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Turkana tribesmen dance around a killed bull during wedding ceremony near Todonyang, Kenya March 22, 2019. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
April 25, 2019
By Goran Tomasevic
MAISA, Kenya (Reuters) – Kenya’s Chief Eipa Choro, 74, remembers when battles were fought with knives and spears. But now newcomers with far more firepower are taking lives in his region at the remote northern edge of the Rift Valley.
Instability in neighboring Ethiopia and South Sudan are spilling over the border into the disputed territory known as the Ilemi Triangle, residents said. A growing population, changing weather patterns, and displacement caused by conflict are all crowding more people and livestock into their arid scrublands.
That intensifying conflict may be repeated in unstable regions across the world, said Murithi Mutiga, deputy project director at the International Crisis Group, a think-tank based in Brussels.
“This is going to become an increasingly difficult problem, not just in the Horn of Africa, but in many other places where there’s changing weather patterns and a slowness to adapt to more modern forms of cultural thinking — places like Chad, Nigeria, and Sudan,” Mutiga said.
Traditional fighting and livestock raids used to claim perhaps one life in Choro’s area every six months, the chief said. But he estimated that almost 20 people had been killed in the last two months.
“These attacks are becoming too much,” he told Reuters over a crackling phone line. “There’s no proper communication, no radio, the (phone) network signal is very weak. If we are attacked we can’t send out a message for rescue.”
His village, Maisa, is about 7 kilometers (4.4 miles) from the border with Ethiopia, where ethnic violence has displaced around 3 million people, and 50 km from South Sudan, whose five-year civil war ended with a fragile September peace deal.
Two armed police reservists live in Choro’s community, but the nearest police station is more than 20 km away — more than an hour by car across the rutted, trackless land.
Edward Mwamburi, the police commander for the Rift Valley region, said he was not aware of the violence.
“I have not heard of any deaths of people killed,” he said.
Choro said there had been an influx of people from the Dassenach ethnic group in Ethiopia’s Omo riverlands.
Armed men from the Nyangatom ethnic group in South Sudan, who speak a similar language to the Turkana, Choro’s own ethnic group, have occupied an area called Soya near his village since November 2018, he said.
Clashes between the groups are not new, but he said the level of fatalities is unprecedented.
“They’ve been attacking for a very long time,” Choro said. “But now they have better weapons, more ammo and are more organized than traditional warriors.”
Last month a group of more than 200 attackers from Nyangatom killed four Turkana men, he said. Three Nyangatom were also killed.
Akiru Losuru, 33, confirmed to Reuters that Nyangatom had killed four men from her area on March 17.
(Additional reporting by Billy Kapua in Maisa and Katharine Houreld and Humphrey Malalo in Nairobi; Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Catherine Evans)
Source: OANN

The Goethe Galerie shopping mall next to the headquarters of Jenoptik is pictured in Jena, Germany March 21, 2019. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
April 25, 2019
By Paul Carrel
JENA, Germany (Reuters) – From the 12th floor of Jenoptik’s headquarters, chief executive Stefan Traeger points to his laser factory and the university that provides it with talent. Welcome to “Optics Valley” – a role model for Germany’s East in a big year for the region.
Three elections in eastern states this autumn are focusing the minds of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her allies, who want to win over voters unhappy that their living standards still lag the West 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
They have work to do. The East was given big promises after reunification but its economy languished.
After cash injections of 2 trillion euros ($2 trillion) over three decades, the East’s economic output per capita is still three quarters of western German levels.
But the East is slowly closing the gap and several tech hubs are giving it hope of catching – and maybe eventually overtaking – the West.
In Jena, Traeger says his predecessors turned “the ruins of the old East German Carl Zeiss conglomerate” into Jenoptik – a multinational lasers and imaging equipment group.
With most of the East’s old industries long gone, Merkel’s government is trying to encourage hubs like Jena to profit from disruptive new technologies.
“I do feel at times that here in the East, still today, there is this feeling of ‘well, maybe it’s okay that we just play’. No, we want to win,” Traeger told Reuters after presenting record earnings for 2018 and a bullish outlook.
Many East German firms closed after reunification, so why was Jenoptik different? Traeger says its first CEO, Lothar Spaeth, a former premier of Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany’s West, saw potential to create a world-class business out of an “unpolished gemstone”.
With the aid of government loans, Spaeth built Jenoptik from the Carl Zeiss group, but at a price.
“It was a very difficult time. Several thousand people lost their jobs,” said Helmut Bernitzki, 62, who joined the forerunner to Jenoptik in 1984.
“We had to expand into new markets,” Bernitzki, now an expert in optical coatings at Jenoptik, said. “We fought to be profitable and to create jobs here again.”
In a city of 110,000 inhabitants, 22,000 of them students, Jenoptik has channeled ideas from the university into specialized laser and optics products to give the company a technological edge.
(For a graphic: https://tmsnrt.rs/2GGQUVz)
PRODUCTIVITY PREMIUM
The upshot is high productivity: Jena’s output per worker is the highest in the eastern state of Thuringia, and slightly higher than towns like Bielefeld and Bochum in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Federal Statistics Office data show.
“Here in the ‘Optics Valley’ in Jena, we have a very closely connected community and it does feel like Silicon Valley, on a smaller scale,” said Traeger.
He aims to turn ideas stimulated by Jena’s university into high-tech products that “create and justify price premiums”.
Generating this added value has eluded other industries in Germany’s East. Solar power firms made a promising start in the early 2000s before Asian rivals undercut many of them, with the loss of thousands of jobs.
Developing products that rivals cannot beat on price is the holy grail for the optics, biotech and artificial intelligence start-ups taking root in the East – many around universities and research institutes.
But for the East as a whole, productivity was three quarters the western average in 2017, the latest government figures show.
“The availability of skilled labor is much lower in east Germany,” said Reint Gropp, head of the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
His policy prescription: make the East more attractive to qualified migrants, and invest in universities, research facilities and urban centers. In short, be more like Jena, home to the Fraunhofer optics research institute and the Friedrich Schiller University, where 14 percent of students are foreign.
The East’s appeal to foreigners took a hit last year, however, when Chemnitz, a town east of Jena, saw Germany’s most violent right-wing protests in decades after the killing of a German man, for which two immigrants were arrested and one later released.
INNOVATION CLUSTERS
The federal government is now encouraging high-tech hubs in Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Dresden and Jena.
The initiatives are bearing fruit. For the first time since reunification, more people moved from the West to the East – excluding booming Berlin – in 2017 than the other way around, government figures show. Small and mid-sized enterprises are driving the revival.
Success stories include Halle-based ProBioDrug, which is developing products to treat Alzheimer’s disease, and Jena medical devices maker Avatera Medical, which people close to the matter say is considering a stock market flotation.
Not all areas are thriving. In the Lausitz region south of Berlin, plans to phase out coal mining are worrying locals.
Unemployment in the East – at 6.7 percent – is still 2 points higher than in the West, and the population is older.
Easterners also feel their prospects are poorer. A recent study by the DeZIM institute for research on integration found a third of ‘Ossies’ believe they are treated as second-class citizens, about the same proportion as Muslims.
FAR-RIGHT CURSE
In Jena, mayor Thomas Nitzsche wants to export his city’s success to surrounding areas, where the far-right and left play on people’s fears of being left behind.
Between 1990 and 2016, the East’s population fell by 11.2 percent to 16.2 million, government figures show. The number of working-age people is expected to decline up to 2030, with those over 65 rising to a third from a quarter.
Nitzsche is trying to meet Jena’s demand for talent.
“Even if we retained all the school leavers and university graduates we have here, that would still be too few,” said Nitzsche, a liberal Free Democrat.
“So we need to attract people here – not just from Thuringia, but across the country and abroad.”
Ahead of the regional elections on Sept. 1 in Brandenburg and Saxony and on Oct. 27 in Thuringia, the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling close to 20 percent in all three states – putting it in second or third place.
None of the major parties want to share power with the AfD. Mainstream politicians, business leaders and think-tanks agree: the East can continue on an upward trajectory if remains open to skilled outsiders to help its young firms grow.
The East, said Gropp at the IWH institute, has less to lose by taking a chance on new technologies than the West, where the auto sector and other mature industries face challenges from innovations like electric cars.
“East Germany has a better chance of handling this more disruptive structural change, which can take place much more easily in new firms,” Gropp said. Could the East even overtake the West? “I think it could, absolutely.”
(Additional reporting by Michael Nienaber and Markus Wacket; Editing by Giles Elgood)
Source: OANN

FILE PHOTO: Daniel Craig poses for photographers as he attends the world premiere of the new James Bond 007 film “Spectre” at the Royal Albert Hall in London, Britain, October 26, 2015. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
April 25, 2019
Source: OANN
The United States is in the middle of a cyberwar, but President Donald Trump is compromised and the “federal government is asleep at the switch,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said Thursday while insisting that President Donald Trump’s tax returns will be released through a subpoena rather than leaked.
“That will be the product of a subpoena process,” Perez told CNN’s “New Day,” after he was asked if a candidate will use the documents if they are leaked. “We are entitled to that. If you look at the law that Chairman [Richard] Neal of the House Ways and Means Committee is using, it’s clear.”
However, he added that the DNC and the party are working to protect its data and working with all their campaigns to provide cybersecurity training, because “we can’t expect help from the administration.”
The tactics of cyberattacks aren’t about “right versus left,” but instead, “right versus wrong,” insisted Perez.
“A foreign adversary, Russia, they hacked the DNC and others,” said Perez. “They did so with the intent to interfere with our presidential election. What we said in the letter is when we have such activity, if someone calls and tells you ‘I’m going to rob a bank,’ your response should be ‘I’m going to call the authorities.’
When Russian called President Donald Trump’s campaign and said they had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, they should have called the authorities, he continued.
Meanwhile, Perez said the committee is welcoming former Vice President Joe Biden, who announced his presidential candidacy on Thursday, to the race.
“The video was very powerful,” said Perez. “As he points out, this is a battle for the soul of our nation.”
Source: NewsMax Politics

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Chipotle Mexican Grill is seen at the Chipotle Next Kitchen in Manhattan, New York, U.S., June 28, 2018. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo
April 25, 2019
(Reuters) – Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc said on Thursday it received another subpoena from U.S. federal prosecutors, seeking information related to an outbreak that left hundreds of people sick last year in an Ohio restaurant.
Over the past three years, the company has faced a number of subpoenas regarding sicknesses linked to its restaurants following an E. Coli, salmonella and norovirus outbreaks at the company’s outlets dating back to late 2015 that affected hundreds across several states.
The latest subpoena is the fourth and is part of an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Central District of California.
Last August, a type of bacteria found in meat and pre-cooked food left at unsafe temperatures was responsible for making hundreds of people ill in a Powell, Ohio restaurant.
The April 18 subpoena, disclosed https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1058090/000105809019000015/cmg-20190331x10q.htm in a regulatory filing on Thursday, is seeking information related to the incidents of illnesses associated with the Ohio restaurant and restaurants in California, Massachusetts, and Virginia, that were covered under previous subpoenas.
Chipotle reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit on Wednesday, driven by its new campaigns and its online ordering and deliveries initiatives.
The results were a reflection of Chief Executive Officer Brian Niccol’s push to increase delivery options, create new menus and grow its loyalty program.
The company even launched a campaign earlier this year, that showcases all the fresh ingredients used in its tacos and burritos, coming after the negative publicity it received from the 2015 incident.
The company’s shares were up about a percent before the bell.
(Reporting by Nivedita Balu in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)
Source: OANN

FILE PHOTO: A screen displays the share price for pharmaceutical maker AbbVie on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange July 18, 2014. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
April 25, 2019
(Reuters) – Drugmaker AbbVie Inc’s quarterly revenue beat Wall Street estimates on Thursday, as the decline in sales of its blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira was not as steep as expected.
The company also raised its adjusted earnings forecast for the year to between $8.73 and $8.83 per share from $8.65 to $8.75 to reflect continued business momentum.
Humira, which has long been the world’s best-selling prescription medicine, saw sales fall for the first time in years largely due to competition from new, cheap rivals.
The drug brought in revenue of $4.45 billion in the first quarter, a fall of 5.6 percent from last year but ahead of the $4.38 billion forecast by eight analysts polled by Refinitiv.
Net earnings fell to $2.46 billion, or $1.65 per share, in the three months ended March 31, from $2.78 billion, or $1.74 per share, a year earlier.
Excluding items, AbbVie earned $2.14 per share. Analysts on average had expected $2.05, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Net revenue dropped 1.3 percent to $7.83 billion but beat the average analyst estimate of $7.75 billion.
(Reporting by Tamara Mathias and Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
Source: OANN

FILE PHOTO: Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., April 24, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
April 25, 2019
By Sruthi Shankar
(Reuters) – Dow and S&P futures were pressured by a steep fall in industrial company 3M’s shares on Thursday, while upbeat results from high-flying companies Facebook and Microsoft supported Nasdaq futures.
Investors are assessing earnings reports from some of the biggest U.S. companies this week to see if the strong run-up in market since the start of the year is justified as the main Wall Street indexes hover below all-time highs.
The S&P 500 is trading roughly 0.5% below its intraday record hit in late September, while the Nasdaq hit an intra-day record high on Wednesday but failed to close at those levels.
“As the earnings season gains potency, the missing link to a stronger upward move is low volume, suggesting a cautious attitude by investors,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities in New York.
3M Co’s shares tumbled 9.1% in premarket trading after the company said it would lay off 2,000 workers globally as it reported a lower-than-expected quarterly profit and cut its 2019 earnings forecast.
Microsoft Corp gained 5% after the company beat Wall Street estimates for quarterly results and predicted continued growth for its cloud computing business.
After a 23% rally in its shares this year, the software company is set to topple Apple Inc as the most valuable publicly listed U.S. company.
Facebook Inc jumped 8.4% after the social media giant’s quarterly profit blew past Wall Street’s profit estimates and the company set aside $3 billion to cover a settlement with U.S. regulators.
At 7:18 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were down 104 points, or 0.39%. S&P 500 e-minis were up 0.25 points, or 0.01% and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 17.5 points, or 0.22%.
Among other movers, Lam Research gained 4.8% after the semiconductor equipment maker reported better-than-expected quarterly results.
Amazon.com Inc, Intel Corp and Ford Motor Co are among the big names set to report results after the bell.
Economic data due at 8:30 a.m. ET is expected to show new orders for U.S. core capital goods rebounded in March, after falling unexpectedly in February.
Separately, a Labor Department report is expected to show the number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits rising 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 200,000 for the week ended April 20.
(Reporting by Sruthi Shankar and Amy Caren Daniel in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
Source: OANN

Former president and current leader of opposition party, Mahinda Rajapaksa, speaks to media in Negombo, Sri Lanka, April 21, 2019 in this still image obtained from video. Derana TV/via Reuters TV
April 25, 2019
By Sanjeev Miglani and Shihar Aneez
COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka’s former president Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, then the defense secretary, crushed Tamil Tiger separatists with such ferocity ten years ago that Western powers sought war crime trials against them and greeted their defeat in elections later with barely concealed glee.
But now the tiny Indian Ocean island is faced with South Asia’s deadliest militant attack – claimed by Islamic State – and may well again turn to the Rajapaksas for a strong-willed response to the new threat, politicians and diplomats say.
Elections to pick a new president are due between October and December and Mahinda Rajapaksa is already targeting President Maithripala Sirisena and his Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe for failing to preserve the hard fought peace.
Rajapaksa cannot contest for president again, but his brother Gotabaya is ready to make a bid, his aide has said.
“Rajapaksas’ will take the easy benefit and be able to claim with some credibility that if they come back to power, they will adopt the same strong security policy that allowed them to free the country from terrorism,” said a Western diplomat.
Sri Lanka, a country of 21 million, has been a tinder box of sectarian and ethnic tensions, first between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and minority Tamil groups and in recent years between the Sinhalese and the Muslims.
At the same time, the island nation better known for its beaches, jungles and tea plantations, has gained in geopolitical importance, becoming an arena for influence peddling between India, its traditional partner, and China, which has invested billions of dollars in infrastructure.
With Islamic State claiming responsibility for the Easter Sunday attacks in which more than 350 people were killed, Sri Lanka has been thrust further into the global limelight.
Rajapaksa and his supporters say that the government – under foreign pressure – has been weakening the military and intelligence arms he had built up to ensure there was no revival of the Tamil movement, but also keep an eye on disaffected minorities.
Instead, the government has spent its energy investigating old allegations of abuse against soldiers stemming from the 26-year civil war against the Tamil separatists.
“Because the government was engaged in relentlessly persecuting its own armed forces, we became an easy target for terrorists,” Rajapaksa said in parliament this week.
“No other country has persecuted and weakened their own armed forces and intelligence services in this manner. Terrorists observe these things and plan accordingly,” he said.
The government said it had received prior warnings about impending attacks on churches but these were not shared across the government and admitted that was a lapse.
DISBANDING INTELLIGENCE CELLS
A source in the Indian government, which provided three warnings ahead of the Sunday bombings, said Sri Lanka no longer had the sophisticated national security apparatus that the former defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa ran.
Out in the east, home to the suspected mastermind of the attacks, there was a 45-member cell of intelligence operatives that had been wound up, said Kehelia Rambukwella, a spokesman for Rajapaksa’s party.
“Some of its people had been sent to the welfare department. If you had them still functioning, we might have picked this plot up,” he said.
But government officials said many of these secret intelligence cells were disbanded because they faced allegations of abuse, including torture and extra judicial killings, during the war and in the months afterwards, officials said.
Rajitha Senaratne, a government spokesman said: “We can’t allow the military to kill innocent people, children, and journalists. Murderers can’t be war heroes.”
Gotabaya is himself facing lawsuits in the United States where he is a dual citizen.
The South Africa-based International Truth and Justice Project, in partnership with U.S. law firm Hausfeld, filed a civil case in California this month against Gotabaya on behalf of a Tamil torture survivor.
In a separate case, Ahimsa Wickrematunga, the daughter of murdered investigative editor Lasantha Wickrematunga, filed a complaint for damages in the same U.S. District Court in California for allegedly instigating and authorizing the extrajudicial killing of her father.
Gotabaya has denied the allegations and said these were timed to thwart his possible presidential run.
For the Sinhalese nationalists who fully backed the measures against the Tamil separatists, the new attacks have already fueled calls for strong leadership.
Political differences between President Sirisena and his premier, Wickremesinghe, have presented a picture of a government in drift and an economy vastly underperforming.
Both sides have said they were not aware of the intelligence that was provided by India about the attacks, prompting questions about who was in command.
The worry is that the election campaign, now months away, could turn into a contest on who is tougher on Islamist militancy and in that the country’s largely peaceful Muslim community would be under pressure, said political commentator Kusal Perera.
“The post-attack situation is going to create a demand for Rajapaksas because Sinhala Buddhist nationalists are going to say they need a dictator or a strong leader who can handle the national security threats,” he said.
Earlier the country’s Tamil minority were the targets, but now in the aftermath of the attacks carried out by suicide bombers who have been identified as well-educated local Muslims, the community could face the heat in the elections.
“The anti-Muslim racist card could become the main election campaign strategy of all political parties,” said Perera.
(Reporting by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Source: OANN

Mohammed El-Kuwaiz, Chairman of the Capital Market Authority speaks during an interview with Reuters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Nael Shyoukhi
April 25, 2019
By Saeed Azhar and Stephen Kalin
RIYADH (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia’s Capital Market Authority (CMA) is considering relaxing a 49 percent limit for foreign strategic investors in shares of listed companies due to increased demand, its chairman said on Thursday.
Foreigners currently own 5.5 percent of Saudi equities but that could nearly double by the end of 2020, Mohammed El Kuwaiz said in an interview on the sidelines of a financial conference in Riyadh.
“We found most strategic investors are maybe looking to build more sizeable stakes,” Kuwaiz said.
The kingdom has introduced a raft of reforms in recent years, winning endorsements from international index compilers MSCI and FTSE Russell, as it seeks to position its bourse as an international capital markets hub.
Local shares were incorporated into the FTSE emerging-market index in March and will join the MSCI emerging market benchmark later this year.
An upcoming sale of shares in shopping mall operator Arabian Centres Company, owned by Fawaz Alhokair Group, will be the first offering in the kingdom under Rule 144a, which allows the sale of securities primarily to qualified institutional buyers in the United States.
The Saudi stock market is the Middle East’s largest exchange and has seen an upsurge in foreign fund flows since the start of the year due to the inclusion in the emerging markets indexes.
The country’s Tadawul All-Share Index is up more than 18 percent year-to-date, one of the best performances in the region.
At least six Gulf firms have expressed interest in an additional listing on the Saudi exchange, which is due to release detailed procedures in the next two weeks, the chief executive of the bourse told Reuters during the financial forum on Thursday.
“We have at least one to two companies already in a very good stage of their preparations to submit their files,” Khalid Al Hussan said at the conference.
The exchange will launch the country’s first index futures contracts in the second half of the year, Hussan added, allowing investors to take a view on the direction of the index without having to buy individual shares.
On Thursday the CMA, the country’s bourse and its Debt Management Office (DMO) announced a reduction in fees and commissions to encourage secondary market trading of debt.
The three entities said trading commissions for the Tadawul and the CMA had been reduced, while fees for new offerings and annual registration charges for issuers were also reduced.
The DMO also reduced the par value for government-issued sukuk, or Islamic bonds, from 1 million Saudi riyals ($266,666.67) to one thousand, signaling further government efforts to facilitate access to the bond market for retail investors.
($1 = 3.7500 riyals)
(Additional reporting by Nael Shyoukhi, Writing by Hadeel Al Sayegh, editing by Gareth Jones)
Source: OANN

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