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Despite being exposed, fake news thrives on social media ahead of India polls

A crew member walks in front of a hoarding displaying the logo of BOOM, one of Facebook Inc's fact-checking partners in India, at a studio in Mumbai
A crew member walks in front of a hoarding displaying the logo of BOOM, one of Facebook Inc's fact-checking partners in India, at a studio in Mumbai, India, March 12, 2019. Picture taken March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas

April 2, 2019

By Sankalp Phartiyal and Aditya Kalra

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Two weeks after a suicide bombing in Kashmir in February killed 40 Indian policemen, a Facebook user called Avi Dandiya posted a live video in which he played a recording of a call purportedly involving India’s home minister, the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and an unidentified woman.

The trio could be heard talking about arousing nationalist sentiment ahead of India’s general election, with the BJP president allegedly saying in Hindi: “We agree that for election, we need a war”.

Within 24 hours, one of Facebook Inc’s fact-checking partners in India, BOOM, exposed Dandiya’s video as fake. An analysis on BOOM’s website said the video was created by splicing audio from older political interviews.

By the time Facebook took down the post, it had received more than 2.5 million views and 150,000 shares. There is no Indian law that specifically targets fake news, but police in New Delhi registered a case of forgery against Dandiya and an official said investigations were ongoing.

Still, Reuters last week found at least four edited copies of Dandiya’s videos on Facebook with about 36,000 views. One on Google’s YouTube has been seen 2,800 times while another on Twitter has 22,000 views.

Messages and e-mails to Dandiya, an avid Facebook user who last appeared in a live video on March 23, went unanswered. The home ministry, the BJP president and party’s information-technology chief did not respond to requests for comment.

The videos underline how social media companies are struggling with fake news in India despite saying they’ve taken steps to tackle the menace ahead of India’s general election, which starts on April 11.

With 900 million people eligible to vote and an estimated half-a-billion with access to the internet, fake news can have an enormous impact on the election. Dandiya’s video, for example, could have seriously damaged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP if enough people thought it was true.

Policing content has become a massive global problem for social media giants which have no template for consistently preventing online fake news or eliminating it.

Fierce internet disinformation battles gripped countries such as Brazil and Malaysia last year ahead of elections. Authorities in Indonesia and the EU, which are due to hold polls, have warned of the threat of fake news.

In India, Facebook has partnered with fact checkers and, like Twitter, ramped up efforts to block fake accounts.

On Monday, Facebook said it had deleted 1,126 accounts, groups and pages in India and Pakistan for “inauthentic behavior” and spamming, many linked to India’s opposition Congress party.

Google has partnered with fact-checkers to train 10,000 journalists this year to better tackle fake news.

Facebook’s popular messaging app WhatsApp has launched newspaper and radio campaigns to deter the spread of misinformation.

Social media companies say they don’t outrightly remove all fake posts as that would jeopardize free speech. Facebook has said that circulation of posts which are debunked, or discovered to be fake, is reduced by more than 80 percent.

NO SILVER BULLET

Posts that violate Facebook’s community guidelines, including hate speech or content that could incite violence, are completely deleted, the company said, adding that Dandiya’s video came under that category.

But even when content has been identified as fake and removed, slightly modified versions of the same images, video or text can escape detection and spread further.

“This is a highly adversarial space, so we still miss things and won’t catch everything – but we’re making progress,” said a Facebook spokeswoman, who added that the overall volume of false news had been reduced on the platform.

“There’s no silver bullet solution in fighting misinformation.”

Twitter said it deeply cares about the potentially harmful effects of misinformation and encourages users not to share unverified information.

A YouTube spokesman said the company will continue to embrace the “democratization of access to information” while providing a reliable service to users.

Twitter and YouTube did not comment on Dandiya’s video.

SHOWN TO BE FALSE

Another fake post that went viral recently was on popular Indian student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, who was arrested and charged with sedition after a 2016 rally to commemorate the execution of a Kashmiri separatist. Opposition parties said Kumar’s arrest by federal police was an attempt by authorities to curb free speech.

Some Facebook posts in February described Kumar as anti-India and showed his photo in front of a map that depicted some Indian states as part of Pakistan. Two Facebook fact-checkers in India investigated the posts and said the image was doctored.

Still, a month later, Reuters found at least two copies of those posts on Facebook with 375 comments and 1,500 shares.

Facebook in February announced an expansion of its fact-checking company partners to seven, from two. Facebook says it also issues an alert to users who try to share a post which its fact-checkers have debunked, but doesn’t prohibit further sharing.

Reuters found that when debunked posts of Kumar were shared, an alert popped up with a link to the fact-checkers’ analysis. However, all four variants of Dandiya’s videos could be shared without such fake news alerts from Facebook.

“There is no way you can solve this problem (quickly) … the magnitude of the problem is really huge,” said Kanchan Kaur, a Bengaluru-based assessor at International Fact-Checking Network at U.S.-based Poynter Institute.

FACT-CHECKING BUSINESS

When tensions rose between India and Pakistan in February following a suicide bombing in Kashmir and cross-border air strikes, social media was flooded with fake news – old videos of captured pilots and photos of earthquake-hit regions were spread as depicting current events.

“Since Pulwama we’ve been working seven days a week,” said Jency Jacob, managing editor at BOOM, referring to the site of the suicide attack.

On a recent visit to BOOM’s office in India’s financial capital Mumbai, five people were seen monitoring and analyzing online content. One of the rooms served as BOOM’s studio where television-style news videos are shot on debunked stories and published on its website.

As an industry, fact-checking is fast spreading in India.

British broadcaster BBC has in-house fact checking operations and a dedicated WhatsApp number where anyone can flag suspected fake posts for further checks.

“A dedicated team of journalists is debunking fake news daily, and also writing detailed explainers on controversial issues and claims,” BBC’s India Digital Editor, Milind Khandekar, told Reuters.

Former software engineer Pratik Sinha and his mother are part of a 10-member fact checking initiative named “Alt News” which is run from a two-bedroom-flat in the western city of Ahmedabad.

Using online video verification and social media tracking tools, Sinha said his team debunks up to four posts each day.

Debunked posts appearing online has become a problem even for India’s Election Commission.

In February, a WhatsApp message called for spreading the word that said Indians living overseas could “now vote online for 2019 elections” and should register on the Commission’s website. The Commission called it “FAKE NEWS” on Twitter and filed a police complaint against “unknown persons” for public mischief.

A month later, the message continues to circulate on Facebook – a user who shared it on March 23 has so far received 42 likes and 19 shares. When someone questioned the post, the Facebook user responded: “I think you can vote. Just check the web site and follow the steps”.

(Reporting by Sankalp Phartiyal and Aditya Kalra; Additional reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal and Aditi Shah; Writing by Aditya Kalra; Editing by Martin Howell, Jonathan Weber and Raju Gopalakrishnan.)

Source: OANN

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Turkey says buying Russian defense system should not trigger U.S. sanctions

Turkey's Chief of the General Staff Akar is seen during the EFES-2018 Military Exercise near the Aegean port city of Izmir
Turkey's Chief of the General Staff Hulusi Akar is seen during the EFES-2018 Military Exercise near the Aegean port city of Izmir, Turkey May 10, 2018. REUTERS/Osman Orsal

April 15, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Turkey’s purchase of Russian air defense missile systems should not trigger U.S. sanctions because Ankara is not an adversary of Washington and remains committed to the NATO alliance, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said on Monday.

Akar also told a conference in Washington that Turkey expected to remain not just a buyer of advanced F-35 stealth fighter jets but also one of the partner countries involved in its production, despite U.S. warnings that it would be shut out of the F-35 project if it buys the Russian S-400 defense system.

Turkey is carefully studying an offer from the United States to buy Patriot missile defense systems, Akar added.

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Source: OANN

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South Korea hopes Trump-Kim summit in Vietnam ushers new era of peace

SEOUL, South Korea – The Trump-Kim summit may be happening 2,000 miles away in Vietnam, but most people in this country are closely following all the details that emerge from the meeting.

There is a lot at stake on the Korean peninsula. After the first summit in Singapore that was a lot of show, the hope here is that this meeting will get down to substantial issues.

One of the possible bargaining chips President Trump holds is a political statement about the end of the Korean War. Fighting stopped here with an armistice some 65 years ago.  The governments of both North and South Korea want an end-of-war declaration.

KIM JONG UN ARRIVES IN VIETNAM FOR 2ND NUCLEAR SUMMIT WITH TRUMP

“It’s symbolically important,” former California Congressman Jay Kim told Fox News. “People would feel better, they’d feel safer.”

Most here also agree they’d “feel safer” if North Korea leader Kim Jong Un delivered on what he’s been talking about: The dismantling and inspection of the Yongbyon site, one of the locations where it is believed the regime manufactures material for its nuclear arsenal.

A South Korean protester with a box cutter tears a North Korean flag during a rally to oppose end of the Korean War declaration in the upcoming summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A South Korean protester with a box cutter tears a North Korean flag during a rally to oppose end of the Korean War declaration in the upcoming summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

President Trump has been talking up the economic potential of North Korea if the government chooses to denuclearize. While ex-Congressman Kim, who now does business in Seoul, thinks that’s “exaggerating just a little bit,” he does think there are prospects in the North and it is a “good carrot.”

Not everyone in Seoul is pleased with the Hanoi summit.

TRUMP, KIM JONG UN'S VIETNAM SUMMIT JOINS LONG LIST OF KEY MOMENTS BETWEEN WORLD LEADERS: A TIMELINE

There was a small but noisy protest outside the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday. Those present complained that the regime’s human rights abuses are not being addressed at the summit. They were also avoided at the first summit in Singapore.

There are an estimated 120,000 people in political gulags in North Korea.

South Korean protesters shout slogans during a rally demanding the end the Korean War and to stop the sanction on North Korea near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

South Korean protesters shout slogans during a rally demanding the end the Korean War and to stop the sanction on North Korea near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

Still, most here are hoping for the best, knowing that negotiations with North Korea have come this close to peace in the past, only to fail.

I asked Kim, who is a Republican and was the first Korean-American in the House of Representatives, what could be different this time around.

He didn’t hesitate to respond.

“Trump,” he said, “that’s what can do it.”

Experts agree.  The North Korea leader and the timing of the talks could also make the difference.

But things could also go wrong.

Source: Fox News World

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Beijing city targets raising $1.5 billion fund in tech push: sources

FILE PHOTO: A man wearing a mask makes his way at a financial district during a heavily polluted day in Beijing
FILE PHOTO: A man wearing a mask makes his way at a financial district during a heavily polluted day in Beijing, November 30, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

February 26, 2019

By Julie Zhu and Kane Wu

HONG KONG (Reuters) – An investment firm backed by the Beijing city government is in talks with prospective investors to raise over 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in its first fund aimed mainly at cutting-edge tech investments, said two people with direct knowledge.

Beijing Innovation Industry Investment Co’s fundraising move underscores the Chinese capital city’s push to catch up with other cities in the country, most notably Shenzhen, in pursuing innovative technology and industrial upgrading projects.

It comes as China aims to speed up development of its technology sector, including segments such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence, amid a fierce trade stand-off with the United States that has demonstrated the country’s reliance on imported technology.

China’s State Council in 2016 approved a 200 billion yuan venture capital fund https://www.reuters.com/article/china-funds-idUSL3N1AZ1SX, financed by state controlled entities, to invest in new technologies.

Beijing Innovation could not be immediately reached for comment.

It was set up by Beijing’s municipal State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), which oversees the city’s state-owned enterprises, and has been tasked with making investments in new-economy sectors on behalf of the local government.

Beijing Innovation has attracted the local SASAC and several local government-backed companies such as Shenzhen Capital Group, the venture investment vehicle of the Shenzhen government, as investors, according to domestic media reports and public corporate registry filings.

It will look for direct-equity investment opportunities in sectors ranging from information technology and integrated circuits to electric vehicles and new materials, according to domestic media reports.

As a major tech hub in China, Beijing, where ByteDance Technology, one of the world’s most valuable startups, online food delivery-to-ticketing services firm Meituan Dianping and e-commerce firm JD.com are headquartered, has for years lacked a consolidated investment arm under the local government for tech deals.

In contrast, Shenzhen which has bred companies such as online gaming-to-social media giant Tencent Holdings, telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies and drone maker DJI, has Shenzhen Capital Group investing in the tech sector for 20 years.

Shenzhen Capital Group has over 333 billion yuan of assets under management, its website shows, and holds a 15 percent stake in Beijing Innovation, according to public disclosures.

(Reporting by Julie Zhu and Kane Wu; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Source: OANN

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NZ foreign minister headed to Turkey to ‘confront’ Erdogan’s mosque shooting comments

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern visits Christchurch
New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern attends a news conference after meeting with first responders who were at the scene of the Christchurch mosque shooting, in Christchurch, New Zealand March 20, 2019. REUTERS/Edgar Su

March 20, 2019

(Reuters) – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Wednesday Foreign Minister Winston Peters will travel to Turkey to “confront” comments made by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on the killing of 50 people at mosques in Christchurch.

Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist, was charged with murder on Saturday after a lone gunman opened fire at the two mosques during Friday prayers.

Erdogan – who is seeking to drum up support for his Islamist-rooted AK Party in March 31 local elections – said on Tuesday Turkey would make the suspected attacker pay if New Zealand did not.

The comments came at a campaign rally that included video footage of the shootings that the alleged gunman had broadcast on Facebook.

Ardern said Peters would seek urgent clarification.

“Our deputy prime minister will be confronting those comments in Turkey,” Ardern told reporters in Christchurch. “He is going there to set the record straight, face-to-face.”

Erdogan has referred to the mosque shootings several times during public gatherings in recent days.

Turkish Presidential Communications Director Fahrettin Altun said comments made by Erdogan on Monday during the commemoration of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign were taken out of context, adding he was responding to the attacker’s “manifesto”, which was posted online by the attacker and later taken down.

“Turks have always been the most welcoming & gracious hosts to their Anzac visitors,” Altun said on Twitter, using the abbreviation for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

“As he was giving the speech at the Canakkale (Gallipoli) commemoration, he framed his remarks in a historical context of attacks against Turkey, past and present.”

During his speech on Monday, Erdogan described the mass shooting as part of a wider attack on Turkey and threatened to send back “in caskets” anyone who tried to take the battle to Istanbul.

Peters had earlier condemned the airing of footage of the shooting, which he said could endanger New Zealanders abroad.

Despite Peters’ intervention, an extract from Tarrant’s alleged manifesto was flashed up on a screen at Erdogan’s rally again on Tuesday, along with footage of the gunman entering one of the mosques and shooting as he approached the door.

Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he summoned Turkey’s ambassador for a meeting, during which he demanded Erdogan’s comments be removed from Turkey’s state broadcaster.

“I will wait to see what the response is from the Turkish government before taking further action, but I can tell you that all options are on the table,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra.

Australia’s ambassador to Turkey would meet with members of Erdogan’s government on Wednesday, Morrison said.

Morrison said Canberra is also reconsidering its travel advice for Australians planning trips to Turkey.

Relations between Turkey, New Zealand and Australia have generally been good. Thousands of Australians and New Zealanders travel each year to Turkey for war memorial services.

Just over a century ago, thousands of soldiers from the ANZAC struggled ashore on a narrow beach at Gallipoli during an ill-fated campaign that would claim more than 130,000 lives.

Visitors come to the area to honor their nations’ fallen on ANZAC Day every April 25.

(Reporting by Colin Packham in Sydney and Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul; Editing by Michael Perry and Frances Kerry)

Source: OANN

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Police searching for motive after pregnant woman allegedly strangled by stepson

Florida police were searching for a motive after a man allegedly strangled his pregnant stepmother at a cemetery last week.

Ian Anselmo, 21, was charged with second-degree attempted murder after he allegedly admitted to killing his stepmother Sue Ellen Anselmo at Eustis Cemetery in Lake County, the Orlando Sentinel reported Thursday. The woman was a mother of six and was six-weeks pregnant at the time of her death.

JOHN LEGEND JOINS VIRAL ‘FLORIDA MAN’ CHALLENGE WITH HEADLINE FROM HIS BIRTH DATE

“I killed my mom, she’s dead,” Anselmo told 911 dispatchers. “I strangled her.”

Anselmo was booked into the Lake County Jail on the charges and prosecutors were likely going to upgrade the charges because the woman died, the Orlando Sentinel reported. Authorities didn’t give a motive as to why Anselmo allegedly committed the crime.

Sue Ellen Anselmo was found unconscious with a cord around her neck in the front seat of her SUV, according to the newspaper. It wasn’t clear why Anselmo or his stepmother were at the cemetery.

Ian Anselmo had initially thought he killed his stepmother at the cemetery, but she was rushed to the hospital with a “faint pulse” and died Monday, the newspaper reported.

“This whole thing seems so weird,” John Anselmo, Sue Ellen’s husband and Ian’s father, told the Orlando Sentinel. “We’re just racking our brains trying to figure out what happened.”

John Anselmo added that he and his wife had recently separated but he was anticipating a reconciliation, according to the newspaper. His mother-in-law, though, attempted to become the guardian of Sue Ellen Anselmo while she was in the hospital, saying that John Anselmo was a “person of interest” in the investigation.

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John Anselmo denied the allegations. Eustis police haven’t said whether John Anselmo was a person of interest in Sue Ellen Anselmo’s death.

Source: Fox News National

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Short & distort? The ugly war between CEOs and activist critics

A screen displays a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average during trading on the floor of the NYSE in New York
A screen displays a chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average during trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., March 20, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

March 21, 2019

By Lawrence Delevingne

NEW YORK (Reuters) – On the morning of July 11, Paul Pittman was on a corn farm in Western Illinois, unaware his company had taken a devastating hit.

Just before the stock market opened, an anonymous short seller named “Rota Fortunae” posted on Twitter and financial website Seeking Alpha that Pittman’s small real estate investment trust, Farmland Partners Inc, had engaged in dubious transactions and risked “insolvency.”

The posting pushed shares down enough to make thousands of previously-purchased stock options profitable, according to a later expert analysis, in turn causing more selling by those on the other side of the trade who committed to buy shares at a higher set price. The accelerating losses were probably compounded by high-frequency trading algorithms activated by price swings and negative keywords, according to that analysis.

Pittman’s stomach churned when he checked his smartphone around noon: Shares were off almost 40 percent. (Graphic: https://tmsnrt.rs/2HyuFCE)

“The game was rigged,” Pittman, 56, told Reuters.

What followed exemplified a new, ugly phase in a war between companies and activist short sellers, with businesses fighting back against social-media fueled attacks and investors accusing executives of trying to muzzle critics.

Farmland sued Rota Fortunae – Latin for “wheel of fortune” – and other unnamed individuals alleging a “malicious scheme” to profit from the spread of false information and well-timed stock options. The short seller, a Texas-based individual whose identity has been kept secret, sent a statement to Reuters via an attorney that the litigation aimed to “intimidate and choke critical opinion” and that the idea of crashing the stock through “sophisticated trading” was “utter hogwash.” It is all under the watch of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been briefed on the matter.

The stand-off reflects a broader debate over how to balance the desire to keep public companies accountable with concerns over market manipulation.

Short selling, said to be as old as stock markets, used to be a low-profile affair where bearish investors relied on the media, analysts or regulators to take the lead in exposing over-valued companies. New tools such as Twitter and Seeking Alpha changed that, creating a small but prominent group of brash public activists.

Successful campaigns that exposed corporate fraud or dubious practices, including Carson Block’s Sino-Forest Corp takedown and Andrew Left’s shorting of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc, underscored short sellers’ role as market watchdogs. Such victories, coupled with elevated stock valuations, helped spur record numbers of short campaigns, according to industry tracker Activist Insight.

Activist Insight data show such campaigns can have a noticeable impact on stock prices. A 2017 working paper by researchers Yu Ting Forester Wong and Wuyang Zhao also showed they weigh on target companies’ investments, dividends and access to financing.

Block, Left and other prominent short sellers interviewed by Reuters say they do thorough research and help keep companies honest.

Yet targeted businesses say many short campaigns waged this decade amount to “short and distort” schemes. They accuse some activists of spreading false or misleading information to drive a stock down and then quickly cash out, a mirror image of “pump and dump,” where unscrupulous investors promote speculative stocks before selling out at the top.

Cases against short sellers are rare, though, given free speech protections and companies hesitant to put themselves under the microscope of regulators, lawyers say.

SHORT IDEAS AND OPTIONS

Recent research provides fresh fodder for the debate. Columbia Law School securities expert Joshua Mitts said in a working paper that he had looked at 1,720 pseudonymous short idea posts on Seeking Alpha between 2010 and 2017 and found that 86 percent were preceded by “extraordinary” options trading.

Mitts told Reuters his review of the posts found that, like with Farmland, many short sellers appeared to use fast-expiring put-options bought before the release of a report to spur more selling by underwriters.

“Shorts have to rely on good research, not trading tricks, to punish a stock,” said Mitts, whose work has led to paid consulting for Farmland and other companies.

He has also found other unusual trading patterns, including dozens of cases of “spoofing” and “layering,” illegal trading strategies of placing and canceling orders to create a false impression of demand or supply. Mitts said, however, that high-frequency traders were probably responsible, not activists.

Prominent activists deny engaging in practices described by Mitts and say they rarely use options. Instead, they would typically borrow stocks and immediately sell them in anticipation of a price drop, so they can buy them back for less and pocket the difference.

“I’m sure there are a few anonymous guys out there doing tricky stuff, but it’s not a systemic problem,” Left said.

One smaller short seller said he used put options in conjunction with Seeking Alpha posts to make larger bets given limited capital, but emphasized making unfounded claims could backfire.

“With options you can get totally destroyed,” said the investor, who requested anonymity. “A bad thesis can be debunked almost instantly.”

Activist Insight, which has analyzed hundreds of campaigns, found many cases where target share prices went up, not down.

So far Mitts is virtually alone in analyzing trading activity around short campaigns, but his findings have already drawn the attention of a top U.S. regulator.

SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson told Reuters the research was “important” and challenged his agency to “identify folks who are dancing a very fine line between trading and market manipulation.”

The question, Jackson said, was whether the regulator would go after short sellers who engage in fraud as forcefully as it investigates companies for bad behavior.

“I hope the answer to that question will be yes.”

A hint came last September, when the SEC brought a rare “short and distort” case against hedge fund manager Gregory Lemelson for making false claims about Ligand Pharmaceuticals Inc, an allegation which Lemelson has denied.

Jackson said, however, laws on anonymity and free speech could limit any steps that went beyond straightforward cases involving false information.

On March 12, for example, a New York state judge dismissed a lawsuit against short sellers by Indian media company Eros International PLC, noting their opinions on Seeking Alpha and elsewhere were substantiated and therefore protected.

Still, companies are increasingly retaliating with lawsuits, hiring private investigators and using other aggressive tactics, according to some activists. Block, for example, said he has faced “constant” legal threats, at least one undercover operative, and a failed $50 million investigation to discredit his research.

“More than ever, bad companies are trying to shoot the messenger through any means available,” Block said.

FARM WAR

In the days after Rota’s post, Farmland issued a public rebuttal and Pittman, a former farmer and financial executive, said the company had to go on an “‘I am not a crook’ tour” in meetings and calls with investors and business partners.

Most were sympathetic, Pittman said, including farmers who had traded land for stock, but Farmland lost a potential partnership and had to cut staff from 17 to 13.

George Moriarty, executive editor of Seeking Alpha, said that courts have respected the site’s status as a neutral platform and that its staff vetted all posts. In this case, Rota made “limited factual corrections” after Seeking Alpha contacted him about Farmland’s rebuttal.

Still, shares have never quite recovered, and Rota told Reuters that Farmland has yet to substantively address his concerns.

Stock analysts said Rota’s language was dramatic relative to the underlying issues and instead focused on broader business challenges and the potential costs of fighting back. Farmland recently reported about $1.6 million in extra expenses over 2018, before insurance, citing Rota’s campaign. That included defending against a related shareholder class-action and legal costs from its suit against the short seller.

Mitts has submitted his opinion on put options in the case, a pattern he said he discovered independently during his academic research.

The short seller behind the Rota moniker told Reuters he planned to challenge Mitts’ assertions and would continue his defense of first amendment rights. Farmland’s lawyers said Rota’s free speech argument was undercut by his acknowledgement of payments received for research on Farmland.

Whatever happens in court, the SEC is watching. Rota submitted his Farmland analysis to the agency’s whistleblower hotline, while Farmland later briefed SEC staff on its side.

The SEC declined to comment, but on Jan. 29 it denied Farmland’s request for records on Rota and options trading because, according to a letter revealed in a court filing, related information was in an “investigative file” from an “on-going law enforcement proceeding.”

(Reporting by Lawrence Delevingne. Editing by Neal Templin and Tomasz Janowski.)

Source: OANN

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Alex Jones – Info Wars

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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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Source: InfoWars

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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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