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Hollywood actresses seek truth at Tijuana migrant shelters

Actress America Ferrera led a small group of artists on a migrant shelter tour in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, across from San Diego, over the weekend. They dressed in casual clothes, with little to no makeup. They talked with immigration lawyers and shelter managers. They colored pictures with children. And they listened to harrowing tales of long treks through Mexico and beyond in hopes of starting a new life in the U.S.

Those aspirations have become tougher in recent months as U.S. border agents process only a handful of asylum requests a day, creating backlogs and limited space at shelters in Mexican border towns. Most shelters can accommodate only a few dozen migrants at a time, while thousands of Central Americans have made the arduous journey north, fleeing violence and poverty.

Apprehensions by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol are higher than they have been in a decade.

Many of these migrants are from Honduras, like Ferrera's parents.

"It is easy for me to look at these human beings and see myself," the actress, who became a household name after her title role in the TV show "Ugly Betty," said in a telephone interview Sunday. "This could very easily have been my reality in this lifetime."

Ferrera has spoken out for migrants for years. But she said the urge to speak louder intensified after images of migrant children being separated from their parents by U.S. officials emerged last year.

She remembers holding her newborn at the time and trying to imagine the plight of the migrants: "How dire would my situation have to be to grab this brand new child and walk for a month, with no access to clean water and food, not knowing what I would meet along the way, to try and seek asylum and safety and refuge because my situation was so bad?"

Jessica Morales Rocketto, who heads the nonprofit advocacy group Families Belong Together, which organized the weekend trip, said one of the migrants the delegation spoke with has been waiting with her 1-year-old to apply for asylum since November. Another, a mother of a 4-month-old, gave birth while traveling in one of the migrant caravans, she said.

"People get to the border and think that's the end of the journey, but it's only the beginning," said Morales Rocketto, who grew up in California and made frequent trips to a family dentist in Tijuana.

The visit was meant to inspire and educate actresses, storytellers and other influencers so they can better engage on an issue that matters to them, Ferrera said. The way Ferrera sees it, she has a responsibility as a citizen of the world to seek and speak truth.

Puerto Rican actress Roselyn Sanchez described the experience on Instagram as "surreal" and "eye-opening."

"It's depressing and at the same time marvelous to see the strength of these female warriors who, against wind and tide, walk for months for the wellbeing of themselves and their children. I'd like to have this mind and body of a giant," she wrote.

Actress Kerry Washington concluded on Instagram that Families Belong Together is doing "God's" work and called for donations to the charity.

Source: Fox News National

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The Latest: Harvard can't yet comment on slave-photo lawsuit

The Latest on a lawsuit over images held by Harvard University of slaves (all times local):

12:20 p.m.

Harvard University says it is not in a position to comment on a lawsuit complaining it has profited from images of two 19th-century slaves.

Spokesman Jonathan Swain said Wednesday that the Ivy League university has not yet been served with the lawsuit.

Tamara Lanier says in her lawsuit that Harvard has ignored her request to turn over the photos. The woman from Norwich, Connecticut, says the slaves depicted in the photos are her ancestors.

Lanier's suit says the photos were commissioned by former Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, whose ideas were used to support the enslavement of Africans.

The lawsuit says Harvard requires "hefty" licensing fees to reproduce the photos, and has used one image on the cover of a book.

___

10 a.m.

A Connecticut woman says Harvard University has "shamelessly" turned a profit from images of two 19th-century slaves she says are her ancestors.

Tamara Lanier, of Norwich, says in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that Harvard has ignored her request to turn over the photos. Her lawsuit in Massachusetts state court asks Harvard to relinquish them and pay unspecified damages.

A message was left with Harvard seeking comment.

The images depict a South Carolina slave named Renty and his daughter, Delia. Lanier says she is a direct descendant.

Lanier's suit says the photos were commissioned by former Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz, whose ideas were used to support the enslavement of Africans.

The lawsuit says Harvard requires "hefty" licensing fees to reproduce the photos, and has used one image on the cover of a book.

Source: Fox News National

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Vietnamese carriers VietJet, Bamboo sign deals for 110 Boeing jets

A Boeing logo is pictured during EBACE in Geneva
A Boeing logo is pictured during the European Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition (EBACE) at Geneva Airport, Switzerland May 28, 2018. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

February 27, 2019

By Jeff Mason and Khanh Vu

HANOI (Reuters) – Vietnamese carriers VietJet and Bamboo Airways on Wednesday signed deals with Boeing Co to buy 110 planes worth more than $15 billion as the fast-growing companies look to expand their operations in Asia and beyond.

On the sidelines of a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, VietJet signed a firm order to purchase 100 737 MAX planes worth $12.7 billion. The deal was made provisionally in July last year.

Bamboo signed a firm deal with Boeing to purchase 10 wide-bodied 787 planes worth $2.9 billion.

Bamboo, owned by property and leisure company FLC Group is also in talks to buy 25 narrow-bodied Boeing 737 planes, chairman Trinh Van Quyet told Reuters.

Bamboo, which made its first flights in January, had placed a provisional order last year for 20 Boeing 787 widebody jets worth $5.6 billion at list prices, and Wednesday’s deal is not part of that.

“The purchases are part of our strategy to expand our operations on the international market, including flying to the United States and Europe,” Quyet said.

He said Bamboo plans to launch its first non-stop flights to the United States late this year or early next year.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration declared Vietnam complied with international aviation standards, allowing Vietnamese carriers to fly to the United States for the first time and codeshare with U.S. airlines.

VietJet also finalised a $5.3 billion long-term engine support agreement with General Electric for the LEAP-1B engines in its fleet.

Trump and Kim Jong Un meet in Hanoi on Wednesday for their second summit, with Trump holding out Vietnam as a model of economic success that isolated North Korea could follow.

(Reporting by Khanh Vu and Jeff Mason in HANOI; Editing by Lincoln Feast)

Source: OANN

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Correction: Southern Flood Threat story

In a story March 21 about the U.S. flooding outlook, The Associated Press misspelled the last name of a weather forecaster. He is Kevin Low, not Lao.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Unprecedented spring flooding possible, US forecasters say

The National Weather Service says the flooding of Nebraska and Iowa is just a preview of potentially historic widespread major flooding to hit much of America this spring

By SETH BORENSTEIN and JEFF MARTIN

Associated Press

The stage is set for unprecedented major flooding this spring for most of the nation, U.S. weather officials said Thursday.

More than 200 million Americans are at risk for some kind of flooding, with 13 million of them at risk of major inundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its spring weather outlook. About 41 million people are at risk of moderate flooding.

Major flooding now occurring in Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Missouri and other Midwestern states is a preview of an all-too-wet and dangerous spring, said Mary Erickson, deputy director of the National Weather Service. "In fact, we expect the flooding to get worse and more widespread," she said.

This year's flooding "could be worse than anything we've seen in recent years, even worse than the historic floods of 1993 and 2011," she said. Those floods caused billions of dollars in damage, and officials said this year's damage in Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota has already passed the billion-dollar mark.

Forecasters said the biggest risks include all three Mississippi River basins, the Red River of the North, the Great Lakes, plus the basins of the eastern Missouri River, lower Ohio River, lower Cumberland River and the Tennessee River.

"This is the broadest expanse of area in the United States that we've projected with an elevated risk that I can remember," said Thomas Graziano, a 20-year weather service veteran and director of the Office of Water Prediction. "Is this the perfect storm? I don't know."

A lot depends on how much rain falls in the next couple months, Graziano said, but forecasters say it will be more than average.

The Missouri River has already set records with historic flood marks measured in 30 places in Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota, Kansas City forecaster Kevin Low said.

The river "remains vulnerable to moderate flooding for the remainder of the spring and early summer," Low said. "People should be prepared for major flooding along the Missouri River ... going into the future."

Most of Nebraska, except right along the Missouri River, is unlikely to see major flooding again this year, but the rest of the flooded area is still prone to more, Low said.

Several factors will likely combine to create a pulse of flooding that will eventually head south along the Mississippi: above average rainfall this winter— including 10 to 15 inches earlier this year in a drenching along the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys; the third wettest year in U.S. history; and rapidly melting snow in the Upper Midwest.

Extra rain will bring more farm runoff down the Mississippi, which will likely lead to more oxygen-starved areas in the Gulf of Mexico and likely make the summer dead zone larger than normal, said Edward Clark, director of NOAA's National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

It's too early for scientists to make the complex calculations to see if human-caused climate change played a role in the flooding. However, scientists said the conditions are consistent with what they expect from global warming.

In addition to the year-to-year natural variability of weather, there is a long-term, climate change-driven trend that is making extreme rainfalls even more intense, said Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler.

"You can think of climate change as steroids for these rain events," he said.

University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles, co-author of a report released Thursday on climate change and the Great Lakes, said "we have been seeing a significant increase in precipitation coming as larger events, especially in the Midwest and Northeast, over the last five to six decades." It will get worse, so flooding will get to be a bigger concern, he said.

In part of the South, it already is.

Major flooding is already occurring this week on the Mississippi River near several Southern cities including Arkansas City, Arkansas; Natchez, Mississippi; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, according to river gauges and data from NOAA. Since Feb. 8, about 100 Army Corps of Engineers personnel have been monitoring levees and other flood protection in Memphis; Clarksdale, Mississippi; and Helena, Arkansas.

The swollen river has been flooding some unprotected western Mississippi communities since last month.

One Mississippi region protected by levees is also flooding. The smaller rivers there can't drain into the Mississippi River as normal, because a floodgate that protects the region from even worse flooding by the big river has been closed since Feb. 15.

Residents around Rolling Fork, Mississippi, first noticed water rising from swamps in late February. The water eventually invaded some homes in that community, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) north of Vicksburg.

___

Borenstein reported from Washington, Martin from Atlanta. Associated Press Writers Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee, and Jeff Amy in Jackson, Mississippi, contributed.

Source: Fox News National

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OU regents chair: President didn't initiate personnel probe

The chair of the University of Oklahoma regents said an ongoing personnel investigation was not initiated by the current president, but declined to elaborate further following a closed-door meeting Wednesday with attorneys to discuss the probe.

The two-hour meeting comes a week after The Oklahoman newspaper, citing unnamed sources, reported that former University of Oklahoma President David Boren was the target of an investigation. The Associated Press has not confirmed that information.

"Our goal is to ensure the investigation's integrity, and any comment would be highly inappropriate at this time," Board of Regents Chairwoman Leslie Rainbolt-Forbes told reporters after the meeting. "What I can do ... is that I want to affirm this board's complete support for Jim Gallogly as president of this university and to also make it completely clear that he did not initiate, nor is he involved with, this investigation, which is being conducted by an independent third party."

The investigation is being conducted by Jones Day, one of the world's largest law firms. The university has said only that it received "allegations of serious misconduct that it was legally obligated to investigate," but has not confirmed Boren is a target.

Boren, 77, is one of the most prominent politicians in Oklahoma. The Democrat served as a governor and U.S. senator before being named OU's president in 1994, a post he held until stepping down last year amid health concerns. Boren's father, Lyle Boren, and son, Dan Boren, both served in the U.S. House.

Boren's attorney, Bob Burke, declined to comment Wednesday, but has previously described the probe as a "character assassination" and suggested it stems from strained relations between Boren and Gallogly. Gallogly has been critical of university spending and debt levels under Boren's tenure, and on his first day on the job he fired about one-third of the top-level executives who reported directly to the president.

Burke has said that, even though he's not aware of any formal complaint against Boren, the former president denies any inappropriate behavior or unlawful activity.

___

Follow Sean Murphy at www.twitter.com/apseanmurphy

Source: Fox News National

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Brazilians split on pension reform, but back Bolsonaro: poll

FILE PHOTO: Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro waves at an inauguration ceremony of the new president of the Parliamentary Agricultural Front (FPA) in Brasilia
FILE PHOTO: Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro waves at an inauguration ceremony of the new president of the Parliamentary Agricultural Front (FPA) in Brasilia, Brazil February 19, 2019. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

February 26, 2019

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazilians are split on a proposed overhaul of the country’s pension system, a poll showed on Tuesday, while most said they approve of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro’s performance.

In one of the first major surveys since Bolsonaro’s Jan. 1 inauguration, 45.6 percent of respondents said they disapprove of the proposed pension reform, while 43.4 percent said they approve. The rest said they did not know or did not respond.

It was the first time a poll, conducted by the MDA institute and commissioned by the CNT transportation lobby, directly asked respondents if they approved of pension reform.

Other polls in the past year have shown large swings in voter opinion on pension reform, from over two-thirds against to figures in line with the MDA survey.

Bolsonaro’s proposal to address a widening pension deficit by raising taxes, delaying retirements and creating individual savings accounts is the cornerstone of his economic agenda.

Last week, the president delivered his proposal to Congress, aiming to save over 1 trillion reais ($266 billion) in the next decade. Most economists agree the system must be overhauled to shore up public finances and foster growth.

On Bolsonaro’s popularity, 57.5 percent approved of his performance, while 28.2 percent disapproved and 14.3 percent did not offer an opinion.

In the survey, 38.9 percent said Bolsonaro’s government was “good” or “excellent,” 29 percent said it was “regular” and 19 percent said it was “bad” or “terrible.”

MDA surveyed 2,002 Brazilians between Feb. 21 and 23. The poll has a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points.

(Reporting by Eduardo Simões and Brad Brooks; Additional reporting by Gram Slattery in Rio de Janeiro; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Steve Orlofsky)

Source: OANN

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VIDEO: “Notre Dame Should Be Looked At As Islamic Terror” French Official

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Source: InfoWars

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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A worker walks on the roof of a new home under construction in Carlsbad
FILE PHOTO: A worker walks on the roof of a new home under construction in Carlsbad, California September 22, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Blake

April 26, 2019

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. economy is growing at a 2.08% annualized pace in the second quarter based on upbeat data on durable goods orders and new home sales in March, the New York Federal Reserve’s Nowcast model showed on Friday.

This was faster than the 1.92% growth rate calculated by the N.Y. Fed model the week before.

(Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Source: OANN

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Extraordinary European Union leaders summit in Brussels
FILE PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte arrives at an extraordinary European Union leaders summit to discuss Brexit, in Brussels, Belgium April 10, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman

April 26, 2019

(Reuters) – Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Friday he had assured China’s Huawei Technologies that it would not face discrimination in the rollout of Italy’s 5G telecoms network.

Conte was speaking on a visit to China where he said he met Huawei’s chief executive, Ren Zhengfei. The prime minister’s comments were carried in Italy by TV broadcaster Sky Italia.

“I told him that we have adopted some precautions, some measures to protect our interests that demand very high levels of security … not only from Huawei but any company entering into the 5G arena,” he said.

Huawei, the world’s biggest producer of telecoms equipment, is under intense scrutiny after the United States told allies not to use its technology because of fears it could be a vehicle for Chinese spying. Huawei has categorically denied this.

(Writing by by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Angelo Amante)

Source: OANN

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U.S. President Trump departs for travel to Indianapolis from the White House in Washington
U.S. President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he departs for travel to Indianapolis, Indiana from the White House in Washington, U.S., April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

April 26, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Friday was expected to announce his intention to revoke the United States’ status as a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, which was signed in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama but never ratified by Congress, two U.S. officials said.

Trump was expected to announce the decision in a speech in Indianapolis, to the National Rifle Association, the officials said. The NRA, a powerful gun lobby group, has long been opposed to the treaty, which was negotiated at the United Nations.

(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Bill Trott)

Source: OANN

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A remote controlled robot for the 'Isotopium: Chernobyl' game is seen at the game's location in Brovary
A remote controlled robot for the ‘Isotopium: Chernobyl’ game is seen at the game’s location in Brovary, Ukraine April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

April 26, 2019

By Margaryta Chornokondratenko

KIEV (Reuters) – A Ukrainian computer game that brings to life a town abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster may not sound like everyone’s idea of fun but has attracted 60,000 people globally since its launch in October.

Players of “Isotopium: Chernobyl” drive tanks around the ghost town of Prypyat near Chernobyl, knocking out competitors as they search for an energy source called isotopium and collecting points every time they find some.

While the game takes its theme from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in northern Ukraine, which marked its 33rd anniversary on Friday, it was also inspired by the 2009 science fiction film “Avatar”.

Newcomers to the game think they have entered a virtual world when in fact they are controlling a real robot, equipped with a camera and computer, which makes its way around a model of the town rendered down to the tiniest detail.

“When playing our game, for the first 5-10 minutes many players don’t understand that it is not fictional,” said the game’s co-founder Sergey Beskrestnov. “They message us saying: ‘You have cool texture, you have good graphics, your designer is good, well done. You have a cool operating system.’

“People then reply: ‘It is not an operating system, it is real,’ and the player can’t believe it is real,” said Beskrestnov, speaking mid-game from Prypyat city square as he towers over surrounding five-storey buildings.

Kiev-born Beskrestnov was just 12 years old when on April 26, 1986 a botched test at the nuclear plant in the then Soviet Union sent clouds of smoldering nuclear material across large swathes of Europe, forced over 50,000 people, including Beskrestnov’s family, to evacuate and poisoned unknown numbers of workers involved in its clean-up.

Beskrestnov and his partner Alexey Fateyev used Google maps and hundreds of pictures from the Chernobyl area to recreate Prypyat landmarks, including residential buildings, a hotel, concert hall, amusement park and a stadium.

The game’s real-scale model occupies a 180 square meter (1,938 sq. ft) basement of a residential building in the Ukraine city of Brovary, just 150 km (93 miles) from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and 30 km east of Kiev.

Miniature radioactivity warning signs, graffiti on the walls of abandoned buildings and tables and chairs left scattered inside a small cafe all add to the creepy atmosphere of a once lively town.

“It’s a really neat concept …,” Shaun Prescott wrote in a review of the game published by PC Gamer magazine in January. “Controlling the tanks is kinda cumbersome, but they are tanks, after all.”

An attentive player will notice at least one inaccuracy – the real Chernobyl nuclear power plant is not located in town as it is in the game.

It costs $9 to immerse in the atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic town for an hour but only 20 people at a time can play simultaneously. Beskrestnov’s company, Remote Games, said 62,615 people around the world have registered to play the game, including around 15,000 in France and 10,000 in the United States.

A camera fixed on top of a moving tank broadcasts high quality signal in real time, allowing players from as far apart as Australia and Canada enjoy the game without facing any time delay in delivering video signals.

Its creators next ambition is to devise a game featuring the colonization of Mars in which 1,000 people will be able to simultaneously control robots on different missions involved in the operation.

“Many people advise us to contact Elon Musk directly because it resonates his dreams and ideas,” Beskrestnov jokes.    

(Editing by Susan Fenton)

Source: OANN

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