before Woods encountered health and personal problems, it was expected that topping Nicklaus’ major mark was “when” and not “if.” Then the certainty went away, but Woods thought he still had a chance.

“I always thought it was possible, if I had everything go my way. It took him an entire career to get to 18, so now that I’ve had another extension to my career – one that I didn’t think I had a couple of years ago – if I do things correctly and everything falls my way, yeah, it’s a possibility. I’m never going to say it’s not.

“Now I just need to have a lot of things go my way, and who’s to say that it will or will not happen? That’s what the future holds, I don’t know. The only thing I can promise you is this: that I will be prepared.”

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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Maria Butina, the Russian woman who was accused of being a secret agent for the Russian government, was sentenced to 18 months in prison Friday by a federal judge in Washington after pleading guilty last year to a conspiracy charge.

Butina, who has already served nine months behind bars, will get credit for time served and can possibly get credit for good behavior, the judge said. She will be removed from the U.S. promptly on completion of her time, the judge added, and returned to Russia.

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

An emotional and apologetic Butina said in court Friday she is “truly sorry” and regrets not registering as a foreign agent.

“I feel ashamed and embarrassed,” she said, adding that her “reputation is ruined.”

Butina has been jailed since her arrest in July 2018. She entered the court Friday wearing a dark green prison jumpsuit and spoke in clear English, with a slight Russian accent.

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

Butina’s lawyer, Robert Driscoll, said after the sentencing they had hoped for a “better outcome,” but expressed a desire for Butina to be released to her family by the fall.

Prosecutors had claimed Butina used her contacts with the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast to develop relationships with U.S. politicians and gather information for Russia.

Prosecutors also have said that Butina’s boyfriend, conservative political operative Paul Erickson, identified in court papers as “U.S. Person 1,” helped her establish ties with the NRA.

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

In their filings, prosecutors claim federal agents found Butina had contact information for people suspected of being employed by Russia’s Federal Security Services, or FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. Inside her home, they found notes referring to a potential job offer from the FSB, according to the documents.

Investigators recovered several emails and Twitter direct message conversations in which Butina referred to the need to keep her work secret and, in one instance, said it should be “incognito.” Prosecutors said Butina had contact with Russian intelligence officials and that the FBI photographed her dining with a diplomat suspected of being a Russian intelligence agent.

Fox News’ Jason Donner, Bill Mears, Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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An official Sri Lankan police Twitter account was deleted after it misidentified an American human rights activist as a suspect in the country’s Easter Sunday terrorist attacks.

On Thursday, police posted the names and photos of six people that they said were at-large suspects in the bombings that killed more than 250 people.

However, one of the names on the list was Muslim U.S. activist Amara Majeed, who quickly tweeted that she had been falsely identified.

“I have this morning been FALSELY identified by the Sri Lankan government as one of the ISIS terrorists that committed the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka. What a thing to wake up to!” she wrote.

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

She wrote in a follow-up tweet that the claim was “obviously completely false” and asked social media users to “please stop implicating and associating me with these horrific attacks.”

“And next time, be more diligent about releasing such information that has the potential to deeply violate someone’s family and community,” she continued.

Later, she wrote an update saying police apologized for wrongly mistaking her as a suspect.

Police said in a statement: “However, although one of the released images was identified as one Abdul Cader Fathima Khadhiya in the information provided by the CID, the CID has now informed that a) the individual whose image was labeled as Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya is not in fact Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya b) the individual pictured is not wanted for questioning c) Abdul Cader Fathima is the correct name of the suspect wanted by the CID.”

On Friday, the account, @SriLankaPolice2 was deleted with no explanation. Police did not release more information regarding the mistake.

Majeed, who founded “The Hijab Project” when she was 16 years old, told the Baltimore Sun that it was hurtful to be linked to the attacks.

“Sri Lanka is my motherland,” the Brown University student said. “It’s very painful to be associated with [the bombings].”

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Mohamed Zahran, the suspected leader of the attacks which targeted six hotels and churches, killed himself in a suicide bombing at the Shangri-La hotel. Police also said they had arrested the second-in-command of the group, called National Towheed Jamaat. Catholic churches in Sri Lanka canceled all Sunday Masses until further notice over concerns that they remain a top target of Islamic State-linked extremists.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Easter Sunday, in Colombo
FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, five days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Catholic churches and luxury hotels across the island on Easter Sunday, in Colombo, Sri Lanka April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

KATTANKUDY, Sri Lanka (Reuters) – Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran was 12 years old when he began his studies at the Jamiathul Falah Arabic College. He was a nobody, with no claim to scholarship other than ambition.

Zahran and his four brothers and sisters squeezed into a two-room house with their parents in a small seaside town in eastern Sri Lanka; their father was a poor man who sold packets of food on the street and had a reputation for being a petty thief.

“His father didn’t do much,” recalled the school’s vice principal, S.M. Aliyar, laughing out loud.

The boy surprised the school with his sharp mind. For three years, Zahran practiced memorizing the Koran. Next came his studies in Islamic law. But the more he learned, the more Zahran argued that his teachers were too liberal in their reading of the holy book.

“He was against our teaching and the way we interpreted the Koran – he wanted his radical Islam,” said Aliyar. “So we kicked him out.”

Aliyar, now 73 with a long white beard, remembers the day Zahran left in 2005. “His father came and asked, ‘Where can he go?’.”

The school would hear again of Mohamed Zahran. And the world now knows his name. The Sri Lankan government has identified him as the ringleader of a group that carried out a series of Easter Sunday suicide bombings in the country on April 21.

The blasts killed more than 250 people in churches and luxury hotels, one of the deadliest-ever such attacks in South Asia. There were nine suicide bombers who blew apart men, women and children as they sat to pray or ate breakfast.

Most of the attackers were well-educated and from wealthy families, with some having been abroad to study, according to Sri Lankan officials.

That description does not, however, fit their alleged leader, a man said to be in his early 30s, who authorities say died in the slaughter. Zahran was different.

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

Sri Lanka’s national leadership has come under heavy criticism for failing to heed warnings from Indian intelligence services – at least three in April alone – that an attack was pending. But Zahran’s path from provincial troublemaker to alleged jihadist mastermind was marked by years of missed or ignored signals that the man with a thick beard and paunch was dangerous.

His increasingly militant brand of Islam was allowed to grow inside a marginalized minority community – barely 10 percent of the country’s roughly 20 million people are Muslim – against a backdrop of a dysfunctional developing nation.

The top official at the nation’s defense ministry resigned on Thursday, saying that some institutions under his charge had failed.

For much of his adult life, Zahran, 33, courted controversy inside the Muslim community itself.

In the internet age, that problem did not stay local. Zahran released online videos calling for jihad and threatening bloodshed.

After the blasts, Islamic State claimed credit and posted a video of Zahran, clutching an assault rifle, standing before the group’s black flag and pledging allegiance to its leader.

The precise relationship between Zahran and Islamic State is not yet known. An official with India’s security services, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that during a raid on a suspected Islamic State cell by the National Investigation Agency earlier this year officers found copies of Zahran’s videos. The operation was in the state of Tamil Nadu, just across a thin strait of ocean from Sri Lanka.

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

Back in 2005, Zahran was looking to make his way in the world. His hometown of Kattankudy is some seven hours’ drive from Colombo on the other side of the island nation, past the countless palm trees, roadside Buddha statues, cashew hawkers and an occasional lumbering elephant in the bush. It is a town of about 40,000 people, a dot on the eastern coast with no clear future for an impoverished young man who’d just been expelled.

Zahran joined a mosque in 2006, the Dharul Athar, and gained a place on its management committee. But within three years they’d had a falling out.

“He wanted to speak more independently, without taking advice from elders,” said the mosque’s imam, or spiritual leader, M.T.M. Fawaz.

Also, the young man was more conservative, Fawaz said, objecting, for instance, to women wearing bangles or earrings.

“The rest of us come together as community leaders but Zahran wanted to speak for himself,” said Fawaz, a man with broad shoulders lounging with a group of friends in a back office of the mosque after evening prayers. “He was a black sheep who broke free.”

Mohamed Yusuf Mohamed Thaufeek, a friend who met Zahran at school and later became an adherent of his, said the problems revolved around Zahran’s habit of misquoting Islamic scriptures.

The mosque’s committee banned him from preaching for three months in 2009. Zahran stormed off.

“We treated him like a spoiled child, a very narrow-minded person who was always causing some trouble,” said the head of the committee, Mohamed Ismail Mohamed Naushad, a timber supplier who shook his head at the memory.

Now on his own, Zahran began to collect a group of followers who met in what Fawaz described as “a hut”.

At about that time, Zahran, then 23, married a young girl from a small town outside the capital of Colombo and brought his bride back to Kattankudy, according to his sister, Mathaniya.

“I didn’t have much of a connection with her – she was 14,” she said.

Despite being “a bit rough-edged”, Zahran was a skilled speaker and others his age were drawn to his speeches and Koranic lessons, said Thaufeek. He traveled the countryside at times, giving his version of religious instruction as he went.

Also, Zahran had found a popular target: the town’s Sufi population, who practice a form of Islam often described a mystical, but which to conservatives is heresy.

Tensions in the area went back some years. In 2004, there was a grenade attack on a Sufi mosque and in 2006 several homes of Sufis were set afire. Announcements boomed from surrounding mosques at the time calling for a Sufi spiritual leader to be killed, said Sahlan Khalil Rahman, secretary of a trust that oversees a group of Sufi mosques.

He blamed followers of the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam that some locals say became more popular after funding from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Wahhabism, flowed to mosques in Kattankudy.

It was, Rahman said, an effort “to convert Sufis into Wahhabis through this terrorism”. Rahman handed over a photograph album showing charred homes, bullet holes sprayed across an office wall and a shrine’s casket upended.

ONLINE RADICAL

It was an ideal backdrop for Zahran’s bellicose delivery and apparent sense of religious destiny.

He began holding rallies, bellowing insults through loudspeakers that reverberated inside the Sufis’ house of worship as they tried to pray.

In 2012, Zahran started a mosque of his own. The Sufis were alarmed and, Rahman said, passed on complaints to both local law enforcement and eventually national government offices. No action was taken.

The then-officer in charge of Kattankudy police, Ariyabandhu Wedagedara, said in a telephone interview that he couldn’t arrest people simply because of theological differences.

     “The problem at the time was between followers of different Islamic sects – Zahran was not a major troublemaker, but he and followers of other sects, including the Sufis, were at loggerheads,” Wedagedara said.

Zahran found another megaphone: the internet. His Facebook page was taken down after the bombings, but Muslims in the area said his video clips had previously achieved notoriety.

His speeches went from denouncing Sufis to “kafirs”, or non-believers, in general. Zahran’s sister, Mathaniya, said in an interview that she thought “his ideas became more radical from listening to Islamic State views on the Internet”.

In one undated video, Zahran, in a white tunic and standing in front of an image of flames, boomed in a loud voice: “You will not have time to pick up the remains of blown-up bodies. We’ll keep sending those insulting Allah to hell.”

“HARD TO TAKE”

Zahran spoke in Tamil, making his words available to young Muslims clicking on their cellphones in Kattankudy and other towns like it during a period when, in both 2014 and 2018, reports and images spread of Sinhalese Buddhists rioting against Muslims in Sri Lanka.

In 2017, Zahran’s confrontations boiled over. At a rally near a Sufi community, his followers came wielding swords. At least one man was hacked and hospitalized. The police arrested several people connected to Zahran, including his father and one of his brothers. Zahran slipped away from public view.

That December, the mosque Zahran founded released a public notice disowning him. Thaufeek, his friend from school, is now the head. He counted the places that Zahran had been driven away from – his school, the Dharul Athar mosque and then, “we ourselves kicked him out, which would have been hard for him to take”.

The next year, a group of Buddha statues was vandalized in the town of Mawanella, about five hours drive from Kattankudy. There, in the lush mountains of Sri Lanka’s interior, Zahran had taken up temporary residence.

“He was preaching to kill people,” said A.G.M. Anees, who has served as an imam at a small mosque in the area for a decade. “This is not Islam, this is violence.”

Zahran went into hiding once more.

On the Thursday morning before the Easter Sunday bombings, Zahran’s sister-in-law knocked on the door of a neighbor who did seamstress work near Kattankudy. She handed over a parcel of fabric and asked for it to be sewn into a tunic by the end of the day.

“She said she was going on a family trip,” said the neighbor, M.H. Sithi Nazlya.

Zahran’s sister says that her parents turned off their cellphones on the Friday. On Sunday, when she visited their home, they were gone.

She does not know if Zahran arranged for them to be taken somewhere safe. Or why he would have carried out the bombing.

But now in Kattankudy, and in many other places, people are talking about Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran.

(Reporting by Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam; Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani, Shihar Aneez and Alasdair Pal; Editing by John Chalmers and Alex Richardson)

Source: OANN

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