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Attorneys, judge to keep winnowing jury pool for cop trial

A judge and attorneys are set to continue winnowing the jury pool Thursday for the murder trial of a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed woman who had called 911 to report a possible sexual assault near her home.

Another 10 prospective jurors were excused Wednesday for the trial of Mohamed Noor, bringing the total to 16 excused so far out of a pool of 75 potential jurors.

Noor is charged with murder and manslaughter in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a 40-year-old dual Australian-U.S. citizen who had approached Noor's squad car after summoning police to the alley behind her home.

The 33-year-old Noor has declined to speak to investigators, but his attorneys plan to argue that he acted in self-defense.

Source: Fox News National

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Group says 60 killed in protests against Sudan’s president

An international rights group says Sudan's security forces have killed at least 60 people in more than three months of street protests calling on President Omar al-Bashir to step down.

Physicians for Human Rights says al-Bashir's forces have attacked at least seven medical facilities, arrested at least 136 health personnel, fired tear gas and other weapons into hospital wards and denied patients access to medical care.

The protests erupted in December, initially over price hikes, but later tuned into calls for al-Bashir to resign.

Security forces have responded with a fierce crackdown. The government has said that 31 have been killed but hasn't updated its tally in weeks.

The New York-based watchdog has called attacks on doctors and medical facilities an "egregious violation of human rights."

Source: Fox News World

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Target coffee to be all fair trade by 2022

A Target logo is seen during the going-out-of-business sale at Target Canada in Toronto
A Target logo is seen during the going-out-of-business sale at Target Canada in Toronto, February 5, 2015. REUTERS/Mark Blinch

March 20, 2019

By Ayenat Mersie

NEW YORK (Reuters) – All of Target Corp’s flagship coffee brand Archer Farms will be certified fair trade by 2022, the company and Fair Trade USA told Reuters on Wednesday, a victory for that movement, which seeks to make sure producers are adequately compensated for their labor.

Coffee futures are currently trading near 13-year lows, weighed down by a record-large Brazilian crop. Prices are below the cost of production in most countries, forcing some farmers out of business and prompting concern from the industry on its long-term ability to source good coffee.

Archer Farms, Target’s flagship-owned coffee brand, sells about six million pounds of coffee each year. Currently, about 20 percent of Archer Farms coffee is fair trade certified.

The United States imported about 3.5 billion pounds of coffee in the 2018/2019 season, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Fair Trade USA, the leading certifier of such products in North America, works to institute a floor price for farmers; for coffee, that minimum price is $1.40 per pound and farmers receive an additional 20 cents per pound sold.

“The current market is nothing short of a disaster for coffee farmers,” said Paul Rice, founder and CEO of Fair Trade USA.

The most active coffee futures contract fell last week to 94.65 cents per pound, the lowest since 2005. Farmers have been searching for ways to find pricing alternatives, including separate pricing mechanisms for high-grade specialty beans.

(Reporting by Ayenat Mersie; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Source: OANN

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Bernie Silent on Assange But Silences InfoWars

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Source: InfoWars

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Court papers show Gillibrand’s father worked for Nxivm sex cult: report

Court documents revealed this week confirmed that the father of 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand once worked as a lobbyist for a secretive sex cult, but left after the upstate New York group sued him, according to a report.

The documents backed up previous accounts that the New York Democrat's father, Doug Rutnik, worked for Albany-based Nxivm for four months in 2004 at a rate of $25,000 per month, Big League Politics reported.

Rutnik was sued when he attempted to distance himself from the group before reaching a settlement.

“Her father Doug Rutnik came to work as a consultant for NXIVM. ... He was fired, they sued him, and they had to pay him $100,000,” former NXIVM employee Frank Parlato told Big League Politics. “Her father’s wife, her stepmother, was also a member of NXIVM. ... Doug got her into the cult, Gillibrand’s father got Gillibrand’s future stepmother into the cult. Doug left the cult because he was sued. Clare Bronfman, after her father was sued, donated money to Gillibrand. Gillibrand accepted it.”

SEAGRAM HEIRESS SECRETLY PAYING SEX CULT’S LEGAL FEES: PROSECUTORS

An unnamed witness described how Gillibrand once sat at a Nxivm table at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser, according to the political news site.

“Yeah the three front VIP tables were all brought by NXIVM and she was sitting with Nancy Salzman,” court documents said, referring to former to the Nxivm co-founder who pleaded guilty in March to a single racketeering charge.

Gillibrand has sometimes been called a #MeToo champion for her advocacy on gender equality and women’s issues. She has denied having a connection to Nxivm and said she first heard of it through extensive media coverage.

"Senator Gillibrand had never heard of this group until she recently read about them in the newspaper," a spokesman for Gillibrand told the Washington Free Beacon in March 2018. "She is glad that federal and state prosecutors have taken action in this case."

NXIVM-INSPIRED SEX CULT TV SERIES IN THE WORKS FOLLOWING ALLISON MACK ARREST

The group and its leader Keith Raniere, known as Vanguard, have been accused by former members of forcing women to become sex slaves and branding women like cattle with Raniere’s initials. Some women said they were forced to hand over nude photos of themselves in case they disobeyed him and were forced to perform manual labor, according to the Post.

Other former members have described Nxivm as a “cult” centered around Raniere. Salzman admitted to a federal judge to spying on Nxivm’s perceived enemies and hacking into email accounts.

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Her daughter Laura Salzman, 42, also entered a guilty plea last month to keeping her own personal female slave locked in a room for two years and threatening to deport her back to Mexico, court transcripts said.

Raniere was arrested in Mexico last year and is expected to go on trial in late April on multiple charges, including forced labor and possession of child pornography.

Source: Fox News Politics

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‘Africans are tired’: hairdresser hopes for change as Senegal election nears

Yaya Niass, a hairdresser who works out of a road-side shack, is pictured inside his shop in Pikine, on the outskirts of Dakar
FILE PHOTO: Yaya Niass, a hairdresser who works out of a road-side shack, is pictured inside his shop in Pikine, on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal February 1, 2019. REUTERS/ Zohra Bensemra

February 19, 2019

DAKAR (Reuters) – For Yaya Niass, who cuts hair in a roadside shack on the outskirts of Dakar, the time for political change in Senegal – and in Africa as a whole – is well overdue.

“We are late in terms of development compared to other continents …so I expect from the next president, from the next African presidents that they work to …be in power for the people,” he said as the country prepares to elect a new leader on Sunday.

Niass, 48, who grew up in France and lived there until 1985, did not say who he will vote for, but was sure he wanted to see fundamental changes in the country.

“The African people are really tired, we make do…but I think states really have the power to change things.”

Senegal was on a good path, he said. “(But) just one group of Senegalese that live really well in comfort while all the rest suffer, that needs to stop.”

(Reporting by Christophe van der Perre; Editing by John Stonestreet)

Source: OANN

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Why We Don't Trust Our Institutions

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This week, special counsel Robert Mueller released his long-awaited report on alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to impact the 2016 election. His conclusion: no collusion. It's been apparent for quite some time that Mueller would end up here -- every indictment has been based on an ancillary crime, not the chief question of election conspiracy. Nonetheless, the final result came as a bombshell.

That's because for two years, the mainstream media have treated Trump-Russian collusion as a reality. Facts would eventually arrive to fill in the gaps in the narrative. Surely, Trump's presidency would crumble when the deus ex machina, the Mueller report, arrived.

But that didn't happen. And so the media are left with unending egg on their faces, having suggested continuously for years that Trump was illegitimately elected, and that his campaign had engaged in treasonous activity to prevent the rightful president, Hillary Clinton, from assuming office.

That narrative found support in leaders from the Democratic intelligence community. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., of the House Intelligence Committee spent years camping outside CNN headquarters in a pup tent, ready at a moment's notice to suggest access to secret information that would certainly take down the president. Former CIA Director John Brennan accused Trump of treason, standing on his resume to do so. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated that Watergate "pales" beside allegations of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe suggested that Trump could be a Russian cat's paw. Former FBI Director James Comey implied that Trump had fired him for nefarious reasons, not because Trump was angry with Comey for failing to announce that Trump wasn't under investigation.

Our intelligence leadership, in other words, humiliated themselves.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Cook County prosecutors agreed to drop charges against alleged hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett, who alleged that he was beaten by two white men in the middle of the night on the streets of Chicago. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the dropped charges a "whitewash." Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson bashed Smollett's defense team, explaining, "They chose to hide behind secrecy and broker a deal to circumvent the judicial system."

Why have key institutions betrayed their initial mission? Mission creep. The job of the media is to objectively cover stories, not to drive narratives. The job of the intelligence community is to diligently follow evidence, not to follow its cognitive bias. The job of the state's attorney is to prosecute crime, not to play politics.

Without defined roles, our institutions crumble. Treating institutions as mere tools to be wielded in pursuit of some higher goal leads to the destruction of those institutions; they become little more than weapons, aimed by those in power. That's dangerous stuff. We should be able to trust our press. If we can't, then we can no longer base our republican decision-making on a common set of facts. We should be able to trust our intelligence community and our prosecutors. If we can't, then we can't support granting them the power they require to protect us.

But protecting institutions has taken a back seat to do-goodism. "Objective" journalists see themselves as crusaders; political members of the intelligence community see themselves as protectors; prosecutors see themselves as emissaries of social justice rather than as part of a broader, more objective system of determining guilt and innocence. Institutions only mean more than the people who comprise them when the people who comprise them value the institutions more than their own politics. That's being lost. The result is the continued atomization of our society.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

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Cambodian authorities have ordered a one-hour reduction in the length of school days because of concerns that students and teachers may fall ill from a prolonged heat wave.

Education Minister Hang Chuon Naron said in an announcement seen Friday that the shortened hours will remain in effect until the rainy season starts, which usually occurs in May. The current heat wave, in which temperatures are regularly reaching as high as 41 Celsius (106 Fahrenheit), is one of the longest in memory.

Most schools in Cambodia lack air conditioning, prompting concern that temperatures inside classrooms could rise to unhealthy levels.

School authorities were instructed to watch for symptoms of heat stroke and urge pupils to drink more water.

The new hours cut 30 minutes off the beginning of the school day and 30 minutes off the end.

School authorities instituted a similar measure in 2016.

Source: Fox News World

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Explosions have rocked Britain’s largest steel plant, injuring two people and shaking nearby homes.

South Wales Police say the incident at the Tata Steel plant in Port Talbot was reported at about 3:35 a.m. Friday (22:35 EDT Thursday). The explosions touched off small fires, which are under control. Two workers suffered minor injuries and all staff members have been accounted for.

Police say early indications are that the explosions were caused by a train used to carry molten metal into the plant. Tata Steel says its personnel are working with emergency services at the scene.

Local lawmaker Stephen Kinnock says the incident raises concerns about safety.

He tweeted: “It could have been a lot worse … @TataSteelEurope must conduct a full review, to improve safety.”

Source: Fox News World

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The Wider Image: China's start-ups go small in age of 'shoebox' satellites
LinkSpace’s reusable rocket RLV-T5, also known as NewLine Baby, is carried to a vacant plot of land for a test launch in Longkou, Shandong province, China, April 19, 2019. REUTERS/Jason Lee

April 26, 2019

By Ryan Woo

LONGKOU, China (Reuters) – During initial tests of their 8.1-metre (27-foot) tall reusable rocket, Chinese engineers from LinkSpace, a start-up led by China’s youngest space entrepreneur, used a Kevlar tether to ensure its safe return. Just in case.

But when the Beijing-based company’s prototype, called NewLine Baby, successfully took off and landed last week for the second time in two months, no tether was needed.

The 1.5-tonne rocket hovered 40 meters above the ground before descending back to its concrete launch pad after 30 seconds, to the relief of 26-year-old chief executive Hu Zhenyu and his engineers – one of whom cartwheeled his way to the launch pad in delight.

LinkSpace, one of China’s 15-plus private rocket manufacturers, sees these short hops as the first steps towards a new business model: sending tiny, inexpensive satellites into orbit at affordable prices.

Demand for these so-called nanosatellites – which weigh less than 10 kilograms (22 pounds) and are in some cases as small as a shoebox – is expected to explode in the next few years. And China’s rocket entrepreneurs reckon there is no better place to develop inexpensive launch vehicles than their home country.

“For suborbital clients, their focus will be on scientific research and some commercial uses. After entering orbit, the near-term focus (of clients) will certainly be on satellites,” Hu said.

In the near term, China envisions massive constellations of commercial satellites that can offer services ranging from high-speed internet for aircraft to tracking coal shipments. Universities conducting experiments and companies looking to offer remote-sensing and communication services are among the potential domestic customers for nanosatellites.

A handful of U.S. small-rocket companies are also developing launchers ahead of the expected boom. One of the biggest, Rocket Lab, has already put 25 satellites in orbit.

No private company in China has done that yet. Since October, two – LandSpace and OneSpace – have tried but failed, illustrating the difficulties facing space start-ups everywhere.

The Chinese companies are approaching inexpensive launches in different ways. Some, like OneSpace, are designing cheap, disposable boosters. LinkSpace’s Hu aspires to build reusable rockets that return to Earth after delivering their payload, much like the Falcon 9 rockets of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

“If you’re a small company and you can only build a very, very small rocket because that’s all you have money for, then your profit margins are going to be narrower,” said Macro Caceres, analyst at U.S. aerospace consultancy Teal Group.

“But if you can take that small rocket and make it reusable, and you can launch it once a week, four times a month, 50 times a year, then with more volume, your profit increases,” Caceres added.

Eventually LinkSpace hopes to charge no more than 30 million yuan ($4.48 million) per launch, Hu told Reuters.

That is a fraction of the $25 million to $30 million needed for a launch on a Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems Pegasus, a commonly used small rocket. The Pegasus is launched from a high-flying aircraft and is not reusable.

(Click https://reut.rs/2UVBjKs to see a picture package of China’s rocket start-ups. Click https://tmsnrt.rs/2GIy9Bc for an interactive look at the nascent industry.)

NEED FOR CASH

LinkSpace plans to conduct suborbital launch tests using a bigger recoverable rocket in the first half of 2020, reaching altitudes of at least 100 kilometers, then an orbital launch in 2021, Hu told Reuters.

The company is in its third round of fundraising and wants to raise up to 100 million yuan, Hu said. It had secured tens of millions of yuan in previous rounds.

After a surge in fresh funding in 2018, firms like LinkSpace are pushing out prototypes, planning more tests and even proposing operational launches this year.

Last year, equity investment in China’s space start-ups reached 3.57 billion yuan ($533 million), a report by Beijing-based investor FutureAerospace shows, with a burst of financing in late 2018.

That accounted for about 18 percent of global space start-up investments in 2018, a historic high, according to Reuters calculations based on a global estimate by Space Angels. The New York-based venture capital firm said global space start-up investments totaled $2.97 billion last year.

“Costs for rocket companies are relatively high, but as to how much funding they need, be it in the hundreds of millions, or tens of millions, or even just a few million yuan, depends on the company’s stage of development,” said Niu Min, founder of FutureAerospace.

FutureAerospace has invested tens of millions of yuan in LandSpace, based in Beijing.

Like space-launch startups elsewhere in the world, the immediate challenge for Chinese entrepreneurs is developing a safe and reliable rocket.

Proven talent to develop such hardware can be found in China’s state research institutes or the military; the government directly supports private firms by allowing them to launch from military-controlled facilities.

But it’s still a high-risk business, and one unsuccessful launch might kill a company.

“The biggest problem facing all commercial space companies, especially early-stage entrepreneurs, is failure” of an attempted flight, Liang Jianjun, chief executive of rocket company Space Trek, told Reuters. That can affect financing, research, manufacturing and the team’s morale, he added.

Space Trek is planning its first suborbital launch by the end of June and an orbital launch next year, said Liang, who founded the company in late 2017 with three other former military technical officers.

Despite LandSpace’s failed Zhuque-1 orbital launch in October, the Beijing-based firm secured 300 million yuan in additional funding for the development of its Zhuque-2 rocket a month later.

In December, the company started operating China’s first private rocket production facility in Zhejiang province, in anticipation of large-scale manufacturing of its Zhuque-2, which it expects to unveil next year.

STATE COMPETITION

China’s state defense contractors are also trying to get into the low-cost market.

In December, the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp (CASIC) successfully launched a low-orbit communication satellite, the first of 156 that CASIC aims to deploy by 2022 to provide more stable broadband connectivity to rural China and eventually developing countries.

The satellite, Hongyun-1, was launched on a rocket supplied by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), the nation’s main space contractor.

In early April, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALVT), a subsidiary of CASC, completed engine tests for its Dragon, China’s first rocket meant solely for commercial use, clearing the path for a maiden flight before July.

The Dragon, much bigger than the rockets being developed by private firms, is designed to carry multiple commercial satellites.

At least 35 private Chinese companies are working to produce more satellites.

Spacety, a satellite maker based in southern Hunan province, plans to put 20 satellites in orbit this year, including its first for a foreign client, chief executive Yang Feng told Reuters.

The company has only launched 12 on state-produced rockets since the company started operating in early 2016.

“When it comes to rocket launches, what we care about would be cost, reliability and time,” Yang said.

(Reporting by Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by Beijing newsroom; Editing by Gerry Doyle)

Source: OANN

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At least one person is reported dead and homes have been destroyed by a powerful cyclone that struck northern Mozambique and continues to dump rain on the region, with the United Nations warning of “massive flooding.”

Cyclone Kenneth arrived just six weeks after Cyclone Idai tore into central Mozambique, killing more than 600 people and displacing scores of thousands. The U.N. says this is the first time in known history that the southern African nation has been hit by two cyclones in one season.

Forecasters say the new cyclone made landfall Thursday night in a part of Mozambique that has not seen such a storm in at least 60 years.

Mozambique’s local emergency operations center says a woman in the city of Pemba was killed by a falling tree.

Source: Fox News World

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German drug and crop chemical maker Bayer holds annual general meeting
Werner Baumann, CEO of German pharmaceutical and chemical maker Bayer AG, attends the annual general shareholders meeting in Bonn, Germany, April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

April 26, 2019

By Patricia Weiss and Ludwig Burger

BONN (Reuters) – Bayer shareholders vented their anger over its stock price slump on Friday as litigation risks mount from the German drugmaker’s $63 billion takeover of seed maker Monsanto.

Several large investors said they will not support aspirin investor Bayer’s management in a key vote scheduled for the end of its annual general meeting.

Bayer’s management, led by chief executive Werner Baumann, could see an embarrassing plunge in approval ratings, down from 97 percent at last year’s AGM, which was held shortly before the Monsanto takeover closed in June.

A vote to ratify the board’s actions features prominently at every German AGM. Although it has no bearing on management’s liability, it is seen as a key gauge of shareholder sentiment.

“Due to the continued negative development at Bayer, high legal risks and a massive share price slump, we refuse to ratify the management board and supervisory board’s actions during the business year,” Janne Werning, representing Germany’s Union Investment, a top-20 shareholder, said in prepared remarks.

About 30 billion euros ($34 billion) have been wiped off Bayer’s market value since August, when a U.S. jury found the pesticide and drugs group liable because Monsanto had not warned of alleged cancer risks linked to its weedkiller Roundup.

Bayer suffered a similar defeat last month and more than 13,000 plaintiffs are claiming damages.

Bayer is appealing or plans to appeal the verdicts.

Deutsche Bank’s asset managing arm DWS said shareholders should have been consulted before the takeover, which was agreed in 2016 and closed in June last year.

“You are pointing out that the lawsuits have not been lost yet. We and our customers, however, have already lost something – money and trust,” Nicolas Huber, head of corporate governance at DWS, said in prepared remarks for the AGM.

He said DWS would abstain from the shareholder vote of confidence in the executive and non-executive boards.

Two people familiar with the situation told Reuters this week that Bayer’s largest shareholder, BlackRock, plans to either abstain from or vote against ratifying the management board’s actions.

Asset management firm Deka, among Bayer’s largest German investors, has also said it would cast a no vote.

Baumann said Bayer’s true value was not reflected in the current share price.

“There’s no way to make this look good. The lawsuits and the first verdicts weigh heavily on our company and it’s a concern for many people,” he said, adding it was the right decision to buy Monsanto and that Bayer was vigorously defending itself.

This month, shareholder advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis recommended investors not to give the executive board their seal of approval.

(Reporting by Patricia Weiss and Ludwig Burger; Editing by Alexander Smith)

Source: OANN

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