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SAP signals cloud intent as it ousts top in-house programmers

FILE PHOTO: SAP SE CEO McDermott attends the company's annual results press conference in Walldorf
FILE PHOTO: SAP SE CEO Bill McDermott attends the company's annual results press conference in Walldorf, Germany, January 24, 2017. REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski/File Photo

March 20, 2019

By Douglas Busvine

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – When business software company SAP announced in January it would lay off 4,400 staff, Chief Financial Officer Luka Mucic described the restructuring as a “fitness program” for Europe’s most valuable technology firm.

But what some of the German company’s customers didn’t expect was that top software talent would be among those shipping out, rather than shaping up.

Gone is Bjoern Goerke, chief technology officer and head of SAP’s cloud platform business, along with programming gurus Thomas Jung and Rich Heilman – both highly respected in the wider SAP developer ecosystem.

The departures underscore CEO Bill McDermott’s determination to deliver on his long-stated ambition to drag SAP out of its comfort zone providing old-school enterprise software and complete its transformation into a digital platform business.

The shift comes at the risk of alienating core clients, who still account for the bulk of SAP’s business.

“The existing business must be supported with the necessary know-how,” said Marco Lenck, chairman of the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG) which represents 3,500 companies.

“We are seeing that a lot of people with know-how are leaving the company. That’s a trend that should not become too extensive.”

Nine years into McDermott’s tenure, SAP’s transition remains incomplete: Its legacy software license and support business remains its cash cow, accounting for three-quarters of revenue and most of profits. However, it is stagnating.

Its newer cloud operation is smaller and is growing quickly but, because it is subscription based, has thinner margins.

McDermott, 57, has promised to treble the size of the cloud business by 2023, bringing total revenues at SAP to 35 billion euros ($40 billion), as it competes with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce.com.

The latter is an all-cloud operation whose founder, Marc Benioff, wants to achieve sales of up to $28 billion in 2023 – in the same ballpark as SAP’s own ambition.

McDermott’s $8 billion takeover in November of Qualtrics, a U.S. firm that tracks consumer sentiment online, showed he is ready, if necessary, to pay top dollar for the talent needed for SAP to thrive in the digital era.

“We are a growth company,” the New Yorker said when he announced the shake-up in January. He expects SAP’s headcount – 96,500 at the end of last year – to exceed 100,000 by the end of this year as new hiring outpaces job cuts.

Asked for follow-up comment, SAP said the restructuring “will allow us to invest in key growth areas while implementing required changes in other areas to ensure they are prepared for the future”.

For some, the plan is sound.

“It’s not about headcount reduction and savings, but talent re-alignment,” said Holger Mueller, an SAP veteran and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

DEVELOPERS FRET

But for fans in the SAP ecosystem that includes a wider community of developers and business consultants, the departures are unsettling.

Dennis Howlett, a veteran consultant and co-founder of tech website Diginomica https://diginomica.com/saps-restructuring-hunger-games-game-of-thrones-or-both/amp, said SAP was letting go of “exceptional” talent to compensate for shortcomings in its own cloud strategy.

“Bill McDermott says we are a growth company, but where is the growth coming from, Bill, apart from acquisitions?” Howlett asked.

The trio, along with axed board member Bernd Leukert, were prime exponents of the in-house programming language that has for decades been the beating heart of SAP’s range of enterprise software and database products.

Their expertise helped the company, based in the small Rhineland town of Walldorf, grow into a $136 billion leader in applications – ranging from finance to supply-chain management – that can be variably configured to meet client needs.

“The software is like Lego, with pieces you can put together to make your world,” said Thorsten Franz, who runs an SAP consultancy in Germany and aired his concern about the layoffs on social media.

“Apparently it was too good to last,” he told Reuters. “Now SAP says: We don’t like the house any more, so we are firing the architect and all the people working on it.”

Jung and Heilman, who announced their departures this month on Twitter, declined to comment to Reuters.

Goerke, who is based in Palo Alto and is known for dressing up as Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk at off-site events, could not be reached. His Twitter handle suggested he was taking a time-out, carrying updates with poetry and photos from his daily jogging outings.

The restructuring sends a message to SAP’s existing clients that they need to take seriously a 2025 ‘end of life’ deadline for migrating users from legacy products to its latest, cloud-compatible S/4HANA platform.

German users are pushing back: “We will fight to ensure that we continue to receive support after 2025,” said Lenck of the DSAG.

SAP says, meanwhile, that it still has to hold conversations with staff on its restructuring in Europe. These are expected in the second quarter. The company plans to offer a mix of early retirement and voluntary redundancy to staff.

(Reporting by Douglas Busvine; Editing by Mark Potter)

Source: OANN

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The Latest: Mother, child saved from bank fire in Paris riot

The Latest on yellow vest protests in France (all times local):

2:40 p.m.

A bank has been set ablaze as French yellow vest protesters clash with police in Paris and firefighters had to rescue a mother and her child as the fire threatened to engulf their floor.

Florian Lointier, spokesman for Paris' firefighters, told The Associated Press that 11 people sustained light injuries Saturday in the blaze, including two firefighters.

The fire in the bank, which was on the ground floor of a seven-story residential building near the Champs-Elysees Avenue, was later extinguished. Lointier said a mother and her child were saved from the flames on the second floor and other residents were safely evacuated.

French yellow vest protesters are rioting in a 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron.

___

12:15 p.m.

Large plumes of smoke are rising above Paris' landmark Champs-Elysees avenue as French yellow vest protesters set life-threatening fires, smashed up luxury stores and clashed with police in a 18th straight weekend of demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron.

Police tried to contain the demonstrators Saturday with tear gas and water cannons. Fire trucks rushed and extinguished two burning newspaper kiosks that had been set ablaze. Several protesters posed for a photo in front of a kiosk's charred remains.

The violence started when protesters threw smoke bombs and other objects at officers along the famed avenue in the French capital.

The violence comes after a two-month national debate that Macron organized to respond to protesters' concerns about sinking living standards, high unemployment, stagnant wages and general income inequality.

Source: Fox News World

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Gillibrand talks Franken’s ousting at town hall

New York Democratic Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand defended her stance on leading the ousting of Sen. Al Franken in early 2018.

During a televised town hall on Monday night, Gillibrand was asked by MSNBC host Chris Hayes about her role in Franken’s resignation as well as the sexual harassment controversy that took place on her own staff.

Gillibrand first responded by saying that society must  “value women” and mentioned a bill she co-sponsored with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex, on how Congress handles sexual harassment.

Earlier this month, it was reported that a former female staffer of Gillibrand's resigned over her office's mishandling of misconduct allegations against a male colleague. Gillibrand insisted at the town hall that the female staffer was "believed" and the allegations were "fully investigated." She concluded the actions of the male staffer "didn't rise to sexual harassment" but that he was "punished" for making derogatory comments.

WHO IS KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND? 5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEW YORK SENATOR AND 2020 CANDIDATE

She then addressed Franken, which she referred to as a “hard issue for so many Democrats.”

“The truth is we miss him and people loved him, but he had eight credible allegations against him of sexual harassment for groping, two of them since he was a senator and the eighth one was a congressional staffer. And I had a choice to make whether to stay silent or not, whether to say, ‘That’s not OK with me,’ and I decided to say that,” the New York senator said. “Now, Senator Franken was entitled to whatever type of review or process he wanted. He could have stuck it out, stayed in the Senate, gone through his ethics committee investigation for as long as he wants for ever how many months, he could have sued all of the eight women, those were his choices. But I had to make my choice.”

The 2020 candidate also went into detail about the “upsetting” conversations she would have with her son about Franken.

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“As a mother, I have to be very clear. It is not OK for anyone to grope a woman anywhere on her body without her consent. It is not OK to forcibly kiss a woman, ever, without her consent. It was not OK for Sen. Franken and it is not OK for you, Theo. Ever,” Gillibrand told her oldest son. “So I needed to have clarity. And if there are few, Democratic powerful donors who are angry because I stood up for women who came forward with allegations of sexual harassment, that’s on them.”

Source: Fox News Politics

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Catholic Church in Peru rebukes local bishop who sued journalists

FILE PHOTO: Peruvian journalist Pedro Salinas, who exposed a web of abuse in an elite Catholic society and is being sued for defamation by a local bishop, talks to Reuters during an interview in Lima
FILE PHOTO: Peruvian journalist Pedro Salinas, who exposed a web of abuse in an elite Catholic society and is being sued for defamation by a local bishop, talks to Reuters during an interview in Lima, Peru October 16, 2018. REUTERS/Mariana Bazo/File Photo

April 11, 2019

LIMA (Reuters) – The Catholic Church in Peru on Wednesday rebuked a local archbishop who has sued two local investigative journalists for libel after they broke a sex abuse story involving an elite Catholic society that he belongs to.

Jose Eguren, archbishop of the coastal city of Piura, has accused the journalists, Pedro Salinas and Paola Ugaz, of slandering him by accusing him of covering up the abuse. This week, a judge ruled in his favor and ordered Salinas to a year’s probation and $24,000 fine. A ruling is pending for Ugaz.

Human rights activists and journalists slammed the sentence as a blow to freedom of expression and efforts to end impunity for child sex abusers.

In a statement about the ruling, the Peruvian Episcopal Conference, which represents the Catholic Church in the country of 32 million people and reports to the Vatican, called for solidarity with the victims of abuse in the Church and for those who expose abuse such as journalists.

“The Holy Pope himself has praised and thanked journalists for work that has, through their investigations, contributed to the reporting of abuse, punishment for abusers and assistance for victims,” the presidency of the conference said.

“The Pope stresses that the Church needs help in this difficult task of fighting this evil,” added the statement, which did not mention Eguren directly.

Eguren said it was premature for the Episcopal Conference to comment on the case because the full ruling of Judge Judith Cueva had not been made public. “Before making pronouncements, it’s prudent in these circumstances to wait for the entire sentence to be read,” Eguren said in a statement.

Salinas and Ugaz say they accused Eguren of covering up the abuse because of accounts by victims. They say he is trying to silence them for reporting on accounts of sexual, physical and psychological abuse by leaders in Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a Catholic society with pontifical approval that Eguren belongs to.

The book Salinas and Ugaz co-authored on Sodalitium in 2015, “Mitad Monjes, Mitad Soldados,” prompted investigations into former members of the society by the Peruvian prosecutors’ office and the Vatican.

An internal report by Sodalitium in 2017 concluded the group’s founder and other high-ranking former members had abused 19 minors and 10 adults. Last year, Pope Francis ordered the Vatican to take over the organization.

(Reporting by Mitra Taj; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Source: OANN

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DOJ Now Argues Obamacare Should be Struck Down

The Trump administration is now looking to the courts to completely throw out Obamacare.

In a letter filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, the Justice Department is asking that a lower court’s ruling that the healthcare law is unconstitutional now be affirmed, USA Today is reporting.

U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor in Texas had ruled the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, was no longer constitutional because Congress had repealed the requirement that people buy insurance or pay a penalty.

Axios reported that if the DOJ gets its way the ACA’s insurance exchanges would go away and so would its Medicaid expansion. In addition, millions would lose their coverage.

And Axios noted that the Trump administration had initially argued that the courts should only toss out the individual mandate and protections for pre-existing conditions.

Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve School of Law, writing on Reason.com, said the latest DOJ position was “astounding.”

“I was among those who cheered the selection of William Barr as Attorney General and hoped his confirmation would herald the elevation of law over politics within the Justice Department. I am still hopeful, but this latest filing is not a good sign.”

Meanwhile, the DOJ is defending its decision.

 "The Department of Justice has determined that the district court's comprehensive opinion came to the correct conclusion and will support it on appeal," Kerri Kupec, spokesperson for the Justice Department, is quoted by CNN.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Detailed and public, Kim Jong Nam murder may never be solved

The murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's estranged half brother at an airport in Malaysia was brazen, intricately orchestrated and, thanks to scores of security cameras, witnessed by millions around the world.

The real masterminds behind the killing, however, may never be brought to justice.

The murder charge was dropped against an Indonesian woman, who was freed last month. Her co-defendant, a Vietnamese woman who is the only suspect in custody, pleaded guilty — not to murder, but to the lesser charge of using a deadly weapon to cause injury — and will be freed as early as next month.

Her guilty plea and sentencing on Monday concluded more than two years of legal proceedings. But it cleared up none of the mystery.

Here's a look back at the crime, the missing masterminds and the ending.

___

THE CRIME

On Feb. 13, 2017, when Kim Jong Nam appeared at a check-in counter at a Kuala Lumpur airport terminal, he was jumped by two women who smeared something on his face. He soon began to feel ill, found his way to a medical station and was taken by ambulance to a hospital. He was dead within a matter of hours.

The women — Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam — were arrested soon afterward.

Huong was seen on security video wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "LOL" across the chest. The video, and video of the chubby, blue jean-clad victim staggering around before his death, went viral.

From the start, this was obviously no ordinary crime.

Aisyah and Huong were accused of using VX nerve agent, a poison developed for military use, and the victim was the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and half brother of current leader Kim Jong Un.

For a time, Kim Jong Nam had been seen, at least by outside experts, as a potential heir to the country's leadership. But he was caught, and humiliated, trying to enter Japan in 1998 to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He ended up in de facto exile, spending most of his time in Macau, a Chinese territory famous for its casinos.

By the time of his death, he wasn't part of the North Korean political scene. But his freedom to reside in Macau indicated he had some Chinese support. It's possible he was seen by some as a viable replacement if Kim Jong Un were ever to be removed from power.

Soon after Kin Jong Nam's murder, his son, Kim Han Sol, appeared in a YouTube video in which he claimed he, his mother and sister were under the protective care of a group calling itself "Cheollima Civil Defense."

The same group is believed to be behind an attack on the North Korean Embassy in Madrid last month in which 10 people allegedly shackled and gagged embassy staff before escaping with computers, hard drives and documents.

___

THE MISSING MASTERMINDS

Malaysian officials have never officially accused North Korea of involvement in Kim's death. North Korea has denied any involvement.

But prosecutors made it clear throughout the trial they suspected a North Korean connection.

Four North Korean suspects were seen on airport security video discarding their belongings and changing their clothing after the attack. The North Korean Embassy has also been implicated, with an embassy official helping obtain flights out of Malaysia for the four men, and using the name of one of its citizens to buy a car that took the suspects to the airport.

At Malaysia's request, Interpol issued a "red notice" for the four North Koreans wanted in connection with the killing.

Investigators said the North Korean suspects met the women at the airport and were believed to have provided them with the VX nerve agent used in the murder.

The North Koreans are suspected of scouting and training the women, who say they thought they were taking part in a candid camera-style prank show for television. Malaysian police believe the North Korean suspects flew out of the country the day of the killing and returned to Pyongyang.

Investigations into Kim's death led to a diplomatic spat between Malaysia and North Korea. Malaysia scrapped visa-free entry for North Koreans and expelled North Korean Ambassador Kang Chol after he rejected Malaysia's investigation and insisted the victim was an ordinary citizen who died of a heart attack. Kang Chol also accused Kuala Lumpur of colluding with outside forces to defame North Korea.

North Korea then banned Malaysians in its country from leaving, entrapping three diplomats and six of their family members. The nine Malaysians were only allowed to fly back after Malaysia released Kim's body to North Korea and allowed the North Koreans to leave, including an embassy official and a North Korean Air Koryo employee wanted by police for questioning over Kim's death.

Following last year's summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Malaysia's government has said it may re-establish ties with North Korea and reopen its embassy in Pyongyang.

___

THE ENDING

With the North Korean suspects missing, the two women were left to face the charges.

After some high-level lobbying by Indonesia's government, the Malaysian attorney general decided to drop the murder case against Aisyah on March 11.

Aisyah, 26, cried and hugged her Vietnamese co-defendant before leaving the courtroom. She was driven away in an Indonesian Embassy car and then flown back to Jakarta, where she thanked the president and other officials for their help.

"I feel happy, very happy that I cannot express in words," she told reporters at Jakarta's airport. "After this I just want to gather with my family."

Huong, 30, also sought to be released after Aisyah was freed, but prosecutors rejected her request.

Both had faced a murder charge that carried the death penalty if they were convicted. Prosecutors on Monday said they were offering Huong a reduced charge, and High Court judge Azmi Ariffin sentenced her to three years and four months from the day she was arrested, telling her she was "very, very lucky" and wishing her "all the best."

Vietnamese officials in the courtroom cheered when the decision was announced.

Her lawyer, Hisyam Teh Poh Teik, said she is expected to be freed by the first week of May, after a one-third reduction in her sentence for good behavior. He said four North Korean suspects still at large were the "real assassins."

As she was being escorted out of the court building, Huong shouted to reporters: "It's very good. I love you." She told reporters earlier that she wants to "sing and act" when she returns to Vietnam.

___

Talmadge, the AP's Pyongyang bureau chief, contributed to this report from Tokyo.

Source: Fox News World

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Pope defends decision to reject French cardinal’s resignation

Pope Francis addresses reporters aboard the plane bringing him back following a two-day trip to Morocco
Pope Francis addresses reporters aboard the plane bringing him back following a two-day trip to Morocco March 31, 2019. Alberto Pizzoli/Pool via REUTERS

March 31, 2019

By Philip Pullella

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (Reuters) – Pope Francis on Sunday defended his decision to reject the resignation of Philippe Barbarin, the French Roman Catholic cardinal convicted on charges of failing to report sexual abuse.

Speaking to reporters on the plane returning from a two-day trip to Morocco, Francis said he was obliged to give the archbishop of Lyon the benefit of the doubt until his appeal is heard.

“I can’t accept it because in juridical terms, in classic world jurisprudence, there is the presumption of innocence as long as the case is open, and he has appealed,” Francis said.

Barbarin offered his resignation when he met the pope on March 18.

A court in Lyon ruled on March 7 that between July 2014 and June 2015, Barbarin covered up allegations of sexual abuse of boy scouts in the 1980s and early 1990s by a priest who is due to go on trial later this year.

Barbarin, 68, the highest-profile cleric to be caught up in the child sex abuse scandal inside the French Church, received a six-month suspended prison sentence. He has denied the allegations and launched an appeal.

“When the second court hands down its decision, then we will see what will happen. But we must always have the presumption of innocence. This is important because it goes beyond the superficial condemnation by the media,” the pope said.

“Maybe he is not innocent, but the presumption (of innocence) must be there,” the pope said.

The Barbarin trial put one of Europe’s most senior clergymen in the spotlight at a time when the pope is grappling with criticism over the Church’s response to a decades-long sexual global abuse crisis.

Barbarin has stepped aside temporarily pending the appeal and has handed over the day-to-day running of the diocese to a vicar general.

He has said he would remain head of the dioceses in title and would continue to sign off on documents until the appeal process is over.

The Church’s credibility has been damaged in much of the world by abuse scandals in countries including Ireland, Chile, Australia, France, the United States and Poland, paying billions of dollars in damages to victims and forcing parishes to close.

The scandals have reached the upper echelons of the Vatican itself with the conviction of Cardinal George Pell, jailed this month for six years for abusing boys in his native Australia. He had served as the Vatican treasurer and a member of the pope’s innermost council of cardinals until his conviction last year.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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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