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Italy considering compensation claim against EU over bank rescue: Conte

Italian Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte arrives at a European Union leaders summit in Brussels
Italian Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte arrives at a European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium March 22, 2019. Julien Warnand/Pool via REUTERS

March 22, 2019

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Italy is considering compensation claims against the European Commission for the strict interpretation it gave to EU banking rules, the Italian prime minister said on Friday, after a landmark EU ruling this week over a bank rescue.

On Tuesday the EU general court overturned Brussels’ decision to block a 2014 rescue plan of small Italian lender Tercas, prompting compensation calls from Italian banks which argued that subsequent banking rescues in Italy were more costly because of the Commission’s strict position.

“We have to draw political and juridical conclusions, including about a compensation plan,” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told reporters after a summit of EU leaders in Brussels.

Earlier this week Italian Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero Milanesi had also flagged the possibility of a legal action against Brussels.

Conte backed Moavero’s comments but called for a cautious approach as the EU Commission could also appeal the ruling, he told reporters.

Conte, whose eurosceptic government has used public funds to help Italy’s ailing Carige bank and has not ruled out further support, said the Tercas ruling “set a precedent” which could enable a less strict application of EU banking rules.

The European Commission has said it is assessing the judgment and its consequences on future interventions.

Seven banks have been rescued in Italy since the Tercas case, including Banca Monte dei Paschi, the world’s oldest lender still in operation, and a smaller bank in Tuscany whose collapse and the subsequent wipeout of its creditors triggered the suicide of one of them.

The Tercas rescue was orchestrated by Italy’s deposit guarantee fund, which Brussels said could not be used for measures other than its core function of paying back savers hit by a bank failure.

The EU court ruling, labeled “historic” by EU lawmakers, effectively dismissed the Commission’s argument.

(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: OANN

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Barclays may cut costs in ‘challenging’ economy

London-based Barclays bank says it may cut costs if "challenging" economic conditions persists throughout the year.

The warning came as the bank said Thursday that revenue dropped 2% to 5.25 billion pounds ($6.77 billion) in the first quarter of 2019. Pre-tax profit from Barclays' corporate and investment banking business fell 30%.

Barclays says the "income environment in the quarter was challenging" and it will reduce spending "if this were to persist for the remainder of the year."

The bank says it has already cut bonus and compensation payouts across the corporate and investment bank to reflect the division's poor performance.

Barclays reported quarterly net income of 1.04 billion pounds, compared with a year-earlier loss of 764 million pounds, when the bank set aside 2 billion pounds to cover misconduct.

Source: Fox News World

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Disturbing Increase in Colorectal Cancer in Young Adults

This article is dedicated to Breanne and Aston in hopes that efforts to identify what is driving this new epidemic of colorectal cancer in our children will lead not only to more effective treatments, but ultimately prevent this devastating disease.

I’m well aware of colorectal cancer in that the disease personally touched my mother in her 70s and my brother in his late 50s. But I was not aware of the alarming new trend of young adults in their 20s and 30s being diagnosed with this devastating disease. Recently, two of my friends in their early thirties have had their lives touched by colon cancer. Before this turn of events, they were incredibly healthy, athletic and taking on the world! Now, they are instead bravely facing surgery, chemotherapy and major lifestyle changes in an effort to regain their health.

A recent WebMD article acknowledged that one of the most significant and disturbing developments in colorectal cancer is the marked increase in younger individuals (which is decades before the American Cancer Society recommends people get screened for the disease). According to the article, by 2030, colorectal cancer incidence rates will be up 90% in people between ages 20 and 34, and 28% for people between ages 35 and 49. What is even more concerning is that often they are not diagnosed until later stages of the disease because most doctors are not thinking “cancer” when a young adult complains of abdominal pain or rectal bleeding.

Researchers describe this upward trend, which began in the late 1980s, as “ominous” and “worrisome.” Although the conventional wisdom is that risk for colorectal cancer (also referred to as colon, bowel or rectal cancer) increases with age, the rate at which adults over age 50 are being diagnosed has been declining. A 2017 study showed that those born around 1990 (i.e., currently in their late twenties) “have double the risk of colon cancer…and quadruple the risk of rectal cancer” compared with adults born around 1950. Similar patterns are playing out in other countries, with worldwide colon cancer deaths expected to increase by 60% by 2035, “especially among younger people.”

Why would Gen Xers and millennials increasingly be presenting with colorectal malignancies once deemed rare in the young? Most observers seem to be “grasping at straws” when it comes to furnishing an explanation. Some want to pin the blame on obesity as a “prime suspect”—but obesity cannot explain why colorectal cancers are repeatedly cropping up in healthy young athletes in “peak physical shape.” A leading oncologist whose colorectal cancer patients are mostly under age 40 recently confessed, “It’s hard to blame it on obesity alone. We suspect there is also something else going on.” The oncologist did not venture to guess what the “something else” might be.

According to the American Cancer Society, it takes anywhere from 10 to 15 years for an abnormal cell in the lining of the colon to develop into cancer. This means that the first abnormal cell growth that resulted in cancer occurred during childhood. Therefore, it is essential that we look at potential culprits and exposures occurring in childhood.

There are two possible contributors that temporally coincide not only with the spike in young adult colorectal cancers but also with the horrifying increase in childhood cancers. The first is the vaccine schedule’s inclusion of more viral vaccines since the late 1980s, and the known fact that viral vaccines are prone to various forms of contamination. Second, over the same time period, young people’s exposure to glyphosate has exploded, wreaking havoc with their gut bacteria—and intestinal imbalances have a well-documented association with colorectal cancer. In this article, I discuss the vaccine contamination issue; in Part II, I will consider glyphosate and the colorectal cancer crisis.


Alex exposes the globalist agenda that uses government agencies to cover up crimes against the population.

Learning From History

Viral vaccines have been plagued with problems of contamination since their earliest days, and, as Children’s Health Defense has discussed previously, these problems furnish a plausible link between vaccines and cancer. In fact, an independent website devoted to this topic describes the vaccine-cancer connection as “the biggest medical scandal in history,” making the crucial point that vaccine scientists’ use of contaminated cell lines from “the very birth of virology” has been “perpetuating and causing cancer” for decades. The Institute of Medicine tacitly acknowledged this in 2002 when it cited biological evidence supporting the theory that contamination of polio vaccines with simian virus 40 (SV40)—vaccines that were administered to millions of Americans in the late 1950s and early 1960s—“could contribute to human cancers.”

In the mid-1950s, Jonas Salk used the world’s most famous laboratory cells—HeLa cells—to develop his initial polio vaccine. Scientists had just succeeded in creating the cells—the first “immortal” (meaning endlessly cloned) human cell line—by feeding a cancer victim’s (Henrietta Lacks’) highly malignant cervical cancer cells with a nutrient mix containing blood and tissue from human placenta, beef embryo and live chicken heart. To the researchers’ delight, the HeLa cells responded to this treatment by multiplying “indefinitely” instead of aging.

However, researchers and government regulators soon backed off from the use of HeLa cells in vaccine production, deeming their malignant characteristics of rapid and immortal cell growth “not acceptable…for vaccine development” due to the “theoretical risk of transmitting cancer.” To produce viral vaccines, they instead relied on living animal cells that they erroneously perceived as safer, including the monkey cell line used in later iterations of Salk’s vaccine and other living cell types such as chicken embryos.

In Salk’s day, scientists may not have realized that their laboratory hodge-podge of animal and human blood and tissue was secretly facilitating the incorporation of “known and unknown viruses and bacteria” into their cell lines, nor that the HeLa cells themselves were capable of aggressively contaminating other cell lines—but a whistleblower named Walter Nelson-Rees later showed that this was in fact the case. Nelson-Rees proved in the 1970s that, very early on, Salk’s monkey cell line had been “invaded and taken over” by HeLa cells, and Salk unknowingly injected the contaminants into some of his human subjects. More recently, scientist Judy Mikovits has catalogued the risks of using animal tissues and cells to grow human viruses for viral vaccine production, stating that “re-injecting that material back into humans could introduce new animal viruses into the human population.”

Circling Back to Tumor Cells

For many years, Nelson-Rees and others persisted in trying to draw attention to the cell culture contamination problem, to little avail. In fact, rather than heed these conscientious researchers’ cautions, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) vaccine regulators, in 2012, characterized the “current repertoire” of animal-derived cell lines as “inadequate” and proposed a startlingly risky about-face. Ignoring the past problems with HeLa cells and other forms of cell culture contamination, the FDA suggested that “cell lines derived from tumors may be the optimal and in some cases the only cell substrate that can be used to propagate certain vaccine viruses.

Matching deeds to words, the FDA also wasted no time in approving, that same year, the first cell-based influenza vaccine, hawking it to the public by praising its apparently superior performance compared to traditional egg-based flu vaccines. The Flucelvax vaccine is made from an immortal cell line “derived from a dog kidney and known to be tumorigenic in mice.” On its website, the FDA discreetly admits that “latent” cancer-causing viruses could potentially be present in these tumor-based cell lines and could pose a threat, “since they might become active under vaccine manufacturing conditions.” The agency also notes that latent viruses are “hard to detect using standard methods.”

The rapid approval of immortalized cell line vaccines stands in stark contrast to an internal document that I wrote about last year in which a leading FDA official contended, in 1999, that modern advances in vaccine technology were rapidly outpacing the ability to predict potential vaccine-related adverse events. The official argued for closer attention to safety issues from the earliest stages of vaccine development. “One of the important things is that the technology used to make these vaccines actually exceeds the science and technology to understand how these vaccines work and to predict how they will work,” stated Dr. Peter Patriarca, MD, Director of the Viral Products Division of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). While scientists use continuous cell lines for their ability to be propagated and grow viruses to a higher titer, Patriarca acknowledged that “the worst thing we are concerned about is malignancy, because some of these continuous cells even have the potential for growing tumors in laboratory animals.”

(Photo by Rubén Díaz / Flickr)

Something Old, Something New?

In an article describing pathogenic vaccine contamination, one author points to evidence that immortal cell lines “react differently” to various animal species, even when the species are “closely related,” and asks whether vaccine contaminants may likewise affect groups of people (such as the elderly versus infants) differently. This is an interesting question, given that one of the notable features of the colorectal cancers appearing in twenty- and thirty-somethings is that the malignancies often exhibit more biological aggressiveness than the colorectal cancers observed in older adults. One study reported that a unique type of cancer cell called “signet cell histology”—cells that “migrate more freely and exhibit a more aggressive mode of spread”—was nearly five times more prevalent in rectal cancer patients under age 40 than in older patients.

Other researchers have used high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques to make similar observations. Those methods reveal “different rates of genetic alterations” between adolescent and young adult colorectal cancer patients compared to older adults, “indicating potential molecular differences in the disease state and suggesting the need for alternative treatment strategies in younger patients.” Certainly, the American Cancer Society’s colorectal cancer screening recommendations, revised downward from age 50 to age 45 in 2018, will do little to help identify these aggressive cancers in younger adults.

Under the U.S. vaccine schedule, children receive numerous and recurrent doses of viral vaccines cultured in either human, monkey, bovine or chicken cells or in a multispecies combination of these cell types. These include viral vaccines against chickenpox, hepatitis, polio, rotavirus and measles-mumps-rubella. Compared to adults, young people have far greater exposure to these viral vaccines—and their inevitable contaminants. Could this have something to do with the age-related molecular differences being observed in colorectal cancers? No one really knows, because while the pharmaceutical industry is busily trying to develop cancer vaccines, it does not make a practice of assessing existing vaccines’ cancer risks. The all-too-typical disclaimer contained in most vaccine package inserts states that the vaccine “has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic potential.”

The unacceptably high numbers of young adults who, in the prime of life, are being sidelined by debilitating colorectal cancers is a red flag telling us that we need to do better. We must find answers for what is causing this new epidemic of cancer in our children and what can be done to prevent it from occurring.

The viewpoints expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Infowars.


Alex Jones coins a new word while breaking down how elites manipulate online comments to control content creators.

Source: InfoWars

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Michael Bennet on cancer diagnosis: ‘I don’t see this stopping me’ from 2020 run

EXETER, N.H. – Sen. Michael Bennet says he’s optimistic he’ll soon be running for president.

The two-term Colorado Democrat – who announced last week that he recently was diagnosed with prostate cancer – told Fox News, “I feel really lucky. It was caught early and this is a really treatable form of cancer and we have insurance. I think I’m going to be fine. I hope I will because I really want to have the opportunity to run in 2020.”

Bennet was interviewed Sunday as he campaigned in New Hampshire, the state that holds the first primary in the race for the White House.

BENNET ANNOUNCES HE HAS PROSTATE CANCER

Pointing to then-Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts – the 2004 Democratic nominee who had successful cancer surgery at the onset of his presidential campaign – Bennet, 54, said, “John was 59 when he had the same operation. He had it and two weeks later he was in California, doing what he needed to do out there to campaign. So I take this seriously, but if all goes well I don’t see this stopping me.”

Bennet didn’t bring up his diagnosis during a question-and-answer session with the Rockingham County Democrats that lasted over an hour, but members of the crowd wished him well.

“I don’t feel the need to bring it up myself. I’m glad to talk about it if people want to raise it,” he told Fox News.

The diagnosis apparently hasn’t slowed Bennet down on the campaign trail. The Exeter event was the second to last in a jam-packed two-day swing through New Hampshire. On Monday he’s headed to Iowa, which votes first in the presidential caucus and primary calendar.

BENNET CRITICIZES REP. OMAR'S COMMENTS AS 'HATEFUL'

Bennet, who said he had planned to declare his candidacy for president this month, explained that he hoped to jump into the White House race a few weeks after next week’s surgery, if he gets a clean bill of health.

Michael Bennet in Exeter, N.H., talking to Rockingham County Democrats.

Michael Bennet in Exeter, N.H., talking to Rockingham County Democrats. (Fox News)

That wouldn’t leave a lot of time for Bennet to make the stage at the first round of Democratic presidential primary debates, set for late June.

“We’ve made it a little bit harder on myself although I wouldn’t have asked for this issue,” he explained. “I think it’s important to be on the debate stage, whether it’s the first debate or the second debate, however you’re able to do it, and we will work to get on there. I don’t want to make excuses for it, but we slowed down a little bit.”

FIRST 2020 DEBATES TO BE HELD IN JUNE

When Bennet likely jumps into the race, he’ll be facing off against a large field of Democratic contenders (it currently stands at 17), many with bigger name ID and bigger campaign war chests. And there’s already a candidate from Colorado in the race. The state’s former two-term governor – John Hickenlooper – launched his campaign last month.

Many of the leading contenders are supporters of the single-payer “Medicare for All” health care proposal, a top wish-list item for the progressive base of the Democratic Party.

However, Bennet isn’t endorsing “Medicare for All.” Instead, he teamed up with Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia to come up with a plan called “Medicare-X” which would establish a public option for people maintaining their private insurance.

“I wouldn’t even call it extreme or left wing or too progressive or any of that stuff,” Bennet said when asked about “Medicare for All.” “I know people out there want to have a public option to compete with private insurance. I know they want to have a choice and I know they don’t want to be dictated by the federal government what that choice has to be. That’s how I developed the idea for 'Medicare X.'”

He touted that his plan is “more achievable.”

And, pointing to President Trump’s efforts to scrap ObamaCare, Bennet argued that “we have a president who has spent his administration trying to take health care away from millions of Americans.”

Bennet, who served as superintendent of the Denver public school system before first winning election to the U.S. Senate in 2010, highlighted his push to reform education.

“This will make me unelectable but I’ll say it on the first day – I think kids should go to school six days a week. And, I don’t think they should go to school nine months a year. I think they should go to school off and on year-round,” Bennet told the crowd.

He highlighted that year-round school would narrow the achievement gap, saying that “in the summertime the more affluent kids gain proficiency, the less affluent kids lose proficiency.”

He also stressed that “this is a place with a lot of low hanging fruit where we can make an enormous difference... with some very smart strategic (federal) funding, we can revolutionize community colleges in this country and we could change dramatically what we’re doing in K-12.”

Bennet also urged that Democrats “need a president and leadership in Washington that’s as strategic as” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

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“It’s not about nice. That guy is not nice. But it’s about following through on what he’s trying to do,” he said of the longtime Republican senator from Kentucky. “We need to be as strategic as McConnell.”

But he added, “I do not believe that we need to be as ruthless as McConnell.”

Source: Fox News Politics

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Lowe’s misses sales forecasts as Canada business struggles

A view of the sign outside the Lowes store in Westminster
A view of the sign outside the Lowes store in Westminster, Colorado February 26, 2014. REUTERS/Rick Wilking/File Photo

February 27, 2019

(Reuters) – U.S. home improvement chain Lowe’s Companies Inc missed Wall Street forecasts for same-store sales on Wednesday, citing poor performance in Canada.

The results follow disappointing numbers from larger rival Home Depot on Tuesday on the back of a cold and wet winter.

Since taking over in July last year, Lowe’s Chief Executive Marvin Ellison has shrunk its struggling Canadian business to less than 300 stores in efforts to boost earnings.

The moves led Lowe’s to record a pre-tax expense of $150 million during the fourth quarter to account for severance and lease obligation costs.

“We anticipate continued weakness in the Canadian housing market in the near-term, but remain confident in our market position in Canada and the long-term potential of that business,” Ellison said in a statement.

The company maintained its sales and earnings projections for 2019.

Sales at Lowe’s stores open for at least 13 months rose 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter ended Feb. 1, below analysts’ average estimate of a 2.03 percent increase, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

It reported a net loss of $824 million, compared with a profit of $554 million a year earlier. Lowe’s recorded $1.6 billion in pre-tax charges, reflecting store closures across North America.

Excluding one-time items, the company earned 80 cents per share, 1 cent more than Wall Street analysts had expected.

Net sales overall rose about 1 percent to $15.65 billion, but missed expectations of $15.74 billion.

(Reporting by Nivedita Balu in Bengaluru; Editing by Sai Sachin Ravikumar)

Source: OANN

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Spring training roundup: Hot Acuna lifts Braves over Cardinals

MLB: Spring Training-Pittsburgh Pirates at Atlanta Braves
Mar 11, 2019; Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA; Atlanta Braves left fielder Ronald Acuna Jr. (13) comes in from the field during the fifth inning against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Champion Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Reinhold Matay-USA TODAY Sports

March 13, 2019

Ronald Acuna Jr. went 3-for-3 with a homer and two RBIs as the Atlanta Braves posted a 5-0 victory over the visiting St. Louis Cardinals on Tuesday at Kissimmee, Fla.

The reigning National League Rookie of the Year had an opposite-field double in the second inning and a run-scoring single in the sixth in addition to the fourth-inning liner over the left-field fence off Cardinals right-hander Miles Mikolas.

“I felt good from the start of camp,” Acuna told reporters through an interpreter after a contest in which he raised his spring average to .360. “But as the games have progressed, I have definitely felt even better.

“I think with those last at-bats, I’ve had a little extra patience. Initially, I think I was still having good at-bats. I just wasn’t getting results. Things are progressing quickly and we’re starting to see the results now.”

Rays 2, Blue Jays 1

Kevin Kiermaier’s seventh-inning sacrifice fly plated the decisive run as Tampa Bay edged host Toronto at Dunedin, Fla. Kevin Pillar had an RBI single for the Blue Jays.

Tigers 4, Red Sox 3

Jordy Mercer slugged a two-run homer to help visiting Detroit beat Boston at Fort Myers, Fla. Red Sox left-hander David Price served up the blast as one of two hits he allowed during three innings.

Twins 10, Pirates 4

LaMonte Wade had a three-run triple to help visiting Minnesota cruise past Pittsburgh at Bradenton, Fla. Adam Frazier contributed a two-run single for the Pirates.

Marlins 8, Mets 1

Brian Anderson hit a two-run homer as Miami trounced visiting New York. Reigning National League Cy Young Award winner Jacob deGrom took the loss while allowing two runs and five hits and striking out six over five innings.

White Sox (ss)-Royals, canceled

The game between Chicago and host Kansas City at Surprise, Ariz., was washed out due to persistent rain.

Mariners-White Sox (ss), canceled

Seattle and host Chicago were unable to play due to heavy rain at Glendale, Ariz.

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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Australia won't risk lives returning IS refugees from Syria

Australia's prime minister says he won't put officials in danger by retrieving extremists from the Middle East after an Australian Islamic State group widow asked to bring her children home from a Syrian refugee camp.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters Australians who take their families to war zones to fight with the Islamic State group had to take responsibility for their actions.

His response came after the Australian Broadcasting Corp. interviewed the woman in one of the refugee camps in northern Syria where she has lived with her toddler son and malnourished 6-month-old daughter since they fled the Syrian village battleground of Baghouz.

ABC said the 24-year-old woman refused to confirm her identity and wore a veil during the interview, but it identified her Thursday as Zehra Duman.

Source: Fox News World

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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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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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Joe Biden may have just stepped into the 2020 ring, but he’s wasted no time in throwing punches at President Trump.

Former Vice President Biden appeared on “The View” Friday in his first interview since officially announcing he is running for the White House on Thursday.

After batting away a softball opening question from host Joy Behar about why he took so long to enter the race, the ex-VP delivered what is likely to be his campaign’s major message.

Asked about the comment in his announcement that a battle is underway for “the soul of this nation,” Biden replied: “What I mean by that is we are not — this is not who we are the way we’re treating people. It’s not who we are as a nation when we’re talking about things like the reason for your problem is the other.

JOE BIDEN’S SENIOR ADVISER IN 2016: ‘WE DON’T NEED WHITE PEOPLE LEADING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY RIGHT NOW’

“It really is what I said and I really mean it and I wrote an article at the time in “The Atlantic” magazine when Charlottesville happened. This is not who we are. It’s about decency, honor, including everyone. The idea to compare these racists and not condemn them. Neo-Nazis — I don’t ever remember that happening in an administration in well over 100 years.

“I found myself thinking — by the way I travel around the world a lot as vice president and since then I have as well. The rest of the world — I mean, they look at us like my god — what happened to America?”

Behar then asked Biden how he plans to win over “blue-collar voters, a group that Trump won.”

“By making the case that we have to restore dignity to work. Think about this. The way we treat ordinary hard-working Americans who are middle class and working class people fighting to get in the middle class is we treat them like they’re a means to an end as opposed to an ends to themselves,” Biden said.

TRUMP ASSESSES 2020 DEMS; TAKES SWIPES AT BIDEN, SANDERS; DISMISSES HARRIS, O’ROURKE; SAYS HE’S ROOTING FOR BUTTIGIEG

“Go out. When’s the last time we went out and thanked the guy who kept the sewer from overflowing into your basement. What about the woman up on a bucket reconnecting a connection?

“Think about what we don’t do guys. It’s all been about dividing. There’s a real opportunity, incredible opportunity if we just treat each other with more decency.

“My dad had an expression. He said, ‘Joey, a job is about more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity, it’s about your place in the community, it’s about your place in society and your self-worth. It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say it’s going to be okay and mean it.’

“Think about how many people can’t do that today. This president has done nothing to help that group.”

BIDEN VOWS THAT ‘AMERICA IS COMING BACK,’ SPARKING ‘MAGA’ COMPARISONS

Biden’s appearance came after President Trump took a swipe at him in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Thursday night.

“I think we are calling him ‘Sleepy Joe’ ’cause I’ve known him for a while. Is he a pretty sleepy guy? He won’t be able to deal with [Chinese] President Xi, I will tell you. That’s a different level of energy and, frankly, intelligence. So I sort refer to him as ‘Sleepy Joe.’ A lot of people wanted me to change the word ‘sleepy’ to something else that rhymes with it,” Trump told host Sean Hannity. “I thought it was too nasty.

“He’s not going to be able to do the job.”

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Biden officially announced his candidacy in a video Thursday morning, going directly after Trump.

“If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are, and I cannot stand by and watch that happen,” Biden said in the video.

Source: Fox News Politics

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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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President Trump on Friday said he “let everybody testify” in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, amid a heated battle this week between the White House and congressional Democrats over subpoenas for testimony from former and current administration officials.

The president, departing the White House on Friday for Indianapolis, touted his administration’s transparency throughout the nearly two-year-long Russia investigation led by Mueller and his team. The president said his administration gave “1.4 million” documents as part of the probe.

TRUMP CLAIMS HE ‘NEVER’ TOLD MCGAHN TO FIRE MUELLER, SAYS HE ‘COULD HAVE DONE IT’ HIMSELF

“I let White House Counsel Don McGahn testify—I let everybody testify. I think McGahn did for 30 hours. I said I want everybody to testify,” Trump told reporters.

“I let everybody testify. There’s never ever been transparency like this,” he continued. “So we got a great ruling, we got the ruling which I knew we were going to get because I have nothing to do with Russia nor the campaign.”

The president underscored the findings in Mueller’s nearly 500-page report, which was released to the public and Congress in a redacted format last week. The report revealed that the special counsel did not find evidence of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia—a conclusion Trump has touted and repeated for days.

“With all of this transparency, we finish. No collusion, no obstruction,” Trump said Friday. “But then I get out, the first day, they say, ‘let’s do it again.’ I say, that’s enough, we have to run a country. We have a very great country to run.”

Trump was referring to the sweeping Trump-focused investigations in the House of Representatives. This week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., subpoenaed McGahn to testify before his panel. The White House blocked McGahn’s testimony, and the president vowed to fight “all” congressionally-issued subpoenas.

“Go through it with the House, the Senate, no collusion, no collusion; no obstruction, no obstruction—again? We have to go through it?” Trump said. “This is a pure political witch hunt. The only thing I did is make this country stronger.”

The president added: “So if I’m guilty of anything, it’s that I’ve been a great president and the Democrats don’t like it.”

But despite his comments, Mueller did not come to a conclusion on the matter of whether the president obstructed justice—rather, the report revealed an array of controversial actions and requests made by the president that were examined as part of Mueller’s obstruction inquiry.

“On June 17, 2017, the president called [White House Counsel Don] McGahn at home and directed him to call the Acting Attorney General and say that the Special Counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed. McGahn did not carry out the direction, however, deciding that he would resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre,” the report stated, referencing the Watergate scandal.

TRUMP VOWS TO FIGHT ‘ALL’ SUBPOENAS AGAINST ADMINISTRATION, CALLS DEMAND FOR MCGAHN TESTIMONY ‘RIDICULOUS’ 

The report also revealed that when the media reported on the president’s request for McGahn to have Mueller removed, the president directed White House officials “to tell McGahn to dispute the story and create a record stating he had not been ordered to have the special counsel removed.”

“McGahn refused to back away from what he remembered happening,” the report said.

The report went on to say that two days after the initial request to McGahn, the president made another attempt to “affect the course of the Russia investigation.”

McGahn’s interview with investigators factored prominently into this section, including a claim that McGahn disobeyed Trump’s call to have him seek Mueller’s removal.

This week, the president said he “never” told McGahn to fire Mueller, and that if he wanted to remove the special counsel, he “could have done it” himself.

Source: Fox News Politics

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