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Rights group: terror watchlist shared with animal shelters

A Muslim civil-rights group says the FBI is letting animal shelters, private investigators and even a Midwestern megachurch have access to its watchlist of suspected terrorists.

In court documents unsealed after a court hearing Friday, lawyers for the Council on American-Islamic Relations expressed concern that the watchlist is disseminated much more broadly than the government is willing to acknowledge.

"Defendants share their list with anyone or anything that asks," CAIR's lawyers wrote in one of their legal briefs.

Government lawyers, meanwhile, say CAIR is being alarmist and misrepresenting some of the entities on the list.

CAIR's assertions about the broad dissemination of the terror watchlist are "so rife with misleading statements and outright falsehood that it is hard to know where to begin," government lawyer Amy Powell wrote in an email attached to a court filing.

Issues over the dissemination of the terrorist watchlist to private entities have come in a lawsuit CAIR filed challenging the watchlist's constitutionality. CAIR says the watchlist is riddled with errors and innocent Muslims are placed on the list by mistake and suffer numerous consequences as a result.

Those consequences are exacerbated, according to CAIR, by the government's willingness to share the watchlist so broadly, including granting access to hundreds of private entities.

The government last month admitted in court papers that hundreds of private entities can access the watchlist, after years of denying the list was shared in that manner. But government officials maintain that private entities accessing the list are connected to law enforcement, like police forces for universities or railroads.

A judge recently ordered the government to let CAIR's lawyers see which private entities had access to the watchlist, but they were forbidden from making copies or taking notes. CAIR's lawyers say those restrictions leave them hamstrung in their ability to research concerns about specific entities.

Some of the disputes about how broadly the list is disseminated seem to stem from how broadly one defines "law enforcement."

Animal shelters are a case in point. The government says those animal shelters on the list are simply animal welfare organizations that have been granted police powers under state law and therefore have law-enforcement responsibility.

The megachurch, government lawyers say, is actually the police department of a religious university.

CAIR's lawyers have long suspected that the list is disseminated much more widely than the government has acknowledged. The broad terror watchlist contains hundreds of thousands of names; the much smaller no-fly list is culled from the watchlist.

At Friday's hearing, Magistrate Judge John Anderson mulled making the list of private entities available to the public at large. He said that since private entities receiving the list are free to disclose the fact they can access the list, he didn't see why the full list shouldn't be part of the public record in the case.

But Justice Department Lawyer Antonia Konkoly said a wholesale disclosure of private entities would be a serious security breach, and could give terrorist groups a "roadmap" to understanding how the government monitors and combats them.

Ultimately, Anderson decided to leave in place rules that restrict CAIR's lawyers from having their own copy of the private-entities list or making that list a publicly filed document.

Source: Fox News National

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Uber driver pleads guilty to kidnapping sleeping passenger

A man who drove for Uber in New York City has pleaded guilty to kidnapping a woman who fell asleep inside his vehicle.

Harbir Parmar pleaded guilty to federal charges Monday in U.S. District Court.

The kidnapping happened in February 2018 after the woman requested a ride from Manhattan to her home in White Plains, New York.

Prosecutors said Parmar groped the woman in the back seat and changed the address of her destination.

He eventually left her on the side of a highway in Connecticut after she asked to be taken to a police station.

Parmar also pleaded guilty to wire fraud for overcharging riders by inputting false information about their destinations. Prosecutors said the fraud amounted to thousands of dollars.

Parmar faces up to life in prison at his June 24 sentencing.

Source: Fox News National

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Brexit Delay a Macron Victory – Reports

The French president has reportedly been a vocal opponent of a long Brexit extension for the UK, whose divorce from the EU was delayed until 31 October, although it was supposed to crash out the bloc by 12 April.

Some reports have suggested that he was “isolated” on the matter despite sympathy from Austria, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

All EU member states will be able to hold summits and make decisions without the UK despite its extended membership. A “Future of Europe” meeting in Sibiu, is scheduled for 9 May after the initially planned Brexit deadline. However, the UK is still allowed to take part in the upcoming European elections on 22 May, which was supposed be after the divorce.

According to the website Euractiv, blocking London from EU decision making can be viewed as a victory for France’s President Emmanuel Macron who went against a long Brexit extension that “was not logical” and would weaken the bloc’s institutions “with a member who is there, but wants to leave,” in his viewpoint.


Alex Jones breaks down the globalists’ plan to destroy borders worldwide before bringing in their New World Order under complete totalitarian rule.

While some reports suggested that Macron was “isolated” on the matter, gaining support only from Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg, he refuted these speculations. He concluded that he saw his role as “bringing clarity” to a process the EU has never experienced before. He also branded the idea of the UK holding European elections “baroque,” noting, however, that EU member states will not prohibit the UK from holding EU elections. Commenting on the outcome of the meeting, Macron concluded “We delivered the best possible compromise.”

However, the website EU Observer reports, citing its source, that EU diplomats were annoyed by the French president, his resistance to a long extension was inspired by “internal political reasons.”

“This summit is not about the UK, but about French internal politics”, an unnamed diplomat said, as cited by the outlet.

During the Special European Council in Brussels, heads of 27 EU member states, excluding the United Kingdom, reached a consensus on Brexit delay, requested by UK Prime Minister Theresa May agreeing upon an extension to the Brexit deadline until 31 October, giving London an additional six months to figure out the best possible way to break the withdrawal impasse. According to the EU Observer, three or four member states preferred a short period, while 17 countries were for a long extension.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May told a news conference on Thursday that Britain could leave the European Union before the 30th of June, adding that she has been reaching out to find a way to reach an agreement on Brexit in the UK Parliament.


Mike Adams breaks down how hospital ventilation systems across American and the world are pumping out a deadly superbug.

Source: InfoWars

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Nike's New Kaepernick Jersey Sells Out in Hours

A new jersey celebrating NFL quarterback-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick sold out hours after it was put on sale, Nike confirmed.

Kaepernick himself posted an image on Instagram late Wednesday, the same day the black jersey with his old number 7 went on sale.

"The Nike Kaepernick Icon Jersey is out of stock! Thank you to everyone that took the time out of their day to pick one up. I am humbled and appreciate all your continued support. Check the link in the bio to be notified for the next drop!" Kaepernick wrote.

Nike said "the Kaepernick Icon Jersey is a celebration of those who seek truth in their communities, and those who remain true to themselves."

A link to the product page redirects to the url kaepernick.nofyme.com. Visitors are asked to provide their mobile phone number in order to receive text messages when Kaepernick products, presumably made by Nike, are available.

Kaepernick gained notoriety in 2016 after he refused to stand for the National Anthem before games as he protested perceived injustices to the black community. He became a free agent after that season but no team has signed him.

Source: NewsMax America

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GOP Fears Mueller’s Collusion Bias Lives On in Final Report

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Although Republicans were pleased that Special Counsel Robert Mueller said he was unable to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, they fear his practice of distorting facts during his investigation will color his final report, which Attorney General William Barr is expected to release to Congress in redacted form this week.

Democrats are convinced that it will show examples of “collusion" between Trump and Russia, even if there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

Seeking to manage public perceptions about the Mueller report as much as Democrats are, Republicans say their counterparts are bent on cherry-picking its details to make it still look as if President Trump coordinated with Russia, part of their effort to keep the collusion narrative alive heading into the 2020 presidential election. They fear Mueller will make it easy for them to continue spinning that tale.

Sen. Lindsey Graham: Mueller distorted Papadopoulos emails.

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Senior Republicans on investigative committees on Capitol Hill, who have reviewed some of the same evidence Mueller’s investigators have examined, complain that the special counsel’s team of mostly Democratic prosecutors shaded evidence in charging documents filed against a number of Trump associates for process crimes unrelated to collusion (mostly lying to investigators) to suggest a broad conspiracy. They say that the special counsel and prosecutors misled the court and the media by, among other things, editing the contents of emails to cast a sinister shadow on otherwise innocuous communications among Trump advisers and by omitting exculpatory information.

They cite charging documents filed against Trump advisers George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen and former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as examples.

“The indictments that were made by the Mueller team are very questionable, and there’s pieces of them that read like Russian spy novels,” said Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

“That was done on purpose,” he added, "to create a narrative to make the American people think, as they were indicting these people, that somehow this had to do with collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

For example, in filing false-statement charges against former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos in October 2017, Mueller’s team included a footnote that said emails obtained by the special counsel revealed that a Trump “campaign official suggested ‘low level’ staff should go to Russia.”

As the Senate Judiciary Committee pointed out in a secret letter to Mueller, the special counsel neglected to mention that the emails had been provided to it by the Trump campaign and they showed the campaign wanted someone “low level” to decline these types of invitations.

The distortions led the Washington Post, CNN and other major media to “misinterpret the nature of the internal campaign dialogue” as attempts by the Trump campaign to coordinate activities with Moscow, according to Sens. Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley, the top Republicans on the committee.

Sens. Graham and Dianne Feinstein of the Judiciary Committee: Graham suspects Robert Mueller of distortion, Feinstein suspects Attorney General William Barr of the same.

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Mueller’s office declined repeated requests for comment. A spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the committee, did not respond to a request for a statement regarding Graham’s and Grassley’s concerns about Mueller’s objectivity. Feinstein on April 11 joined five other Democratic senators in signing a letter to Barr accusing the attorney general of working with Republicans to "perpetuate a partisan narrative designed to undermine the work of the Special Counsel,” arguing that their doubts about the Russia investigation only serve "to legitimize President Trump’s dangerous attacks on the Department of Justice and the FBI."

But Republicans have pressed their own doubts about Mueller. Last month, in another little-noticed letter to Barr, Senate Judiciary Committee investigators elaborated on the Papadopoulos matter and what they described as Mueller unfairly cherry-picking from internal Trump campaign emails. They claimed that he and his prosecutors had cited only fragments of the emails in the charging document against Papadopoulos. And they pointed out that this "selective use" of the emails made it seem as if the adviser and the campaign were working behind the scenes with Russia, when in fact that was not the case.

Taken in their fuller context, the emails showed Papadopoulos was in fact discouraged from meeting with Russians. Additional context showed that Papadopoulos, acting as a foreign policy adviser, had conversations with representatives from multiple governments, not just Russia, and that his supervisor Sam Clovis, along with campaign chair Paul Manafort, had opposed any trip to Russia for Trump and the campaign.

Mueller left all of this out of the complaint he personally signed against Papadopoulos in October 2017.

Citing the misleading complaint, CNN erroneously reported that “records describe an email between Trump campaign officials suggesting they were considering acting on Russian invitations to go to Russia.” The story also stated that the Papadopoulos charge was “the campaign’s clearest connection so far to Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election.”

The following month, after Senate investigators had compared the emails quoted in the Papadopoulos filing with the full emails they had obtained separately from the Trump campaign, they called Mueller out on the omissions, arguing he took information out of context.

George Papadopoulos: Probers made it seem he was “vaguely connected with the collusion aspect”  of Mueller's case.

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File

“In this matter, the public deserves to have the full context for the information the special counsel chooses to release,” then-Senate Judiciary chair Grassley wrote Mueller in a four-page letter. “The glaring lack of it feeds speculation and innuendo that distorts the facts."

Mueller objected to the committee releasing the full emails at the time.

Papadopoulos said he handed over all his emails, text messages and other communications with the Trump campaign to Mueller’s investigators. He said they shaded the emails to make it seem as though he was “vaguely connected with the collusion aspect” of Mueller’s case.

Also listed on the charging document against Papadopoulos was Mueller prosecutor Jeannie Rhee, a former top Obama appointee and Clinton donor who Papadopoulos said was biased against him and had political “conflicts of interest” investigating him and the Republican campaign. She was one of 13 registered Democrats on Mueller’s team of 17 prosecutors.

Papadopoulos said Rhee repeatedly threatened him, telling him he was “looking at 25 years in prison” if he didn’t cooperate with Mueller. Ultimately he pleaded guilty to making a false statement – he claimed he did not know that Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese academic who had told him the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, had connections to the Russian government when, in fact, he did. There are no reports he tried to track down the “dirt” or told anyone in the Trump campaign about Mifsud. Ultimately he was sentenced to 14 days in jail.

Formerly a senior adviser to Attorney General Eric Holder, Rhee was a partner at Mueller’s old law firm, WilmerHale. In 2015, she defended the Clinton Foundation in a lawsuit that claimed it operated as a racketeering enterprise shaking down donors in exchange for government favors. In 2015 and 2016, she contributed $5,400 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In his new book, “Deep State Target,” Papadopoulos revealed that the FBI investigator handling his case and leading interrogations of him was FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, whom the Justice Department inspector general last year exposed for anti-Trump bias. Clinesmith was kicked off the Mueller team in February 2018 after the inspector general alerted Mueller to instant messages he wrote on FBINet revealing he was “devastated” over Clinton’s loss on Election Day and would join the “resistance” against Trump. He also called Vice President Mike Pence “stupid."

Michael Flynn: Mueller omitted an exculpatory detail, that anti-Trump FBI agent Peter Strzok thought he was truthful.

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Republicans say the special counsel also demonstrated collusion bias in its complaint against Trump National Security Adviser Flynn, former prosecutors say.

Mueller charged the retired general with lying to FBI investigators about his conversation with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, even though one of the investigators — noted Trump critic Peter Strzok — “had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying,” according to internal FBI documents uncovered by Flynn’s defense team.

In fact, former FBI Director James Comey has said Flynn provided truthful answers and wasn’t intentionally misleading investigators on Jan. 24, 2017, when he was questioned by Strzok and another agent.

Mueller omitted the exculpatory information from the charging documents he filed against Flynn.

“Flynn’s charges were made up so Mueller could get his Russian connection,” said former federal prosecutor and well-known Trump defender Victoria Toensing. “The complaint he filed against Flynn is warped."

A third troubling example Republicans point to is the special counsel’s  complaints against Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, which like other court documents included tantalizing hints of collusion that dissolved upon closer inspection. They say Mueller used the so-called Moscow Project talks – Trump’s hope to build or at least brand a Russian skyscraper -- to connect Trump directly to Vladimir Putin during the campaign, while withholding from the court details that would exonerate Trump of such collusion. 

Mueller omitted the fact that Michael Cohen, above, did not have any direct points of contact at the Kremlin, and had resorted to sending emails to a general press mailbox.

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File

A closer reading of the November 2018 charging document filed with Cohen's false-statement plea deal reveals that Mueller — who personally signed the document — omitted a fuller accounting of Cohen’s emails and text messages which, according to Capitol Hill investigators who have seen them, make the deal look far less nefarious than portrayed in the filing and in the press.

On page 7, Mueller mentions that Cohen tried to email Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office on Jan. 14, 2016, and again on Jan. 16, 2016. But Mueller omitted the fact that Cohen did not have any direct points of contact at the Kremlin, and had resorted to sending the emails to a general press mailbox.

“It's clear from personal messages he sent in 2015 and 2016 that the Trump Organization did not have formal lines of communication set up with Putin’s office or the Kremlin during the campaign,” one Hill investigator said. “There was no secret ‘back channel.’”

“So as far as collusion goes,” the source added, "the project is actually more exculpatory than incriminating for Trump and his campaign."

In the end, neither Putin nor any Kremlin official was directly involved in the scuttled Moscow Project, sources say. Moreover, neither Cohen nor Trump traveled to Moscow in support of the deal, as real estate broker and Cohen business associate Felix Sater had urged. No meetings with Russian government officials took place.

It was Sater, a Russian immigrant with a checkered past, who came up with the tower project idea in 2015.
But the project never went anywhere partly because Sater didn’t have the pull with Putin he claimed to have.
Sources who have seen Sater’s still-secret transcripts of closed-door testimony say Sater, whom Cohen described as a “salesman," testified to the House intelligence panel in late 2017 that his communications with Cohen about putting Trump and Putin on a stage for a "ribbon-cutting" for a Trump Tower in Moscow were “mere puffery” to try to promote the project and get it off the ground.

Also according to his still-undisclosed testimony, Sater swore none of those communications involved taking any action to influence the 2016 presidential election. None of the emails and texts between Sater and Cohen mention Russian plans or efforts to hack Democrats’ campaign emails or influence the election.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative nonpartisan government watchdog group, said the criminal-information statement of offense against Cohen reflects political bias. He said the special counsel appeared more interested in trying to draw connections to Russia than highlighting exculpatory evidence in what he called "a transparent attempt to try to embarrass the president.”

Major news organizations seized on Mueller's misrepresentations.

CNN said the charging documents, which reference the president as “Individual 1," suggest Trump had a working relationship with Russia’s president and that "Putin had leverage over Trump" because of the project.

“Well into the 2016 campaign, one of the president’s closest associates was in touch with the Kremlin on this project, as we now know, and Michael Cohen says he was lying about it to protect the president,” said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

“Cohen was communicating directly with the Kremlin,” Blitzer added.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said the development was so “enormous” that Trump “might not finish his term.” At MSNBC, pundits maintained the court papers prove “Trump secretly interacted with Putin’s own office."

“Now we have evidence that there was direct communication between the Trump Organization and Putin’s office on this. I mean, this is collusion,” said David Corn of Mother Jones, co-author of “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.”

Adam Schiff, now the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Trump was dealing directly with Putin on real estate ventures during the campaign.

Clinton supporter Rhee’s name is the first listed under Mueller’s signature as one of the prosecutors involved in the Cohen case, appearing at the end of the government’s December 2018 sentencing memorandum filed against him.

Mueller’s office declined repeated requests for comment from RealClearInvestigations. “Thanks, we’ll decline to comment,” spokesman Peter Carr reiterated Sunday evening

Attorney General William Barr: Republicans fear juiced indictments color final report.

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Attorney General Barr last week pledged to Democrats that he won’t withhold any derogatory information about the president regarding “collusion” contained in Mueller’s report.

But Republican lawmakers warn that if the special counsel's juiced indictments are any indication, his report won’t be any more objective in detailing underlying evidence and telling the whole truth about Trump campaign activities in 2016.

Still puzzling to many Republicans is why Mueller, reportedly a Republican himself, would feint criminal collusion findings.

It’s not hard to see why many of the partisan Democrats he hired for his prosecution team, led by Clinton booster and anti-Trump “pit bull” Andrew Weissmann, would want to leave the impression Trump was actively cooperating with Moscow to steal the election from Clinton. But why Mueller?

Former prosecutors and investigators think Mueller’s hidden agenda was to protect the institutions of the FBI and Justice Department, as well as the broader intelligence community the agencies increasingly had become a part of following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

They describe Mueller as “an establishment guy” who spent some 20 years loyally working for the Justice Department and FBI, which had come under attack as politicized and even dirty for employing two standards in investigating Clinton and Trump during the 2016 campaign; they needed to be protected from what he viewed as a hostile takeover by the Trump administration, these people say

“Why did Mueller take the job? Not simply to protect the FBI but the entire intelligence community that he was part of,” said veteran FBI agent and lawyer Mark Wauck. “It’s hard to overestimate his interest in protecting DOJ from a Trump takeover.”

“To do that,” he added, “it would be helpful to not necessarily prove ‘collusion’ but show at least a colorable case that the IC could claim a reasonable belief in collusion.”

Mueller’s “hiring of extreme partisans suggest that the view of Trump was of an existential threat [to the IC] that had to be, at a minimum, neutered but hopefully dumped.”

To that end, some suggest Mueller had a more Machiavellian plan: swaying the 2018 congressional elections to change the House majority and trigger impeachment hearings.

Former federal prosecutor and commentator Andrew McCarthy pointed out that Mueller knew he had no collusion case more than a year before the midterm elections, yet kept teasing collusion in court filings throughout the 2018 campaign.

“When Mueller closed his investigation, he almost certainly knew for about a year and a half that there was no collusion case,” McCarthy said, adding that, among other things, Mueller let the surveillance warrant on Carter Page lapse in early fall of 2017.

Did prolonging his investigation influence the 2018 election results?

Exit polling shows that 49% of voters – nearly 1 in 2 – said they believed the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government during the 2016 election. 

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JPMorgan absolved by U.S. judge in former top broker’s suicide

A view of the exterior of the JP Morgan Chase & Co. Corporate headquarters in the Manhattan borough of New York
FILE PHOTO: A view of the exterior of the JP Morgan Chase & Co. Corporate headquarters in the Manhattan borough of New York City, May 20, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Segar

February 26, 2019

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A federal judge in Manhattan on Tuesday dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase & Co by the estate of a former top broker, who it said committed suicide after being forced into retirement.

U.S. District Judge John Keenan said it was not reasonably foreseeable that JPMorgan’s treatment of Michael Lorig would cause him to take his life at age 66 on Jan. 22, 2017, after years of what the estate called depression and mental illness.

Keith Fleischman, a lawyer for the estate, declined to comment. JPMorgan also declined to comment.

According to the complaint, Lorig was a senior managing director from Florida who joined JPMorgan after it bought his former employer Bear Stearns in 2008.

The marathoner and avid cyclist performed in the top 20 percent of his division and commanded seven-figure pay, but was told on Aug. 8, 2016, there was “no work for him to return to” after he spent two years on disability leave, the complaint said.

Lorig had twice previously taken leaves of absence for his depression, and his mental health issues were or should have been known to the bank, the complaint added.

Keenan, said, however, that because Lorig had assumed he could return to work after his disability leave, only actions taken by JPMorgan after he was told he could not return could be said to have caused his suicide.

The judge also said it had been nearly two years since Lorig’s doctors advised JPMorgan that Lorig might be suicidal.

“Given these circumstances, it was not reasonably foreseeable that defendants’ actions would result in Lorig’s suicide,” Keenan wrote. “These actions were simply too attenuated to be the proximate cause.”

The estate had sought a variety of monetary damages.

The case is Mullaugh as personal representative of the Estate of Lorig v JPMorgan Chase & Co et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 18-02908.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Source: OANN

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Russian central bank meeting Vostochny Bank minority investors

FILE PHOTO: A view shows the Russia's Central Bank headquarters in Moscow
FILE PHOTO: A view shows the Russia's Central Bank headquarters in Moscow, Russia February 22, 2018. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin/File Photo

February 20, 2019

By Tatiana Voronova and Darya Korsunskaya

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s central bank is meeting Vostochny Bank minority shareholders following the detention on fraud charges last week of its majority U.S. investor, a banking source and a senior Russian official told Reuters on Wednesday.

Russia’s 35th biggest lender by assets, which is majority owned by private equity fund Baring Vostok Capital Partners, declined to comment, as did the central bank, citing a policy of not discussing the activities of banks that are going concerns.

Baring Vostok’s founder, U.S. citizen Michael Calvey, and several other senior executives were detained on suspicion of defrauding Vostochny Bank shareholders. They deny the allegations, and say the case is being used to apply pressure in a business dispute.

Prosecutors said the case was initiated when one of the minority shareholders at Vostochny Bank went to law enforcement officials alleging fraud by Baring Vostok.

The banking source said the central bank would meet the minority shareholders to discuss how to handle financial issues at the lender, especially in light of Calvey’s detention.

A coalition of lobby groups for European businesses active in Russia said in a joint statement on Wednesday it was extremely concerned about the detentions.

“The detention of Baring Vostok top-management has sent shockwaves through the country’s business community, and can potentially seriously damage the investment climate and attractiveness of Russia for foreign direct investments.”

Senior figures in the pro-business wing of Russia’s ruling establishment have vouched for Calvey as an upstanding investor.

Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, now head of the State Audit Chamber, called the detention an “emergency” for the Russian economy.

(Additional reporting by Elena Fabrichnaya and Andrey Ostroukh; Writing by Christian Lowe; Editing by Alexander Smith)

Source: OANN

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Park Yoo-chun, a K-pop idol singer, arrives at the Suwon district court in Suwon
Park Yoo-chun, a K-pop idol singer, arrives at the Suwon district court in Suwon, South Korea, April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji

April 26, 2019

SEOUL (Reuters) – K-pop and drama star Park Yu-chun was arrested on Friday on charges of buying and using illegal drugs, a court said, the latest in a series of scandals to hit the South Korean entertainment business.

Suwon District Court approved the arrest warrant for Park, 32, due to concerns over possible destruction of evidence and flight risk, a court spokesman told Reuters.

Park is suspected of having bought about 1.5 grams of methamphetamine with his former girlfriend earlier this year and using the drug around five times, an official at the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency said.

Park has denied wrongdoing, saying he had never taken drugs, and he again denied the charges in court, Yonhap news agency said.

Park’s contract with his management agency had been canceled and he would leave the entertainment industry, Park’s management agency, C-JeS Entertainment, said on Wednesday.

Park was a member of boyband TVXQ between 2003 and 2009 before leaving the group with two other members, forming the group JYJ.

A scandal involving sex tapes, prostitutes and secret chat about rape led at least four other K-pop stars to quit the industry earlier this year.

The cases sparked a nationwide drugs bust and investigations into tax evasion and police collusion at night clubs and other nightlife spots.

(Reporting by Joyce Lee; Additional reporting by Heekyong Yang; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Source: OANN

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FILE PHOTO: An American Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 flight taxis after landing at Reagan National Airport in Washington
FILE PHOTO: An American Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 flight from Los Angeles taxis after landing at Reagan National Airport shortly after an announcement was made by the FAA that the planes were being grounded by the United States over safety issues in Washington, U.S. March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File Photo

April 26, 2019

(Reuters) – American Airlines Group Inc cut its 2019 profit forecast on Friday, saying it expected to take a $350 million hit from the grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX planes after cancelling 1,200 flights in the first quarter.

The company said it now expects its 2019 adjusted profit to be between $4.00 per share and $6.00 per share.

Analysts on average had expected 2019 earnings of $5.63 per share, according to Refinitiv data.

The No. 1 U.S. airline by passenger traffic said net income rose to $185 million, or 41 cents per share, in the first quarter ended March 31, from $159 million, or 34 cents per share, a year earlier.

Total operating revenue rose 2 percent to $10.58 billion.

(Reporting by Sanjana Shivdas in Bengaluru)

Source: OANN

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2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa
2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa, U.S., April 16, 2019. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage

April 26, 2019

By James Oliphant

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa (Reuters) – Four years ago, Donald Trump campaigned in small towns like Marshalltown, Iowa, vowing to restore economic prosperity to the U.S. heartland.

In his bid to replace Trump in the White House, Pete Buttigieg is taking a similar tack. The difference, he says, is that he can point to a model of success: South Bend, Indiana, the revitalized city where he has been mayor since 2012.

The Democratic presidential contender has vaulted to the congested field’s top tier in recent weeks, drawing media and donor attention for his youth, history-making status as the first openly gay major presidential candidate and a resume that includes military service in Afghanistan.

But Buttigieg’s main argument for his candidacy is that he is a turnaround artist in the mold of Trump, although the Democrat does not expressly invoke the comparison with the Republican president.

“I’m not going around saying we’ve fixed every problem we’ve got,” Buttigieg, 37, said after a house party with voters in Marshalltown. “But I’m proud of what we have done together, and I think it’s a very powerful story.”

Critics argue improving the fortunes of a Midwestern city of 100,000 people does not qualify Buttigieg, who has never held national office, for the presidency of a country of 330 million. Others say South Bend still has pockets of despair and that minorities, in particular, have failed to benefit from its growth.

Buttigieg has told crowds in Iowa and elsewhere that his experience in reviving a struggling Rust Belt community allows him to make a case to voters that other Democratic candidates cannot. That may give him the means to win back some of the disaffected Democratic voters who turned their backs on Hillary Clinton in 2016 to vote for Trump.

Watching Buttigieg at a union hall in Des Moines last week, Rick Ryan, 45, a member of the United Steelworkers, lamented how many of his fellow union workers voted for Trump. The president turned in the best performance by a Republican among union households since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Ryan said he hoped someone like Buttigieg could return them to the Democratic fold.

“He’s aware of the decline in the labor force in America, not just in Indiana or Des Moines or anywhere else,” Ryan said. “Jobs are going overseas. We need a find to way to bring that back.”

Randy Tucker, 56, of Pleasant Hill, Iowa, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said Trump appealed to union members “desperate for somebody to reach out to them, to help them, to listen to their voice.”

Buttigieg could do the same, he said. “In my heart right now, he’s No. 1.”

PAST VS. FUTURE

Buttigieg stresses a key difference in his and Trump’s approaches.

Trump, he tells crowds, is mired in the past, promising to rebuild the 20th century industrial economy. Buttigieg argues the pledge is misleading and unrealistic.

Buttigieg says his focus is on the future, and he often talks about what the country might look like decades from now.

“The only way that we can cultivate what makes America great is to look to the future and not be afraid of it,” Buttigieg said in Marshalltown.

Buttigieg knows his sexual preference may be a barrier to winning some blue-collar voters. But he notes that after he came out as gay in 2015, he won a second term as mayor with 80 percent of the vote in conservative Indiana.

Earlier this month, he announced his presidential bid at the hulking plant in South Bend that stopped making Studebaker autos more than 50 years ago. After lying dormant for decades, the building is being transformed into a high-tech hub after Buttigieg and other city leaders realized it would never again attract a large-scale industrial company.

“That building sat as a powerful reminder. We hoped we would get back that major employer that would fix our economy,” said Jeff Rea, president of the regional Chamber of Commerce.

Buttigieg is praised locally for spurring more than $100 million in downtown investment. During his two terms, unemployment has fallen to 4.1 percent from 11.8 percent.

But a study released in 2017 by the nonprofit group Prosperity Now said not all of the city’s residents had shared in its rebound. The median income for African-Americans remained half that of whites, while the unemployment rate for blacks was double.

Regina Williams-Preston, a city councilor running to replace Buttigieg as mayor, credits him for the revitalized downtown. But she said he had a “blind spot” when it came to focusing on troubled neighborhoods like the one she represents and only grew more engaged after community pressure.

“He understands it now,” she said. “The next step is figuring out how to open the doors of opportunity for everyone.”

‘ONE OF US’

Trump touts the fact that the United States added almost 300,000 manufacturing jobs last year as evidence he made good on his promise to restore the industrial sector. But that growth still left the country with fewer manufacturing jobs than in 2008.

The robust U.S. economy is likely the president’s greatest asset in his re-election bid, particularly in states he carried in 2016 such as Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He won Buttigieg’s home state by 19 points over Clinton in 2016.

Sean Bagniewski, chairman of the Democratic Party in Polk County, Iowa, said Buttigieg would be well positioned to compete with Trump in the Midwest.

“People love the fact that he’s a mayor,” said Bagniewski, who has not endorsed a candidate in the nominating contest. “If you can talk about a positive future, and if you actually have experience that can do it, that’s a compelling vision in Iowa.”

Nan Whaley, the mayor of Dayton, Ohio, which faces many of the same challenges as South Bend, agreed.

“He’s one of us,” Whaley said. “That helps.”

(Reporting by James Oliphant; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Peter Cooney)

Source: OANN

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A man looks out at a flooded residential area in Gatineau
A man looks out at a flooded residential area in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada, April 24, 2019. REUTERS/Chris Wattie

April 26, 2019

MONTREAL/OTTAWA (Reuters) – Rising waters were prompting further evacuations in central Canada on Thursday, with the mayor of the country’s capital, Ottawa, declaring a state of emergency and Quebec authorities warning that a hydroelectric dam was at risk of breaking.

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson declared the emergency in response to rising water levels along the Ottawa River and weather forecasts that called for significant rainfall on Friday.

In a statement on Twitter, Watson asked for help from the Ontario provincial government and the country’s military.

He warned that “flood levels are currently forecasted to exceed the levels that caused significant damage to numerous properties in the city of Ottawa in 2017.”

Spring flooding had killed one person and forced more than 900 people from their homes in Canada’s Quebec province as of 1 p.m. on Thursday, according to a government website.

Ottawa has received 80 requests for service related to potential flooding such as sandbagging, a city spokeswoman said.

The prospect of more rain over the next 24 to 48 hours triggered concerns on Thursday that the hydroelectric dam at Bell Falls in the western part of Quebec could be at risk of failing because of rising water levels.

Quebec’s provincial police said 250 people were protectively removed from homes in the area as of late afternoon in case the dam on the Rouge River breaks.

The dam is now at its full flow capacity of 980 cubic meters per second of water, said Francis Labbé, a spokesman for the province’s state-owned utility, Hydro Quebec. He said Hydro Quebec expected the flow could rise to 1,200 cubic meters per second of water over the next two days.

“We have to take the worst-case scenario into consideration, since we`re already at the maximum capacity,” Labbé said by phone.

The dam is part of a power station that no longer produces electricity, but is regularly inspected by Hydro Quebec, he said.

(Reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal and David Ljunggren and Julie Gordon in Ottawa; Editing by James Dalgleish and Peter Cooney)

Source: OANN

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FILE PHOTO: Funeral of journalist Lyra McKee in Belfast
FILE PHOTO: Pallbearers carry the coffin of journalist Lyra McKee at her funeral at St. Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 24, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo

April 26, 2019

BELFAST (Reuters) – Detectives investigating the murder of journalist Lyra McKee in Northern Ireland last week suspect the gunman who shot her dead is in his late teens as they made a further appeal to the local community who they believe know his identity.

McKee’s killing by an Irish nationalist militant during a riot in Londonderry has sparked outrage in the province where a 1998 peace deal mostly ended three decades of sectarian violence that cost the lives of some 3,600 people.

The New IRA, one of a small number of groups that oppose the peace accord, has said one of its members shot the 29-year-old reporter dead in the Creggan area of the city on Thursday when opening fire on police during a riot McKee was watching.

The killing, which followed a large car bomb in Londonderry in January that police also blamed on the New IRA, has raised fears that small marginalized militant groups are exploiting a political vacuum in the province and tensions caused by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.

Police released footage on Friday of immediately before and after the shooting showing three men who were involved in the rioting and identified one as the gunman who they believe is in his late teens. 

“I believe that the information that can help us to bring those responsible for her murder to justice lies within the community. I need the public to tell me who he is,” Detective Superintendent Jason Murphy told reporters.

Murphy said those involved in the disorder on the night were teenagers or in their early 20s, and that about 100 people were on the ground watching the trouble as it unfolded.

He added that police believed the gun used in the attack was of a similar caliber to those used before in paramilitary type attacks in Creggan. 

“I recognize that people living in Creagan may find it’s difficult to come forward to speak to police. Today, I want to provide a personal reassurance that we are able to deal with those issues sensitively,” Murphy said, echoing similar appeals in recent days.

(Reporting by Amanda Ferguson, editing by Padraic Halpin and Toby Chopra)

Source: OANN

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