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JPMorgan profit tops estimates on higher interest income

FILE PHOTO: People walk inside JP Morgan headquarters in New York
FILE PHOTO: People walk inside JP Morgan headquarters in New York, October 25, 2013. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo GLOBAL BUSINESS WEEK AHEAD

April 12, 2019

(Reuters) – JPMorgan Chase & Co reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit on Friday, as higher interest income and gains in the bank’s advisory and debt underwriting business offset weakness in trading.

Trading desks at U.S. banks had a relatively quiet first-quarter, compared with a year-earlier, when worries over inflation and heightened trade tensions between the United States and China led to a spike in volatility.

“Even amid some global geopolitical uncertainty, the U.S. economy continues to grow, employment and wages are going up, inflation is moderate, financial markets are healthy and consumer and business confidence remains strong,” Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said in a statement.

Total investment banking revenue rose 10 percent, boosted by debt underwriting and advisory fees. Weak bond trading dragged overall adjusted trading revenue down 10 percent and hurt total revenue from the bank’s corporate and investment banking business.

Shares of the bank were up 2.3 percent in early trading.

Overall revenue rose 4.7 percent to $29.85 billion.

Analysts had expected revenue of $28.44 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

JPMorgan’s results kickoff earnings for the big banks and is closely watched by investors for cues on the health of the U.S. economy and the financial system.

The largest U.S. bank by assets said net income rose to $9.18 billion, or $2.65 per share, in the first quarter ended March 31, from $8.71 billion, or $2.37 per share, a year earlier.

Net interest income rose 8 percent to $14.60 billion, boosted by rate increases since the first quarter of last year.

Analysts had estimated earnings of $2.35 per share, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Wells Fargo, the No.4 U.S. bank by assets, is expected to report quarterly results later in the day.

(Reporting by Siddharth Cavale in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)

Source: OANN

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No Calls for Terrorist Control

No Calls for Terrorist Control By Paul O’Brien In the wake of the Texas school shooting I see demands from the left for gun control now. They try to shame anyone who believes in owning guns to defend themselves and their families from an attack by the monsters who will shoot up a school. But […]

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Political Centralization Ended the Roman Republic

Those that passionately advocate for political decentralization are often portrayed as fringe carpers whose ideas are entirely unworthy of consideration.

Indeed, the mainstream media and ruling class has repeatedly alleged that events like Brexit and Calexit would cause chaotic political shifts, and routinely deem supporters of such causes radical extremists or “Neo Confederates.” Many such individuals ascribe religious qualities to modern political unions, and denigrate anyone who dares to argue that political arrangements serve a utilitarian – rather than a sacramental – function.

Tactlessly, those who deride the supporters of federalism and political fragmentation imperil us all by ignoring the lessons of history. Candid scholars, on the other hand, recognize that several junctures from the past contradict the orthodox narrative against disunion and decentralized government. One such case was the demise of the Roman Republic, where it was actually the marked transition to political consolidation that caused the very chaos and bloodshed we are always told decentralization will bring.

In the decades prior to the end of the republic, citizens celebrated the Rome’s military might and European conquest. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, better known as Pompey the Great, used his uncanny military acumen to put down a series of slave rebellions known as the Servile Wars. An attempt to overthrow the Roman Republic, the Catiline Conspiracy, was swiftly exposed and suppressed by the Roman army. The subjugation of Gaul was completed in 52 BC, and Rome was the strongest power on earth. Roman patriotism among the plebian class was at an all-time high.

Through it all, the virtuous Cato cautioned that it was not the barbarians that Romans had to fear, but the one man who achieved such prestige as the result of their downfall – Gaius Julius Caesar. Claiming that Caesar sought only to elevate himself in political stature and usurp the power of the republic, Cato pleaded his fellow senators to curtail his political privileges, and eventually, to declare him an outlaw and confront him militarily. If left unopposed, he thought, Caesar would place all authority within the republic in his own hands.

And centralize Caesar did. Bestowed with the privileges of a dictator – a ruler with near unlimited power – he quickly made use of his newfound authority. A friend the plebian class, Caesar developed a cult of personality that allowed him to stretch his authority beyond all imaginable limits. Without Pompey in his way, there was little to stop him from doing so.

In one of his most significant acts as dictator, Caesar imposed several reforms that transformed the republic from a fragmented series of provinces into a single, unitary state. Prior to this overhaul, Rome’s provinces retained a substantial amount of autonomy. Italy especially had been a mosaic of independent regions and cultures, and its unification was consummated only through brutally accelerated violence, confiscation of property, and civil war.1

During his dictatorship, Caesar often made unilateral decisions behind closed doors, and issued edicts as if they had been adopted by the Roman Senate through legitimate constitutional processes. During his absences from Rome, his two non-senatorial advisors, Oppius and Balbus, also wielded unprecedented power. In the words of esteemed Roman scholar Ronald Syme, Caesar’s ascension was characterized by an elevation to supreme and personal rule, and the rise of a national, transformed Roman state.2

Because the Senate had been depleted in the wake of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, the dictator made hundreds of new appointments, filling the assembly with Caesarian partisans who zealously backed his vision for political consolidation. Many of them were notoriously corrupt, and engaged in rampant extortion.3 Caesar eventually assumed the power to appoint all magistrates of the republic, effectively transitioning them from representatives of the people to fervent supporters of himself.

Caesar also passed a sumptuary law, limiting the citizens’ ability to purchase and consume various goods. He also planned grandiose construction projects, including a temple to himself known as the Forum of Caesar. Perhaps most significantly, though, he outlawed Rome’s professional guilds – associations that openly debated political topics of their day. Doing so, he believed, would root out all remaining opposition to the Caesarian regime.

In a move that was absolutely unprecedented in the Roman Republic, Caesar established a police force for the first time. For centuries, Roman cities and neighborhoods effectively policed themselves, and the patronage system that linked patricians with the plebeians protected the safety of the people. With the dictator’s climb to power, however, the iron hand of the enforcement state – which would be later expanded by Augustus – was established for the first time.

Despondent were those who resisted Caesar’s treacherous reign until the bitter end. Cato famously plunged his own sword into himself rather than live under Caesar’s unitary rule over Rome. The age’s best-known orator, Cicero, refused to join Caesar in the First Triumvirate because he believed it would undermine the republic and lead to the accumulation of too much power.4 In his last days, he condemned the dictator, sympathized with those that assassinated him, and worked to obstruct his successors. Though the Liberators that assassinated Caesar remained convinced that the republic’s traditions and customs must be preserved at all costs, they too fell prey to military alliance between Mark Antony and Octavian.

The path to Roman centralization was only made possible, however, because of a sizable political shift that transpired during the prior generation. Indeed, the undertakings of Lucius Cornelius Sulla did much to lay the groundwork for Caesar’s rise.

It was Sulla, after all, that first rallied his army to march on Rome in an unprecedented act of treason. After his military successes, he implemented an array of reforms to the Roman Constitution, including a revival of the malignant proscription system – which authorized the type of political purges Mark Antony and Augustus utilized and build upon. Additionally, it was Sulla that revived the dictatorship – where a single individual was granted near unlimited power over the state. In a manner that Caesar and Augustus came to emulate, Sulla achieved political prominence through military strength and political domination rather than republican virtue.

All of these factors, in combination, played crucial roles in the demise of the Roman Republic – a system of limited and divided political power, where the proclivities of the ambitious were at one time hindered by traditional restraints. In our contemporary age, where the number of potential Caesars has grown exponentially, it behooves us to avoid the pitfalls of political centralization and the calamity it has wrought upon western civilization.



On his way to bullhorn the White House, Alex Jones bumped into Max Keiser of MaxKeiser.com.

Source: InfoWars

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‘Spoiling’ for a fight? Dems frantic over fears Schultz bid could boost Trump

If Republican President Trump is at the top of the Democrats' political target list, billionaire Howard Schultz may soon be second.

Ever since the lifelong Democrat and former chairman and CEO of Starbucks announced on "60 Minutes" in late January that he was mulling an independent bid for the White House, the reaction from Democrats has been ice cold.

HOWARD SCHULTZ TARGETS 2020 DEMOCRATS AS TOO FAR TO LEFT

Democrats quickly united, fearing a Schultz candidacy would wound their efforts to oust Trump from the White House in the 2020 election.

Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts slammed Schultz as a billionaire who thinks he can “buy the presidency to keep the system rigged for themselves while opportunity slips away for everyone else.”

WATCH THE HOWARD SCHULTZ TOWN HALL ON FOX NEWS CHANNEL ON THURSDAY AT 6:30 PM ET. 

Fellow billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg – who at the time was considering a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination – criticized a possible independent run by Schultz, saying it would “end up re-electing the president.”

'If he becomes a candidate, then we’ll treat him like a target.'

— Priorities USA communications director Josh Schwerin

HOWARD SCHULTZ: 2020 DEMS WILL PLAY THE 'SPOILER'

David Axelrod, the former top political adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted that “If Schultz decides to run as an independent, @realDonaldTrump should give Starbucks their Trump Tower space rent free! It would be a gift.”

This was just a taste of what's to come if Schultz moves ahead with an independent bid for 2020.

American Bridge 21st Century, a leading pro-Democratic opposition research shop, already is mounting an offensive against him.

“We think it’s very clear that Howard Schultz would throw the election to Donald Trump and so we’re treating him as a target of equal standing with Trump,” American Bridge communications director Andrew Bates told Fox News.

He explained that “we’re thoroughly researching him in a number of ways. One is his business record. Another is his history aside from his business record. We’re looking into his finances, his public statements.”

Bates said that his group’s arsenal would include opposition research, rapid response and possibly digital ads.

Also getting into the game is Priorities USA, which is the largest pro-Democratic super PAC.

“If he becomes a candidate, then we’ll treat him like a target,” Priorities USA communications director Josh Schwerin told Fox News.

“Anything is on the table,” he stressed.

Also targeting Shultz in the hours after his news shook the political landscape: freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, The View’s Joy Behar, and HBO host Bill Maher.

“Really? The coffee guy wants to be president?” Maher tweeted. “Just because you had one profitable insight — people will overpay for coffee — doesn’t mean you can run the world.”

The anger hit Schultz head-on, as he was heckled on the streets of New York City by a protester yelling “Don’t help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire a------.”

Some activists even threatened boycotts of Starbucks.

SCHULTZ: DEMS NEED 'LITTLE BIT LESS CAFFEINE RIGHT NOW'

The Democrats’ rage is no surprise. It stems from painful political memories of lost presidential elections.

Nearly two decades after the 2000 election, many Democrats still blame independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader for playing the spoiler in then-Vice President Al Gore’s narrow and controversial defeat by then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush. And they point to the 2016 election, arguing that votes won by Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein siphoned support away from Hillary Clinton, helping Donald Trump win crucial swing states.

But Schultz argues that Democrats are the ones who could play the "spoiler" in 2020, if they keep drifting further left.

"If you want to talk about spoiler, if the Democrats decide in their wisdom to nominate a far-left person who is professing policies ... of a socialist — that will be a spoiler,” Schultz said last month in an interview on Fox News.

When Bloomberg decided against launching a campaign for the Democratic nomination, Schultz didn’t waste an opportunity to highlight that there’s no room anymore for a centrist in the Democratic Party.

“Mike Bloomberg governed from the center with big ideas, pragmatism and common sense. In an era of paralysis and dysfunction, he’s an exception,” Schultz tweeted as he pointed to Bloomberg’s tenure as New York City mayor. “I've long said there isn't room for centrist moderation in either party and it appears Mr. Bloomberg has come to the same conclusion.”

Source: Fox News Politics

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Man who found dead baby in 1981 reflects on mother's arrest

A Sioux Falls man who discovered a dead infant in a ditch 38 years ago said following the arrest of the child's biological mother that he still mourns the loss of a child he wishes he had found alive.

Lee Litz told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader that he cried tears of relief when he learned Theresa Bentaas, 57, had been charged with murder and manslaughter in the killing of the child known as Baby Andrew.

Litz found the boy's body wrapped in a blanket in a cornfield ditch in February 1981.

Litz said his family and the 50 strangers who attended the infant's funeral are the boy's true family, even though they didn't know him or his parents. Litz said his wife was pregnant when he discovered the baby and he was already a father, so he couldn't comprehend why someone would leave their child to die.

"It was a human life. He never got the chance to live," Litz said. "There are times when I wish I hadn't found him and there are times that I'm glad I did. I just wish I found him earlier, when he was still alive."

His 37-year-old daughter, Crystal Litz-Oestreich, said she and her family hope for justice for the child whose body was found just months before she was born.

"Bentaas threw him away like trash," Litz-Oestreich said.

Sioux Falls Police used DNA to determine Bentaas was the biological mother and arrested her Friday.

Bentaas' attorney, Raleigh Hansman, declined to comment Monday afternoon. She argued at a bond hearing earlier Monday that Bentaas should be released on her own recognizance, arguing that she is a lifelong Sioux Falls resident with no criminal history and "not a danger to this community." Judge Pat Schroeder granted prosecutors' request for $250,000 cash-only bond.

Bentaas told authorities last month that she concealed her pregnancy from her friends and family and gave birth alone in her apartment, according to an affidavit. Bentaas said she drove the infant to the area where he was later discovered and left him there to die.

Bentaas said she was "young and stupid" and felt sad and scared as she drove away, according to the court document.

Litz said that's no excuse.

"What she did 38 years ago was wrong. It doesn't matter how long it's been," Litz said. "As far as her, I don't have any sympathy for her."

___

Information from: Argus Leader, http://www.argusleader.com

Source: Fox News National

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Conference featuring 2020 Dems begins with fiery chant quoting fugitive cop-killer Assata Shakur

A conference featuring eight prominent 2020 Democrat presidential hopefuls kicked off in Washington, D.C,. with the fiery rallying cry of a fugitive cop-killer on Monday, as the labor and political groups in attendance shouted in unison, "We have nothing to lose but our chains."

Jamal Watkins, the Vice President of Civic Engagement at the NAACP, began by telling the audience at the We the People conference that he would invoke the words of Assata Shakur, whose real name is Joanne Chesimard.

Shakur was convicted of the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper when she was in the Black Liberation Army. After escaping from prison in 1979, Shakur fled to Cuba, which granted her asylum even as she remains on the FBI's list of most-wanted fugitive terrorists.

"Now I came here not to talk at you -- it's gonna be a long and powerful day," Watkins said. "But I want you to do something with me. I'm gonna actually have you participate with me in repeating some words from a leader by the name of Assata Shakur. So if you could stand up -- if you can't stand, it's okay -- but I want you to repeat after me."

Watkins then quoted Shakur, pausing to let attendees repeat after him: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Shakur's words, in turn, were appropriated from the final sentences of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels' Communist Manifesto: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!"

Among the groups in attendance were the Sierra Club, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, SEIU and Communications Workers of America.

They were drawn to the conference to hear from a series of speakers that included 2020 Democratic White House contenders Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jay Inslee  and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Although there was no indication the candidates embraced Shakur's comments, Democrats and progressives have long embraced the convicted murderer. California Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters, for example, wrote in 1998 to then-Cuban President Fidel Castro to apologize for voting for a resolution that called for Cuba to stop harboring Shakur.

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"I, and some of the Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, mistakenly voted for House Concurrent Resolution 254 which called on the Government of Cuba to extradite to the United States Joanne Chesimard and all other individuals who have fled the United States from political persecution and received political asylum in Cuba," Waters wrote to Castro. "Joanne Chesimard was the birth name of a political activist known to most Members of the Congressional Black Caucus as Assata Shakur. For the record, I am opposed to the resolution. I unequivocally stated that a mistake was made and I would have voted against the legislation."

Notably absent from the conference on Monday was former Vice President Joe Biden, who is grappling with accusations of unwanted touching from two women.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Italy urges Europe to ready plan for Libya refugee flight

Italy's Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero Milanesi talks to journalists during the Foreign ministers of G7 nations meeting in Dinard
Italy's Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero Milanesi talks to journalists during the Foreign ministers of G7 nations meeting in Dinard, France, April 6, 2019. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe

April 24, 2019

ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s government has written to the European Union asking it to ready a plan of action to deal with a possible flight of refugees from the armed conflict in Libya, Italian Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero said on Wednesday.

Moavero was speaking at a joint news conference in Rome after talks with the U.N. envoy on Libya, Ghassan Salame.

(Reporting by Giselda Vagnoni; Editing by Mark Bendeich)

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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

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

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

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

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

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

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Fox News Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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