French Yellow Vest protesters hit the streets to demonstrate against President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday for the 18th straight weekend and clashed with riot police, prompting the use of tear gas and a water cannon to disperse the agitators.

At least 20 people were arrested by midmorning in Paris. Authorities, fearing a possible uptick in protester numbers and mayhem, deployed additional forces and closed a number of streets in the capital.

The Yellow Vests, meanwhile, hoped that the latest protest will reignite the movement that is losing popularity every week. Yet as the number of protesters dwindled, violence increased.

FRANCE’S YELLOW VESTS HIT STREETS FOR 17TH TIME, PROTEST AT PARIS AIRPORT AS NUMBERS DWINDLE

Protesters threw smoke bombs and other objects at officers along the Champs-Elysees and hit the windows of a police van, echoing the instances of rioting last year, at the peak of the protests. The police then unleashed the water cannon on protesters clustered between two stores, while a burning vehicle was spotted in the neighborhood nearby.

The Yellow Vest movement has rocked France since November 2018, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets demanding President Emmanuel Macron’s resignation.

Late last year, in an effort to quell protests, Macron called for three months of national debate on economic reforms.

EMMANUEL MACRON URGES EUROPE TO REJECT NATIONALISM AHEAD OF EU ELECTIONS, CALLS FOR ‘RETHINK’ ON MIGRATION

He addressed the country in December, promising to speed up tax relief and urging companies to give bonuses to workers. Macron also reiterated his promise to raise the minimum wage and said the government would scrap a planned tax hike on pensioners.

The movement began to gradually lose steam. Earlier this month, only around 40,000 people protested across the whole of France, with about 4,000 in Paris, compared with hundreds of thousands last year.

This weekend’s protest marked the end of Macron’s “Great National Debate,” which was organized to address the protesters’ needs.

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But even as Macron made a number of concessions to the protest group, many remain skeptical of his presidency and continue to believe that he favors the rich and businesses at the expense of the rest of the public.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/world/frances-yellow-vests-clashes-with-riot-police-in-paris-water-cannon-and-tear-gas-deployed-with-at-least-20-arrested


Special counsel Robert Mueller and his Justice Department supervisors are not saying anything official about the conclusion of their work, but Congress is getting ready. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

MUELLER INVESTIGATION

After many false alarms that the special counsel’s work is winding down, the clues are mounting that it finally is.

The Mueller probe appears to be in the home stretch.

Some Trump aides and advisers have been making that claim for more than a year, with little basis. But the signs are mounting that it’s finally happening.

Story Continued Below

Several came in what was an unusually busy week for Robert Mueller’s investigation into 2016 Russian election interference, with multiple clues that the special counsel’s work is finishing with a final report to the Justice Department.

On Wednesday, a federal judge handed a second prison sentence to Paul Manafort. That closed the door on Mueller’s prosecution of the former Trump campaign chairman, which will put Manafort in jail through the end of 2024 if President Donald Trump doesn’t pardon him or commute the sentence.

Meanwhile other clues emerged this week suggesting that Mueller’s probe is coming to an end. On Tuesday, the special counsel’s lawyers told a federal judge that they have all the information they need from former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has been cooperating with Mueller’s team since he pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI.

Two key members of Mueller’s team are also moving on. The FBI confirmed a week ago Friday that its lead agent tasked to the special counsel’s team has been reassigned to lead the bureau’s Richmond field office. And a Mueller spokesman on Thursday issued a rare public statement confirming that one the office’s prosecutors, Andrew Weissmann, planned to finish his assignment “in the near future.”

“The signs I see are all pointing towards an investigation that is wrapping up,” said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who has worked with Weissmann on organized crime cases. “[We are] probably a few weeks or even a month or more away from the issuing of a final report, but certainly a fairly complete draft is already being circulated inside the Mueller team.”

Cotter said he’d be surprised if Weissmann were to leave before reviewing Mueller’s complete findings, making his departure a sign that the report — which Mueller must transmit to his Justice Department superiors — is nearly complete. “His knowledge, experience and skills are too great for Mueller not to use him as a leading author of such a report. And I do not believe he would leave if he thought major new veins of information and significant charges were still to come,” he added.

While Mueller and his Justice Department supervisors aren’t saying anything official about the conclusion of the special counsel’s work, Congress is getting ready for the big moment. The House this week in a unanimous 420-0 vote called on Attorney General William Barr to release in full the special counsel’s final report.

Even if Mueller’s investigation is all but complete, however, his prosecutions will continue for months. On Thursday, a judge set Nov. 5 as the opening date in the trial of former Trump political adviser Roger Stone on charges that he lied to Congress about efforts to contact Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign.

Here’s a recap of all the week’s major events in the Mueller probe:

Paul Manafort: The former Trump campaign chairman finally learned how long he’ll spend in federal prison — nearly 7.5 years — after U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Wednesday meted out the final portion of his sentence for a series of lobbying and obstruction crimes that were folded into Manafort’s guilty plea last fall.

Jackson agreed with U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III, who sentenced Manafort earlier this month separately for his conviction in Virginia on financial fraud, that the longtime GOP operative can get credit for the nine months he’s already served at a pair of interim detention facilities since being jailed last June for witness tampering.

Manafort’s lawyers have asked that the rest of his sentence be served in Cumberland, Maryland, though that decision rests with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Federal prosecutors also have moved to begin seeking restitution from Manafort for about $24 million tied to his crimes, which involves forfeiting several of his New York properties, plus bank accounts and a life insurance policy. He also must pay a $50,000 fine.

Manafort still appears to be playing for a Trump pardon or commutation of his sentence. Outside the D.C. courthouse this week, Manafort lawyer Kevin Downing invoked a favorite presidential talking point: that Mueller had revealed no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, even though his client’s case never was about the topic. Mueller tried Manafort on charges related to his lucrative political work in Ukraine, which ended prior to the 2016 election.

But any help from Trump can’t protect Manafort from new charges he faces in New York, where the Manhattan district attorney obtained a 16-count grand jury indictment this week for residential mortgage fraud and other alleged state crimes. A presidential pardon cannot absolve a person convicted at the state level.

Roger Stone: The longtime Trump associate got an early November trial date for allegedly misleading lawmakers about his 2016 contacts with WikiLeaks, which released thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign aides. That means D.C. jurors will begin to hear his case just as the one-year countdown begins to the next presidential election.

Stone’s lawyers during a court hearing Thursday acknowledged receiving nine terabytes of material from the government in discovery, which they said stacks up “as high as the Washington Monument twice.” His lawyers also got an April 12 deadline to file any motions seeking to toss out the case, something they signaled plans to do in earlier filings which cited “selective or vindictive prosecution” and an “error in the grand jury proceeding.

Mueller’s plans for trying Stone are unclear. Special counsel deputy Jeannie Rhee took the lead participating in Thursday’s hearing for the prosecution while the soon-to-depart Weissmann made an appearance in the courtroom, seated just inside the courtroom bar with other support staff. The government also has two assistant U.S. attorneys from D.C. who are widely seen as being ready for a hand off should the special counsel close up shop before November.

For his part, Stone blasted out a fundraising plea Thursday night featuring a picture of him, his wife and Trump. Stone said he needs money to defeat the special counsel’s charges and “be free to help the President’s re-election in 2020.”

Michael Flynn: The former Trump national security adviser continues to heed the advice of U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, who in December urged Flynn to wait until he’d exhausted all cooperation demands before agreeing to be sentenced.

On Wednesday, Mueller’s prosecutors in a joint status report acknowledged Flynn could still be called to testify in the government’s upcoming trial against his former business partner, Bijan Rafiekian, on charges of failing to disclose foreign lobbying on behalf of Turkey. But the special counsel’s office also noted they view Flynn’s cooperation as “otherwise complete.”

In a separate court filing related to the Rafiekian case, defense attorneys revealed this week they’d seen FBI interview notes that suggest Flynn had helped prosecutors in several “ongoing investigations.” Government lawyers during a Friday hearing indicated some of those investigations involve Mueller’s office and some involve other prosecutors, though they didn’t delve into specifics.

Rick Gates: The former Trump campaign deputy is still cooperating with federal prosecutors in “several ongoing investigations” and isn’t ready to be sentenced yet.

That was the takeaway from a one-page joint status report filed in federal court in D.C., the fifth one of its kind since Gates pleaded guilty last February to financial fraud and lying to investigators.

It’s unclear whether Gates’s ongoing cooperation still involves the Mueller probe. But Friday’s filing suggests Gates may be helping federal prosecutors in New York who are investigating Trump’s inauguration committee, which he helped run alongside real estate developer and longtime Trump friend Tom Barrack. The committee is facing questions about the source of its donations and how it spent its record-level $107 million haul.

Another joint status report for Gates is due in court by May 14.

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/16/mueller-probe-report-1223959

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (Reuters) – The main suspect in New Zealand’s worst peacetime mass shooting intended to continue the rampage before he was caught by police, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Saturday.

“The offender was mobile, there were two other firearms in the vehicle that the offender was in, and it absolutely was his intention to continue with his attack,” Ardern told reporters in Christchurch. The suspect, identified as Brenton Harrison Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian citizen, has been charged with murder, though Ardern added that further charges are likely.

“I’m not privileged to a full breakdown at this point but it is clear that young children have been caught up in this horrific attack,” she said regarding victims of the attack.

Reporting by Charlotte Greenfield; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore

Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-shootout-primeminister/christchurch-attacker-intended-to-continue-rampage-when-arrested-idUSKCN1QX033

The Australian government has banned the conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from entering Australia for a planned tour this year, officials said on Saturday, citing his comments about the Christchurch attack.

Authorities in Australia were urged to ban the far-right commentator following his remarks about the massacre, in which he described Islam as a “barbaric” and “alien” religious culture.

“Mr. Yiannopoulos’s comments on social media regarding the Christchurch terror attack are appalling and foment hatred and division,” David Coleman, Australia’s minister for immigration, citizenship and multicultural affairs, said in a statement on Saturday.

“The terrorist attack in Christchurch was carried out on Muslims peacefully practicing their religion,” Mr. Coleman continued, adding, “It was an act of pure evil.”

The decision came after Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, denounced remarks made by a senator, Fraser Anning, who said on Friday that the “real cause” of the bloodshed was Muslim immigration. On Saturday, a teenager hit Mr. Anning with an egg in Melbourne, according to news reports.

Attacks on mosques and Muslim religious leaders in the West have increased in recent years, according to data from the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland. North America, Europe and Oceania saw 128 such attacks from 2010 through 2017, the latest year of available data.

Terrorist attacks on other religious institutions, such as churches and synagogues, totaled 213 over the same period.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/world/asia/new-zealand-shooting.html

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Shares of aircraft-manufacturing company Boeing took a hit early this week, losing $26.6 billion in market value Monday and Tuesday, following a deadly crash of one of its 737 Max 8 airplanes in Ethiopia.

That model has since been grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as by aviation regulators around the world.

Still, if you invested in Boeing 10 years ago, that decision would have paid off: According to CNBC calculations, a $1,000 investment in 2009 would be worth more than $14,000 as of March 15, 2019, a total return over 1,000 percent. In the same time frame, the S&P 500 was up 270 percent. So, your $1,000 would be worth just over $3,700, by comparison.

Any individual stock can over- or under-perform, however, and past returns do not predict future results. Boeing paused delivery of 737 Max planes after the Ethiopia crash, which came less than five months after another deadly crash in Indonesia involving the same model.

This left several major airlines, including United, American and Southwest scrambling to rebook passengers and reassign planes. Those companies said they would waive ticket-change fees and fare differences for those affected by the FAA’s grounding order.

Flight-booking site Kayak even introduced a new search feature that allows users to exclude specific plane models, according to co-founder and chief executive officer Steve Hafner.

CNBC: Boeing stock as of Mar. 15, 2019

Fortunately for Boeing, while shares plunged more than 10 percent early this week, they ticked back up by as much as 3 percent Friday. And the company announced plans to roll out a software fix in the next few weeks.

Though, Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein said Thursday that the fix could take a lot longer: “Once Boeing identifies the issue … the most likely scenario is the company will take about 3-6 months to come up with and certify the fix,” he said in a note.

Hafner says he expects the 737 models to be grounded only a few months and that travelers will likely be booking flights on them again soon: “They’re out of service on a temporary basis,” he said on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley.” “In reality, airlines are still planning on flying those planes in the summer. People want security and comfort when they fly.”

In the meantime, Boeing said in a statement it will “continue to build 737 Max airplanes, while assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production system.”

If you’re looking to get into investing, expert investors like Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban suggest you start with index funds, which hold every stock in an index, offer low turnover rates, attendant fees and tax bills. They also fluctuate with the market to eliminate the risk of picking individual stocks.

Here’s a snapshot of how the markets look now.

Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube!

Don’t miss:

If you invested $1,000 in IBM 10 years ago, here’s how much you’d have now

Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/if-you-put-1000-in-boeing-10-years-ago-heres-what-youd-have-now.html

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s social media stardom has catapulted her to a place of national name recognition and influence that is unheard of for a freshman member of Congress. Yet as Americans get to know her, she’s only growing more unpopular. And she’s now actually as unpopular as Sen. Ted Cruz was as a young freshman when he was leading the 2013 effort to defund Obamacare that resulted in a government shutdown.

A newly-released Gallup poll found that just 29 percent of Americans say they have never heard of Ocasio-Cortez. That’s unheard of for somebody who was only recently elected to the House. By way of comparison, that means her name recognition is higher than Chief Justice John Roberts (who 30 percent never heard of) as well as prominent senators who are running for president, such as Sens. Cory Booker (33 percent never heard of), Kirsten Gillibrand (41 percent never heard of), and Amy Klobuchar (45 percent never heard of).

A problem for Ocasio-Cortez is that as people get to see more of her, their views become more negative. Last September, after her upset victory in the primary, 24 percent of those polled had a favorable view of her, compared to 26 percent who had an unfavorable view. Her notoriety has increased significantly since then, but while 31 percent now view her favorably, her unfavorable rating has shot up to 41 percent. That means on net, views of her are negative by 10 points — a 15 point swing.

Back in the fall of 2013, Cruz was seen as one of the most hated figures in American politics for leading a quixotic campaign to get former President Barack Obama to defund Obamacare — his signature achievement — which led to a highly unpopular government shutdown. He received nearly universal negative attention, not just from the liberal media, but also from segments of the conservative media for leading a doomed effort that distracted attention from the disastrous launch of Obamacare.

A Gallup poll taken in October 2013, at the height of the shutdown battle, showed Cruz with a 26 percent favorable rating versus a 36 percent unfavorable rating. So Ocasio-Cortez, has already bested him with 41 percent viewing her unfavorably, though on a net basis they are both at negative 10. She achieved this without being widely blamed for shutting down the government.

Now, historically, numbers such as Ocasio-Cortez’s would be viewed as a disaster for a politician. However, we’re living in a moment in which polarizing figures commanding a passionate following can have tremendous influence, and even success.

Despite his unpopularity, it’s possible that Cruz would have been the Republican nominee in 2016 had Donald Trump not come along. Trump, meanwhile, ended up being elected president despite being the least popular nominee of a major party ever polled (even taking into account losing candidates).

So Ocasio-Cortez’s growing unpopularity, while noteworthy, may not prove a hindrance in the long-run. But it should temper the widely shared belief among many Washington pundits on both the right and left, that she’s successful because she’s so natural and likable.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story, the Washington Examiner reported Ocasio-Cortez’s approval rating was a net negative of 15 points. The 15 points just reflected the net shift. Her net negative rating is 10 points. As such, the headline was also changed to reflect that on a net basis, she was as unpopular as Ted Cruz. The Washington Examiner regrets the error.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-now-as-unpopular-as-ted-cruz-during-2013-government-shutdown-over-obamacare-defunding

An Australian man accused of New Zealand’s worst-ever mass shooting was active for more than half an hour, police said, offering their first official timeline of events that left 49 people dead at two mosques on Friday.

Brenton Tarrant was charged with one count of murder, and police said further charges will follow as they piece together how the 28-year-old was able to travel across Christchurch in a car containing five guns, including semiautomatic rifles, and which was armed with improvised explosive devices. Mr. Tarrant…

Source Article from https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-timeline-new-zealand-shooter-was-active-for-more-than-30-minutes-11552720064

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump promised to fight Democrats and Republicans in Washington, and, with his first-ever veto Friday, he did just that.

“Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, and I have the duty to veto it,” he said as he sent a measure that would have terminated his declaration of a national emergency — and the transfer of billions of dollars to build his promised border wall — right back to Capitol Hill.

The day before, a dozen Republican senators had joined with Democrats to pass the measure, an unusually large number of GOP defections from Trump’s line.

While Trump played down the fracture Friday — “I didn’t need the votes,” he said — it showed that by engaging in a battle with Congress over the power of the purse, he has weakened institutional support for the wall, and for his authority, among Washington Republicans.

That is, even some Republicans who say they’re for the wall are drawing the line at Trump declaring a national emergency and seizing spending decisions from Congress to do it.

But some Republicans say that may not be a bad thing for Trump as he heads into the 2020 election.

On the surface, it suggests he’ll have a much tougher time winning budget battles with a Congress that is obviously increasingly inclined to assert its own prerogatives and restrain his. But Trump doesn’t have any domestic policy agenda items that approach the political importance of the wall, and he wants to campaign against Washington again.

It’s all the better if he can run, at least a little bit, against both parties, said Matt Schlapp, a Trump ally and chairman of the American Conservative Union.

“They gave him a gift,” Schlapp said of Congress sending him the resolution. “The president is at his strongest when he is fighting and he is seen as credible when he is fighting members of his own party…especially when the principles are on his side.”

Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and frequent Trump critic, noted that the president said Friday he wasn’t upset with Republicans who defected. Steele said he sensed a little bit of public theater playing out on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the boulevard that runs between the White House and the Capitol.

“On the vote itself, there’s a lot of high-minded drama about what these senators did,” he said, noting that there was no chance of the president’s veto being overridden and that most of the Republicans who defected aren’t up for re-election next year. “I’m not convinced.”

As for Trump, Steele added, “he loves the fight, he doesn’t care who he’s fighting, it doesn’t matter if it’s Republicans or Democrats … for him, politically, it reaffirms for his base why they sent him to Washington.”

Ultimately, the courts will decide whether Trump’s spending gambit passes constitutional muster. For now, Democrats and some Republicans argue that his decision to grab money from existing projects and rededicate it to build the wall is a violation of Congress’ constitutional primacy in spending matters.

“The House and Senate resoundingly rejected the President’s lawless power grab, yet the president has chosen to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement released after the veto.

Some Republican critics of the president’s methods, including Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, have raised constitutional concerns, while others have simply worried that a future Democratic president would use the precedent set by Trump to spend money on pet projects not approved by Congress.

Rachel Bovard, the policy director at the Conservative Policy Institute and a former aide to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who cited constitutional concerns in voting against the president Thursday, said that the emergency declaration doesn’t violate the separation of powers principle.

“The Constitution is not in crisis. The border is,” Bovard said in a text exchange with NBC. “The president’s declaration follows the law that Congress passed. They’ve appropriated money and authorized a law that allows this wall to be built. If Congress wants to change the law that disallows future presidents from taking this action, they are well within their rights to do so.”

To Bovard, the question is a political one, not a legal one.

“Trump is using the power that Congress gave him to secure the border — which is more than Congress is apparently willing to do,” she said. “So what’s truly at stake is whether or not Republicans are going to be united on border security going into 2020.”

The movement of power toward the executive branch, and away from Congress, is a long-running trend, said Mack McLarty, who served as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

While he sees Trump’s use of executive power in this instance — including the veto and the original decision to shift money around — as “unique” because it “interferes with Congress’ rights …in terms of appropriations funds,” he said Friday’s action makes sense in the context of the emphasis Trump has put on the wall.

“This is a priority issue for him, and this is why he’s using the veto pen,” McLarty said.

Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/inside-his-veto-fight-gop-trump-may-have-found-gift-n983961

CARSON, Calif. (KABC) — Firefighters battled a raging blaze at an oil refinery in Carson on Friday.

Los Angeles County firefighters responded to the massive fire at about 7:20 p.m. at the Phillips 66 oil refinery in the 1500 block of E. Sepulveda Boulevard.

Refinery officials told firefighters the blaze was a reported seal fire in a crude oil pump.

L.A. County fire officials said the fire involved three of four crude oil pumps with flames in the seals. The pumps have been shut down.

In addition to trying to put out the flames, extra attention had to be given to adjacent components. As the firefight continued, the blaze appeared to be contained to the origin of the fire.

No injuries were reported, and no evacuations were put in place.

After more than two hours, fire officials declared a knockdown shortly after 9:30 p.m.

After the knockdown, firefighters stayed on scene to try and cool things down.

A hazmat team with the L.A. County Fire Department was called to determine the air quality in the area.

No alerts were immediately sent from the city of Carson.

Source Article from https://abc7.com/fire-burns-out-of-control-at-carson-oil-refinery/5197433/

The Australian suspect arrested after dozens of worshippers were gunned down in two mosques appeared unrepentant in court in New Zealand on Saturday, staring down media members with a smirk on his face.

Brenton Tarrant, 28, appeared in a Christchurch District Court and was charged with murder. He was remanded without a plea until his next appearance in the South Island city’s High Court on April 5.

Handcuffed, shoeless, and wearing a white prison suit, Tarrant did not speak. His court-appointed lawyer made no application for bail or name suppression.

He flashed an upside-down “okay” signal, a symbol used by white power groups across the globe.

Al Jazeera’s Andrew Thomas, reporting from Christchurch, said the suspect locked eyes intensely with journalists.

“He came into court, he didn’t say anything at all. He stood there looking directly at the media in the courtroom and was smirking throughout his appearance,” Thomas reported.

Judge Paul Kellar allowed photos to be taken but ordered that the face of the former fitness instructor be blurred to preserve fair-trial rights.


Two other suspects were taken into custody while police tried to determine what role, if any, they played in the cold-blooded attack that stunned New Zealand – a country so peaceful that police officers rarely carry guns.

None of those arrested had a criminal history or was on any watch-list in New Zealand or Australia.

With 49 people killed in the mosque attacks, it was by far the deadliest shooting in modern New Zealand history. Funerals were planned on Saturday for some of the victims.

Medical staff said 39 wounded people were being treated in hospitals, 11 in critical condition including a four-year-old girl.

Victims were from across the Muslim world including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia. The dead included women and children.

Gun laws questioned

Calling it a well-planned terrorist attack, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the main suspect was a licensed gun owner who used five weapons during his rampage, including two semi-automatic weapons and two shotguns.

The weapons had been modified to allow the quicker discharge of rounds, she said. 

“I can tell you one thing right now, our gun laws will change,” Ardern told reporters, saying a ban on semi-automatic weapons would be considered.

She said the suspect intended to continue the rampage before he was caught by police. 

New Zealand, with a population of five million, has relatively loose gun laws and an estimated 1.5 million firearms, or roughly one for every three people. But it has one of the lowest gun homicide rates in the world. In 2015, it had just eight gun homicides.

Tarrant posted a jumbled, 74-page manifesto on social media in which he identified himself by name and said he was a white supremacist who was out to avenge attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslims.

The gunman also livestreamed in graphic detail 17 minutes of his rampage at Al Noor mosque, where he sprayed worshippers with bullets, killing at least 41 people. Several more people were killed in an attack on a second mosque in the city a short time later. Police also defused explosive devices in a car.

Authorities did not say whether the same person was responsible for both shootings.

Tarrant’s relatives in the Australian town of Grafton, in New South Wales, contacted police after learning of the shooting and were helping with the investigation, authorities said.

Tarrant has spent little time in Australia in the past four years and only had minor traffic infractions on his record.

Searching for relatives

On Saturday, outside one of the two mosques, 32-year-old Ash Mohammed pushed through police barricades in hopes of finding out what happened to his father and two brothers, whose mobile phones rang unanswered. An officer stopped him.

“We just want to know if they are dead or alive,” Mohammed told the officer.

In the aftermath of Friday’s bloodshed, the country’s threat level was raised from low to high. Police warned Muslims against going to a mosque anywhere in New Zealand, and the national airline cancelled several flights in and out of Christchurch, a city of nearly 400,000.



People pay their respects by placing flowers for the victims in Christchurch on Saturday [Michael Bradley/AFP]

New Zealand is generally considered to be welcoming to migrants and refugees. On Saturday, people across the country were reaching out to Muslims in their communities on social media to volunteer acts of kindness – offering rides to the grocery store or volunteering to walk with them if they felt unsafe.

Muslims account for just one percent of New Zealand’s population, a 2013 census showed, most of whom were born overseas.

A website set up for victims had raised more than $684,000 in less than a day, and social media was flooded with messages of shock, sympathy and solidarity.

One image shared widely was of a cartoon kiwi, the country’s national bird, weeping. Another showed a pair of figures, one in a headscarf, embracing. “This is your home and you should have been safe here” the caption read.


A city mourns

The Al Noor mosque sits opposite a grand English-style park filled with towering oak trees. On Saturday morning, dozens of people stood silently, facing the building as police went about their work.

With the street closed, the only sounds to be heard were crickets and the occasional car engine in the distance. Occasionally the sound of sobbing cut through.

A few hundred metres down the street where the alleged gunman drove after attacking the first mosque, bunches of flowers were slowly building in memoriam. 

Many of those visiting this scene were migrants, newcomers to the city and a country that prides itself on its peace-loving nature.

Rizwan Khan, 32, originally from West Bengal in India, told Al Jazeera of his fortune when an appointment in town meant he was running late for his usual trip to the Al Noor mosque.

“Because I was running late I decided not to go,” said Khan. “I feel very grateful to God. I can’t imagine what would have happened. One of my friends called me, who I normally pray with in the mosque. And when I called him he just said he’d been shot in his shoulder.

“I was just saved by luck.”

Other stories were just as remarkable – for the wrong reasons. 

Two young grief-stricken Muslim men described how their friend’s uncle came to visit him from India for a few weeks. He had gone to the Al Noor mosque the day before flying home, only to be gunned down in cold blood.

Rampage video

Facebook, Twitter and Google scrambled to take down the gunman’s video, which was widely available on social media for hours after the mass shooting.

In the video, the killer spends more than two minutes inside the mosque targeting terrified worshippers with gunfire. He then walked outside where he shot at people on the sidewalk.

Children’s screams can be heard in the distance as he returns to his car to get another weapon. He walked back into the mosque, where there were at least two dozen people lying on the ground.



It was an emotional day for many Christchurch residents on Saturday [Michael Bradley/AFP]

After going back outside and shooting a woman there, he got back in his car where a song can be heard blasting. The singer bellowed “I am the god of hellfire!” and the gunman drove off before police even arrived.

The second attack took place at the Linwood mosque about 5km away. Mark Nichols told the New Zealand Herald he heard about five gunshots and a worshipper returned fire with a rifle or shotgun.

The footage showed the killer was carrying a shotgun and two fully automatic military assault rifles, with an extra magazine taped to one of the weapons so that he could reload quickly. He also had more assault weapons in the trunk of his car, along with explosives.

The gunman said he was not a member of any organisation, acted alone, and chose New Zealand to show even the most remote parts of the world are not free of “mass immigration.”

Bill Code contributed to this report from Christchurch

Source Article from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/zealand-terrorist-attack-suspect-grins-court-190316011147796.html

There is a lot we don’t yet know about what motivated the 28-year-old man charged with murder in a shooting that killed 49 people and injured at least 48 others in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

But his writings suggest that the white nationalist ideas behind violence and attempted violence in the United States and elsewhere influenced him deeply.

The shooter reportedly left behind a 74-page manifesto. It’s the kind of document instigators of mass violence often write to inspire copycat attackers (which is why I chose not to link to it).

Still, the document is worth understanding in context. There are throughlines in the manifesto that are similar to the ideas described by other shooters or those who have attempted shootings in recent cases in the United States and around the world.

In February, a “white nationalist” Coast Guard lieutenant in Maryland was accused of planning attacks on members of the media and left-leaning politicians. (The attacks may have been stymied because of his web searches related to drugs and violent extremist acts.) The Christchurch shooter and the Coast Guard lieutenant used similar language, made similar references, and most disturbingly, revered the same people for their use of horrific violence in the furtherance of white nationalism.

A word on terrorist manifestos

The reason it’s important to both understand the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto and refuse to spread its contents without context is that a manifesto is a published and public declaration of intent or belief — and the critical term to remember is “public.” The Christchurch shooter wrote his manifesto with the clear intention of it being shared widely after he committed an act of mass murder.

That means that historically, terrorist manifestos have never been accurate documentation of either their belief system or the planning that went into their attacks. The main intention of terrorist manifestos is not to help everyday people understand how they became terrorists — it is to create new terrorists.

In this particular manifesto, the author is not attempting to provide a fully factual history of himself or his reasoning behind his actions. Much of the first 10 pages of the manifesto are the shooter responding to questions he’s posing to himself about who he is (“just an ordinary White man” and why he decided to kill (“to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands”). The manifesto intersperses details about why the shooter targeted New Zealand with self-aggrandizing rhetoric about the shooter’s own personal bravery.

And it’s also worth mentioning that a lot of the document is akin to what’s known as “shitposting” — intentionally throwing out red-meat content to readers to distract them or draw them deeper into the same online pits where he himself was radicalized.

For example, the Christchurch shooter mentions a popular YouTube personality and a popular American right-wing figure before joking that he was radicalized in reality by the game Fortnite, which taught him to “floss on the corpses of my enemies” (flossing being a dance move that the game helped popularize.) He also describes himself as an expert in “gorilla warfare.” Many people reading the manifesto jumped on those mentions immediately, which is, as Robert Evans, a journalist and expert on far-right terror communication argued, exactly the point.

While “shitposting” is a common thread in far-right online culture — meme-ing racism and anti-Semitism is how white supremacists hope to spread their ideology — jokey characteristics of the manifesto are in line with similar language used in older far-right groups as well.

In short, everything in the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto is what the Christchurch shooter wants us to know about him. Like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber who killed three people and injured 23 others in a nationwide bombing campaign from the 1970s to the 1990s, or even Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, published in 1925, the point of these manifestos is not to be factual or realistic about the inner worlds of their authors. In Mein Kampf, Hitler portrays himself as a talented artist and lover of architecture. In Kaczynski’s manifesto, he portrays himself as a man profoundly concerned about the material problems of industrial society. Manifestos aren’t honest. Manifestos are for mass consumption.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful for people who study terrorist movements, particularly white nationalism. Rather, connections between manifestos and the terrorists who write them — what they say, how they say it, and who they mention — tell us about the international flow of white nationalist ideology.

The common language of white nationalism and white supremacy

Modern white nationalism has a common history and a common language that transcends borders. The Christchurch shooter’s manifesto uses it, as do others who have either committed or attempted to commit mass violence in the name of white nationalism.

While it has its own American history, white nationalism is an inherently global movement. As researcher J.M. Berger detailed in a paper on the impact of the white nationalist screed The Turner Diaries on the movement:

Most extremist movements believe their waking reality has already become dystopian and they are participants in what Mark Juergensmeyer calls a “cosmic war”. For jihadist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, this belief is articulated as a global “war on Islam”. For anarchists and socialists, a fascist oligarchy controls free market societies. In the case of white nationalism, the “white race” is threatened with extinction due to widespread miscegenation and the erosion of white supremacist social norms.

And the Christchurch shooter notes this in his manifesto, describing himself as European by blood because Australia is “simply an off-shoot of the European people” right alongside his discussions of eco-fascism. The Coast Guard lieutenant who planned to kill politicians and media personalities felt very much the same. In a deleted email recovered from his computer, he wrote:

Liberalist/globalist ideology is destroying traditional peoples esp white. No way to counteract without violence. It should push for more crack down bringing more people to our side. Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch. For some no amount of blood will be enough. They will die as will the traitors who actively work toward our demise. Looking to Russia with hopeful eyes or any land that despises the west’s liberalism. Excluding of course the muslim scum. Who rightfully despise the west’s liberal degeneracy.

It is clear that the author is not thinking of himself as an American citizen but as a white person, united with all other white people against everyone else.

On Friday morning, I spoke with Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and author of Bring the War Home, which traces the white supremacist movement’s relationship with the Vietnam War. She told me about how white nationalist groups like Aryan Nations sent their materials around the world, and how groups like Wotansvolk and the World Church of the Creator set up chapters in dozens of countries — mainly those with large white populations, including Canada, France, and yes, New Zealand.

“As you can see,” Belew said, “these places map on to an idea of whiteness that transcends national boundaries, which is part of why I argue for calling this “white power” rather than white nationalism. The nation in white nationalism is the Aryan nation, not the US or New Zealand.”

She added, “Scholars have documented how these flows took materials, propaganda, training, language, and weapons to other countries, often those, like New Zealand, considered by the movement to be part of a white world that could be salvaged from racial others.”

The common language of white nationalism is rife throughout the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. For example, alongside Nazi imagery, the Christchurch shooter made frequent reference to the concept of “white genocide,” writing of immigration as an “assault on the European people” and adding, “This is ethnic replacement. This is cultural replacement. This is racial replacement. This is WHITE GENOCIDE.”

The concept of “white genocide” — the idea that nonwhite immigration or mixed-race relationships that result in multiracial children poses an existential, genocidal threat to white people around the world — was coined by an American white supremacist named David Lane. As I wrote last year:

David Lane, a white supremacist responsible for the murder of a Jewish radio host in 1984, wrote the “White Genocide Manifesto” while in prison, arguing that “‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide.” He later shortened his three-page manifesto to 14 words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Three decades later, the term “white genocide” is the single most popular hashtag used by white nationalists on Twitter.

The 14 words? Also of apparent importance to the Christchurch shooter, who recites them in his manifesto and reportedly posted images of a gun with the number 14 drawn on it on Twitter.

David Lane was himself inspired by William Pierce, an American white supremacist and author of The Turner Diaries, a book that has become a white nationalist staple since its publication in 1978. (Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in April 1994 in Oklahoma City by bombing a federal building, was a huge fan.)

And The Turner Diaries was also allegedly part of the inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered more than 75 people, mostly teenagers, in a series of terror attacks in Oslo, Norway in 2011. Breivik also wrote a manifesto to “explain” his actions, a document that stretches more than 1,500 pages. Parts of it are extremely similar to passages from the Diaries (while also citing Kaczynski’s manifesto as well). And now, Breivik has become an inspirational figure himself, with his name reportedly cited by both the Christchurch shooter and the Maryland Coast Guard lieutenant.

The Maryland Coast Guard lieutenant reportedly used Breivik’s manifesto as a guide to help plan his attack on political figures and media members, even using Breivik’s classification system to determine his “priority targets,” in Breivik’s terms. And in the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, he describes Breivik (or as he writes, “Knight Justiciar Breivik,” most likely an elaborate joke aimed at his friends on 8Chan and Reddit) as a figure taking a stand against “ethnic and cultural genocide.” Another person listed as an inspiration in the manifesto: Dylann Roof, an American white supremacist who murdered eight black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015 and has now become a sainted figure in some right-wing circles.

The role of America, and America’s racial past

America has a central role in the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. He claims he used guns to stir up America’s debate over gun rights versus safety in hopes of dividing the country over racial and cultural lines, writing, “This balkanization of the US will not only result in the racial separation of the people within the United States ensuring the future of the White race on the North American continent, but also ensuring the death of the ‘melting pot’ pipe dream.” (He also expresses some anger about the United States’ involvement in the 1990s war in Yugoslavia.)

In general white nationalist rhetoric, Europe is “lost” in racial terms because of nonwhite immigration and low birthrates among white Europeans across the continent. But America — alongside New Zealand and Australia, to some within the movement — is viewed as perhaps the last hope for white nationalists to create an idealized “white homeland.”

Over the last 50 years, those ideas have been further developed with a surprising degree of specificity. David Lane, whom I mentioned earlier, was in favor of the so-called Northwest Imperative, the white nationalist idea of creating an “Aryan homeland” in the Pacific Northwest. The man who stabbed two people to death on a train in Oregon in May 2017 was reportedly an adherent of this idea, posting on Facebook before the attack that America should be “balkanize(d)” — the same word used by the Christchurch shooter.

And the Coast Guard lieutenant who allegedly planned attacks made similar points in an email to white supremacist Harold Covington, writing, “How long can we hold out there and prevent niggerization of the Northwest until whites wake up on their own…”


From the government’s motion for detention pending trial, February 19, 2019.

All of these ideas have been shared and combined, with concepts created by white nationalists in the United States spreading to white nationalists living in Britain, Italy, and South Africa, and vice versa.

“One thing to consider is that transnational flows of ideas and materials work in multiple directions,” Belew told me. “The white power movement in the US was heavily influenced by inflows like British Israelism (from Canada) and skinheads (from Great Britain). But in part because of the power and force of its activism in the period I study, [the white power movement in the US] also became a huge exporter of white power activity in the 1990s.”

In other words, white nationalism has been internationalized, with adherents finding inspiration in figures ranging from American neo-Nazis to Norwegian mass murderers, and finding common cause on forums like 8Chan that attract an international audience of shitposting racists who view racism and white nationalism as both a worthy cause and a hilarious chance for memes.

The Christchurch shooter was seemingly influenced by dozens of other white nationalists before him, whose names and ideology created the common framing he and other committers of racist violence have continually used. And through his manifesto, the Christchurch shooter, like the Coast Guard lieutenant, hoped to do the same for someone else.

Source Article from https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/3/15/18267163/new-zealand-shooting-christchurch-white-nationalism-racism-language

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Shares of aircraft-manufacturing company Boeing took a hit early this week, losing $26.6 billion in market value Monday and Tuesday, following a deadly crash of one of its 737 Max 8 airplanes in Ethiopia.

That model has since been grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as by aviation regulators around the world.

Still, if you invested in Boeing 10 years ago, that decision would have paid off: According to CNBC calculations, a $1,000 investment in 2009 would be worth more than $14,000 as of March 15, 2019, a total return over 1,000 percent. In the same time frame, the S&P 500 was up 270 percent. So, your $1,000 would be worth just over $3,700, by comparison.

Any individual stock can over- or under-perform, however, and past returns do not predict future results. Boeing paused delivery of 737 Max planes after the Ethiopia crash, which came less than five months after another deadly crash in Indonesia involving the same model.

This left several major airlines, including United, American and Southwest scrambling to rebook passengers and reassign planes. Those companies said they would waive ticket-change fees and fare differences for those affected by the FAA’s grounding order.

Flight-booking site Kayak even introduced a new search feature that allows users to exclude specific plane models, according to co-founder and chief executive officer Steve Hafner.

CNBC: Boeing stock as of Mar. 15, 2019

Fortunately for Boeing, while shares plunged more than 10 percent early this week, they ticked back up by as much as 3 percent Friday. And the company announced plans to roll out a software fix in the next few weeks.

Though, Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein said Thursday that the fix could take a lot longer: “Once Boeing identifies the issue … the most likely scenario is the company will take about 3-6 months to come up with and certify the fix,” he said in a note.

Hafner says he expects the 737 models to be grounded only a few months and that travelers will likely be booking flights on them again soon: “They’re out of service on a temporary basis,” he said on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley.” “In reality, airlines are still planning on flying those planes in the summer. People want security and comfort when they fly.”

In the meantime, Boeing said in a statement it will “continue to build 737 Max airplanes, while assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production system.”

If you’re looking to get into investing, expert investors like Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban suggest you start with index funds, which hold every stock in an index, offer low turnover rates, attendant fees and tax bills. They also fluctuate with the market to eliminate the risk of picking individual stocks.

Here’s a snapshot of how the markets look now.

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If you invested $1,000 in IBM 10 years ago, here’s how much you’d have now

Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/if-you-put-1000-in-boeing-10-years-ago-heres-what-youd-have-now.html

A 15-year-old Beto O’Rourke once wrote a “murder fantasy” short story about running over two children with a car, according to a new report that also revealed the now-presidential candidate was a member of a famous hacking group.

The details were uncovered in a Reuters report on the “Cult of the Dead Cow,” a famous group of hackers credited with inventing the term “hacktivism.” Reuters revealed that O’Rourke, who joined the Democratic presidential primary race on Thursday, was a member, while reporting, “there is no indication that O’Rourke ever engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity, such as breaking into computers.”

But the report also revealed that teenage Beto, in connection with the group, wrote stories under the name “Psychedelic Warlord” — writings that remain online.

One piece in particular detailed the narrator’s murder spree, as part of his goal seeking “the termination of everything that was free and loving.” The piece described the first kill as the murder of two children crossing the street.

BETO’S IDENTITY CRISIS: IS DEM DARLING A LIBERAL OR A MODERATE? 

It reads: “Then one day, as I was driving home from work, I noticed two children crossing the street. They were happy, happy to be free from their troubles. I knew, however, that this happiness and sense of freedom were much too overwhelming for them.

As I neared the young ones, I put all my weight on my right foot, keeping the accelerator pedal on the floor until I heard the crashing of the two children on the hood, and then the sharp cry of pain from one of the two

— A 15-year-old Beto O’Rourke’s fictional fantasy piece

“This happiness was mine by right. I had earned it in my dreams. As I neared the young ones, I put all my weight on my right foot, keeping the accelerator pedal on the floor until I heard the crashing of the two children on the hood, and then the sharp cry of pain from one of the two. I was so fascinated for a moment, that when after I had stopped my vehicle, I just sat in a daze, sweet visions filling my head.

“My dream was abruptly ended when I heard a loud banging on the front window. It was an old man, who was using his cane to awaken me. He might have been a witness to my act of love. I was not sure, nor did I care. It was simply ecstasy. As I drove home, I envisioned myself committing more of these ‘acts of love,’ and after a while, I had no trouble carrying them out. The more people I killed, the longer my dreams were. … I had killed nearly 38 people by the time of my twenty-third birthday, and each one was more fulfilling than the last.”

O’ROURKE BACKS OFF IMPEACHMENT, SAYS VOTING TRUMP OUT OF OFFICE IN 2020 IS BETTER IDEA

In another piece, he challenged the perspective of a neo-Nazi who was defending Hitler’s actions.

The Reuters report reads: “In another piece, he took on a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi who maintained that Hitler was misunderstood and didn’t personally want Jews killed. O’Rourke and a Jewish friend questioned the man about his theories and let him ramble about Jews and African Americans, an attempt to let him hang himself with his own words.

“We were trying to see what made him think the horrible things that he did,” he wrote in the piece.

It’s unclear whether the piece reflected a real interview, or was fictional.

The Reuters report included quotes from members of the hacker group, many of whom kept O’Rourke’s secret for decades.

The news agency spoke to more than a dozen people who were part of the group for a book from the same reporter titled, “Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World.”

BETO O’ROURKE ‘VANITY FAIR’ PROFILE MOCKED FOR STORIES ABOUT EX-GIRLFRIENDS, BOOKSHELVES AND HIS ‘NEAR-MYTHICAL EXPERIENCE’

O’Rourke said he gave up hacking when he was 18 years old and enrolled in college.

He told Reuters he got into the habit and visited boards frequented by other hackers because it was a “great way to get cracked games” – meaning video games that had been altered in some way.

Of the latest revelations, O’Rourke, 46, told Fox News, “It was stuff that I was a part of as a teenager that I’m not proud of today, and I mean that’s the long and short of it.”

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Asked about the potential impact on his 2020 campaign, he had this to say: “I can’t control anything I did in the past. All I can do is control what I do going forward, and what I plan to do is give this my best; bring as many people together around the solution we face. That’s what I hear the people of Iowa saying as well.”

Fox News’ Charles Watson contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/beto-orourke-wrote-murder-fantasy-children-was-part-of-famed-hacking-group-report

Friday’s slaughter in two New Zealand mosques played out as a dystopian reality show delivered by some of America’s biggest technology companies. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter all had roles in publicizing the violence and, by extension, the hate-filled ideology behind it.

These companies – some of the richest, most technologically advanced in the world – failed to rapidly quell the spread of troubling content as it metastasized across platforms, bringing horrific images to internet users worldwide.

The alleged shooter, a heavily armed man authorities have not yet named, also released a 74-page manifesto denouncing Muslims and immigrants that spread widely online. He left behind a social media trail on Twitter and Facebook that amounted to footnotes to his manifesto. Over the two days before the shooting he posted about 60 of the same links across different platforms, nearly half of which were to YouTube videos that were still active late Friday.

The horror began Friday morning in New Zealand, as the alleged shooter used Facebook to live-stream his assault on Al Noor Mosque, one of two Christchurch mosques that he attacked and the scene of most of the 49 fatalities. Many hours later – long after the man and other suspects had been arrested – some internet users still were uploading and re-uploading the video to YouTube and other online services. A search of keywords related to the event, such as “New Zealand,” surfaced a long list of videos, many of which were lengthy and uncensored views of the massacre.

Source Article from https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-new-zealand-shooting-social-media-20190315-story.html

Anthony Sanders slid on a fluorescent orange “Security” vest, tucked his pistol under the waistband of his jeans and planted his feet at the front entrance to the Masjid Al-Mu’minun mosque in Atlanta during Friday afternoon prayers. 

Sanders closely watched each person who walked in, looking for “shaky” behavior, big bags or clothing that didn’t match the warm weather. Three other men monitored each car pulling into the front parking lot. A fourth man stood sentry inside, watching live security camera footage from many different angles. 

Sanders and his crew were being extra cautious following Friday’s mass shootings at a pair of mosques in New Zealand, a massacre that claimed the lives of 49 people and injured dozens more. Police have taken three people into custody. One has been charged with murder, an unidentified man who left behind a white nationalist manifesto that rails against immigrants and Muslims. 

>> RELATED | “My heart breaks”: Atlantans, world leaders condemn attacks on New Zealand mosques

“It’s unfortunate that when these things happen that we have to become more aware — more conscious — of security. But, I mean, New Zealand? Nothing happens there,” Sanders, a private security guard who volunteers at the mosque, said of his shock. 

At a news conference inside Sanders’ mosque Friday, the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on local police to send patrol cars out to guard local Muslim houses of worship. Atlanta and Gwinnett County police confirmed they would help. 

“We have our officers conducting directed patrols around city mosques and asking them to be on heightened alert for suspicious activity,” Atlanta police spokesman Carlos Campos said. “Additionally, our Homeland Security Unit is monitoring the events out of New Zealand.”

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Gwinnett police responded similarly.

“In response to the incident in New Zealand, we have increased patrols at all mosques in Gwinnett County,” said Cpl. Michele Pihera, a Gwinnett police spokeswoman. “We hope to bring some measure of comfort to those who visit these places of worship during this difficult time.”  

Since 2005, there has been a rise in anti-mosque incidents, including acts of vandalism, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In Georgia, for example, there have been nearly a dozen incidents.  

In the summer of 2017, for instance, a man made several threatening phone calls to the Islamic Society of Augusta, including threats to blow up the mosque and hurt members. The man later pleaded guilty.  

Centers of faith are by nature open and welcoming to anyone who wants to visit, and that makes them vulnerable, said Glen Evans, president of ChurchSecurityTrainer.com in Dayton, Ohio, which advises faith leaders on how to protect their members.  

“Most people who want to cause harm understand this about the faith community,” Evans said. “They all share one common footprint — they were generally welcoming places with generally nonviolent people. It’s what we call a soft target.”  

When people hear screaming or shooting, they should be able to lock down an area without having to get permission from a pastor, imam or rabbi, Evans said. Those few seconds or minutes could save lives before police arrive, he added. There is a movement to station armed people inside places of worship, including specially trained members, private security guards and off-duty police officers, Evans said.  

Sulaimaan Hamed, the imam at Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, said armed personnel protect his mosque.  

“Georgia is a state that respects our Second Amendment, as do I,” he said. “We do have armed security who are licensed — who are trained — to protect those who come to worship God.”  

>> MORE | President Trump on New Zealand shootings: “We stand ready to help”

Furqan Muhammad, the imam at Masjid Al-Mu’minun, pointed to his mosque’s longstanding security plans, saying: “The best time to prepare for war is at peace.”  

“Our faith teaches us to believe in God, to believe in Allah,” he said, “but tie your camel.”  

Inside his mosque Friday, Abdulkarim Muhammad sat at a desk near the entrance, toggling between watching surveillance video footage inside the building and greeting everyone who walked down the hallway toward him. 

A Marine veteran and grandfather, Muhammad peered inside a visitor’s black duffel bag. When another visitor in an Atlanta Braves ball cap reached out to shake his hand, Muhammad politely refused, saying he didn’t want to be distracted from his important duty. Meanwhile, he urged people to turn off their cellphones before they joined the Friday afternoon prayers.  

Muhammad said he believes Allah will protect him, though he remains vigilant.  

“Pray as well as watch,” he said. “I am always alert.”

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Source Article from https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/atlanta-muslims-urged-step-security-after-new-zealand-attacks/lyDkyFdG4lEYWeEU0YJbyI/

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump promised to fight Democrats and Republicans in Washington, and, with his first-ever veto Friday, he did just that.

“Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, and I have the duty to veto it,” he said as he sent a measure that would have terminated his declaration of a national emergency — and the transfer of billions of dollars to build his promised border wall — right back to Capitol Hill.

The day before, a dozen Republican senators had joined with Democrats to pass the measure, an unusually large number of GOP defections from Trump’s line.

While Trump played down the fracture Friday — “I didn’t need the votes,” he said — it showed that by engaging in a battle with Congress over the power of the purse, he has weakened institutional support for the wall, and for his authority, among Washington Republicans.

That is, even some Republicans who say they’re for the wall are drawing the line at Trump declaring a national emergency and seizing spending decisions from Congress to do it.

But some Republicans say that may not be a bad thing for Trump as he heads into the 2020 election.

On the surface, it suggests he’ll have a much tougher time winning budget battles with a Congress that is obviously increasingly inclined to assert its own prerogatives and restrain his. But Trump doesn’t have any domestic policy agenda items that approach the political importance of the wall, and he wants to campaign against Washington again.

It’s all the better if he can run, at least a little bit, against both parties, said Matt Schlapp, a Trump ally and chairman of the American Conservative Union.

“They gave him a gift,” Schlapp said of Congress sending him the resolution. “The president is at his strongest when he is fighting and he is seen as credible when he is fighting members of his own party…especially when the principles are on his side.”

Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and frequent Trump critic, noted that the president said Friday he wasn’t upset with Republicans who defected. Steele said he sensed a little bit of public theater playing out on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the boulevard that runs between the White House and the Capitol.

“On the vote itself, there’s a lot of high-minded drama about what these senators did,” he said, noting that there was no chance of the president’s veto being overridden and that most of the Republicans who defected aren’t up for re-election next year. “I’m not convinced.”

As for Trump, Steele added, “he loves the fight, he doesn’t care who he’s fighting, it doesn’t matter if it’s Republicans or Democrats … for him, politically, it reaffirms for his base why they sent him to Washington.”

Ultimately, the courts will decide whether Trump’s spending gambit passes constitutional muster. For now, Democrats and some Republicans argue that his decision to grab money from existing projects and rededicate it to build the wall is a violation of Congress’ constitutional primacy in spending matters.

“The House and Senate resoundingly rejected the President’s lawless power grab, yet the president has chosen to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement released after the veto.

Some Republican critics of the president’s methods, including Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, have raised constitutional concerns, while others have simply worried that a future Democratic president would use the precedent set by Trump to spend money on pet projects not approved by Congress.

Rachel Bovard, the policy director at the Conservative Policy Institute and a former aide to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who cited constitutional concerns in voting against the president Thursday, said that the emergency declaration doesn’t violate the separation of powers principle.

“The Constitution is not in crisis. The border is,” Bovard said in a text exchange with NBC. “The president’s declaration follows the law that Congress passed. They’ve appropriated money and authorized a law that allows this wall to be built. If Congress wants to change the law that disallows future presidents from taking this action, they are well within their rights to do so.”

To Bovard, the question is a political one, not a legal one.

“Trump is using the power that Congress gave him to secure the border — which is more than Congress is apparently willing to do,” she said. “So what’s truly at stake is whether or not Republicans are going to be united on border security going into 2020.”

The movement of power toward the executive branch, and away from Congress, is a long-running trend, said Mack McLarty, who served as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

While he sees Trump’s use of executive power in this instance — including the veto and the original decision to shift money around — as “unique” because it “interferes with Congress’ rights …in terms of appropriations funds,” he said Friday’s action makes sense in the context of the emphasis Trump has put on the wall.

“This is a priority issue for him, and this is why he’s using the veto pen,” McLarty said.

Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/inside-his-veto-fight-gop-trump-may-have-found-gift-n983961

Members of Bangladesh’s national cricket team, who were in Christchurch for a match, were also saved by tardiness, after a news conference delayed their walk to the Deans Avenue mosque.

Mohammad Isam, an ESPN reporter covering the team, reported on an ESPN website that at 1:52 he got a terrified call from Tamim Iqbal Khan, one of the Bangladesh cricketers.

“There’s shooting here, please save us,” Mr. Khan said, according to Mr. Isam.

“I first think that he is playing a prank but he hangs up and calls again — this time, his voice starts to crack,” Mr. Isam wrote. “He says that I should call the police as there’s a shooting going on inside the mosque where they are about to enter.”

Mr. Khan wrote on Twitter: “Entire team got saved from active shooters.”

Another player, Mushfiqur Rahim, tweeted “we r extremely lucky … never want to see this things happen again … pray for us.”

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/australia/new-zealand-mosque-shooting.html

President Trump shows the executive veto of the national emergency resolution in the Oval Office of the White House Friday.

Alex Wong/Getty Images


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Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Trump shows the executive veto of the national emergency resolution in the Oval Office of the White House Friday.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Updated at 4:56 p.m. ET

President Trump used his veto pen for the first time Friday, after Congress tried to reverse his national emergency declaration and rein in spending on a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Congressional critics do not appear to have the votes to override Trump’s veto. So, as a practical matter, the administration can continue to spend billions of dollars more on border barriers than lawmakers authorized, unless and until the courts intervene.

“Today I am vetoing this resolution,” Trump said, flanked by law enforcement officials at an Oval Office event. “Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution and I have the duty to veto it.”

Also in the room for the veto signing Friday were parents of children who were killed by immigrants who entered the country illegally, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Attorney General William Barr.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever been more proud than to be standing next to you today,” Pence said. “You’re keeping your word by vetoing this legislation.”

Indeed, Trump had telegraphed his plan to proceed with additional wall spending on Thursday, minutes after the Senate voted 59-41 to block it. Twelve Republican senators joined Democrats in rejecting the president’s emergency declaration.

“I look forward to VETOING the just passed Democrat inspired Resolution which would OPEN BORDERS while increasing Crime, Drugs, and Trafficking in our Country,” Trump tweeted. “I thank all of the Strong Republicans who voted to support Border Security and our desperately needed WALL!”

And Friday afternoon Trump again thanked those GOP senators who had voted to allow his emergency declaration to go forward. “This will help stop Crime, Human Trafficking, and Drugs entering our Country,” the president tweeted. “Watch, when you get back to your State, they will LOVE you more than ever before!”

Trump declared a national emergency last month, after Congress authorized only $1.3 billion in border wall funding, far short of the $5.7 billion Trump had asked for. The emergency declaration allows the president to redirect funds from other accounts such as military construction to the Southern border wall.

Republican senators who bucked the president said they did so to preserve congressional control over the government’s purse strings.

“We had a war against a king in the American revolution,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. “This would be the first time that a president has ever asked for a certain amount of money from Congress, Congress has refused to provide it, and then the president has declared a national emergency under the 1976 act and said, ‘I’m going to spend the money anyway.'”

Alexander added that he shares the president’s goal of border security, but warned allowing Trump to redirect money without authorization could set a dangerous precedent.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced soon after the veto that the House would attempt to override it, after returning from a recess later this month.

Republicans, Pelosi said, “will have to choose between their partisan hypocrisy and their sacred oath to support and defend the Constitution.”

Recent months have seen a surge in unauthorized crossings of the U.S. border with Mexico. Last month, roughly 76,000 people tried, including 43,000 children and family members, many fleeing violence and poverty in Central America.

“People hate the word invasion, but that’s what it is,” Trump said Friday.

The large numbers have put a strain on immigration enforcement, although critics say a wall would do little to discourage the crossings since many of those apprehended at the border turn themselves in voluntarily.

The border wall project still faces a variety of legal challenges, and despite Trump’s veto, House and Senate votes against the emergency declaration could carry some weight in the courts.

Trump insists he’s on solid legal ground, however.

“I think actually a national emergency was designed for a specific purpose like this, so we have a great case,” Trump said. “Ideally, they shouldn’t even sue in this case, if you want to know the truth. They shouldn’t even be suing, but they will because they always do.”

On Friday, Barr also said the president’s emergency order was “clearly authorized under the law.”

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2019/03/15/703761034/trump-vetoes-congressional-effort-to-limit-border-wall-funding

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New York (CNN Businss)Nearly 18 hours after a terror attack that killed 49 people at a mosque in New Zealand on Friday, footage from the shooting remained live on YouTube and Facebook.

    Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/15/tech/new-zealand-video-viral-social-media/index.html

    Former British spy Christopher Steele admitted that he relied on an unverified report on a CNN website for part of the “Trump dossier,” which was used as a basis for the FBI’s investigation into Trump.

    According to deposition transcripts released this week, Steele said last year he used a 2009 report he found on CNN’s iReport website and said he wasn’t aware that submissions to that site are posted by members of the public and are not checked for accuracy.

    A web archive from July 29, 2009 shows that CNN described the site in this manner: “iReport.com is a user-generated site. That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked, or screened before they post.”

    In the dossier, Steele, a Cambridge-educated former MI6 officer, wrote about extensive allegations against Donald Trump, associates of his campaign, various Russians and other foreign nationals, and a variety of companies — including one called Webzilla. Those allegations would become part of an FBI investigation and would be used to apply for warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

    During his deposition, Steele was pressed on the methods he used to verify allegations made about Webzilla, which was thought to be used by Russia to hack into Democratic emails.

    When asked if he discovered “anything of relevance concerning Webzilla” during the verification process, Steele replied: “We did. It was an article I have got here which was posted on July 28, 2009, on something called CNN iReport.”

    “I do not have any particular knowledge of that,” Steele said when asked what was his understanding of how the iReport website worked.

    When asked if he understood that content on the site was not generated by CNN reporters, he said, “I do not.” He was then asked: “Do you understand that they have no connection to any CNN reporters?” Steele replied, “I do not.”

    He was pressed on this further: “Do you understand that CNN iReports are or were nothing more than any random individuals’ assertions on the Internet?” Steele replied: “No, I obviously presume that if it is on a CNN site that it may has some kind of CNN status. Albeit that it may be an independent person posting on the site.”

    When asked about his methodology for searching for this information, Steele described it as “what we could call an open source search,” which he defined as “where you go into the Internet and you access material that is available on the Internet that is of relevance or reference to the issue at hand or the person under consideration.”

    Steele said his dossier contained “raw intelligence” that he admitted could contain untrue or even “deliberately false information.”

    Steele was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to investigate then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016. Fusion GPS was receiving funding at the time from the Clinton campaign and the DNC through the Perkins Coie law firm.

    The series of memos that Steele would eventually compile became known as the “Trump Dossier.” The dossier was used in FISA applications to surveil Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

    When asked whether he warned Fusion GPS that the information in the dossier might be “Russian disinformation,” Steele admitted that “a general understanding existed between us and Fusion … that all material contained this risk.”

    Steele also described his interactions with Sen. John McCain’s aide, David Kramer, whose own deposition showed that he provided BuzzFeed with a copy of the dossier and had spoken with more than a dozen journalists about it.

    “I provided copies of the December memo to Fusion GPS for onward passage to David Kramer at the request of Sen. John McCain,” Steele said. “Sen. McCain nominated him as the intermediary. I did not choose him as the intermediary.”

    When asked if he told Kramer that he couldn’t “vouch for everything that was produced in the memos,” Steele replied, “Yes, with an emphasis on ‘everything.'”

    When asked why he believed it was so important to provide the dossier to Sen. McCain, Steele said: “Because I judged it had national security implications for the United States and the West as a whole.”

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/steele-admitted-in-court-he-used-unverified-website-to-support-the-trump-dossier

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    Shares of aircraft-manufacturing company Boeing took a hit early this week, losing $26.6 billion in market value Monday and Tuesday, following a deadly crash of one of its 737 Max 8 airplanes in Ethiopia.

    That model has since been grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as by aviation regulators around the world.

    Still, if you invested in Boeing 10 years ago, that decision would have paid off: According to CNBC calculations, a $1,000 investment in 2009 would be worth more than $14,000 as of March 15, 2019, a total return over 1,000 percent. In the same time frame, the S&P 500 was up 270 percent. So, your $1,000 would be worth just over $3,700, by comparison.

    Any individual stock can over- or under-perform, however, and past returns do not predict future results. Boeing paused delivery of 737 Max planes after the Ethiopia crash, which came less than five months after another deadly crash in Indonesia involving the same model.

    This left several major airlines, including United, American and Southwest scrambling to rebook passengers and reassign planes. Those companies said they would waive ticket-change fees and fare differences for those affected by the FAA’s grounding order.

    Flight-booking site Kayak even introduced a new search feature that allows users to exclude specific plane models, according to co-founder and chief executive officer Steve Hafner.

    CNBC: Boeing stock as of Mar. 15, 2019

    Fortunately for Boeing, while shares plunged more than 10 percent early this week, they ticked back up by as much as 3 percent Friday. And the company announced plans to roll out a software fix in the next few weeks.

    Though, Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein said Thursday that the fix could take a lot longer: “Once Boeing identifies the issue … the most likely scenario is the company will take about 3-6 months to come up with and certify the fix,” he said in a note.

    Hafner says he expects the 737 models to be grounded only a few months and that travelers will likely be booking flights on them again soon: “They’re out of service on a temporary basis,” he said on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley.” “In reality, airlines are still planning on flying those planes in the summer. People want security and comfort when they fly.”

    In the meantime, Boeing said in a statement it will “continue to build 737 Max airplanes, while assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production system.”

    If you’re looking to get into investing, expert investors like Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban suggest you start with index funds, which hold every stock in an index, offer low turnover rates, attendant fees and tax bills. They also fluctuate with the market to eliminate the risk of picking individual stocks.

    Here’s a snapshot of how the markets look now.

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    If you invested $1,000 in IBM 10 years ago, here’s how much you’d have now

    Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/if-you-put-1000-in-boeing-10-years-ago-heres-what-youd-have-now.html