Oklahoma Trial Set In Death Of 'Cathouse' HBO Star, 3 Others

ASSOCIATED PRESS

SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2016

Denny Phillips is led from an Oklahoma County Courtroom in Oklahoma City. Jury selection is scheduled to begin May 16 in the trial of Phillips and Russell Hogshooter, who are charged in the November 2009 death of Brooke Phillips, who had worked for a legal Nevada brothel featured on HBO, and multiple other people.



OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — It's been almost seven years since the bodies of a prostitute featured on the HBO reality series "Cathouse" and three other people were discovered inside a burning one-story brick Oklahoma City home that authorities later said was the center of a drug distribution and prostitution ring.

Come Monday, jury selection begins in the trial of two men who prosecutors say were involved in the Nov. 9, 2009, deaths of TV celebrity Brooke Phillips, Milagros Barrera, Jennifer Lynn Ermey and Casey Mark Barrientos.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Denny Edward Phillips and Russell Lee Hogshooter on six counts of first-degree murder — Brooke Phillips and Barrera were both 22 and pregnant — and one count of conspiracy. The men have pleaded not guilty.

Brooke Phillips, who wasn't related to Denny Phillips, was among the employees featured on the cable network's show about the Moonlite BunnyRanch, a legal brothel near Carson City, Nevada. "There's lasting memory," business owner Dennis Hof said. "We just loved this girl. This was a girl with no drugs, didn't drink hardly at all. It's totally mindboggling. This girl who didn't do any drugs got killed because she was in a drug house."

All of the victims were repeatedly shot and their bodies were set on fire. Phillips and 25-year-old Ermey were also repeatedly stabbed. Prosecutors allege that Barrientos, 32, was the target of the attack and that the women were killed to eliminate witnesses.

Two other men entered guilty pleas and are serving prison time for their roles in the deaths. Denny Phillips' defense attorney, Bill Smith, said he expects the trial to last up to six weeks but declined further comment. Defense attorneys for 38-year-old Hogshooter did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Hof and others who worked with Brooke Phillips at the Moonlite BunnyRanch said the upcoming trial revives memories of her and the shock they felt when they learned of her violent death. "It's the saddest day in BunnyRanch history," he said. "That sad day just keeps going on. It just doesn't go away."

Phillips, known professionally as Hayden Brooks, was "very outgoing," Hof said, and "loved to have fun." A co-worker, professionally known as Caressa Kisses, said she trained Phillips and worked alongside her the entire time she worked at the Moonlite BunnyRanch. Phillips was at the legal brothel for about two years and left about two months before she died.

"She just glowed beauty and radiated love," said Caressa, 29, who became emotional as she remembered Phillips' life. "She was a very beautiful girl. She was absolutely passionate about life." Caressa said she "got sick" when she learned how Phillips had died. "She left a safe place where she was loved," she added.

Testimony during earlier hearings revealed that Denny Phillips, 37, and one of the men who pleaded guilty were allegedly involved in illegal drug sales with Barrientos. Denny Phillips' former girlfriend, Karine Sanders, testified the men became upset with the amount of money they were receiving for their work and came up with a scheme to kill him.

Phillips was already serving a seven-year federal prison sentence on charges related to a 2010 shootout when he was charged in the deaths.

Washington To Create Federal Agency To Counter “Foreign Propaganda”: How Long Before They Target The Alternative Media?

BY TIMOTHY ALEXANDER GUZMAN

SILENT CROW NEWS

Washington and their Main-Stream Media (MSM) propaganda machine is now interested in creating an agency to counter foreign “propaganda”. The irony is that Washington and what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts calls the “Presstitute” media is pure propaganda and now they want to fight the so called “propaganda” with propaganda. Now that is funny. According to RT News:

The bill, H.R. 5181, the ‘Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016’ is a companion bill to S.2692 introduced back in March. According to Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) who coauthored the bill alongside Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA), H.R. 5181, seeks to incorporate a “whole-of-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions,” which will set up innovative partnerships to combat information warfare with “organizations that have experience in countering foreign propaganda.”

This has been in the works for some time. Congressman Kinzinger (R-IL) wants (now get ready for this) “the free flow of truthful information” is laughable. RT News quoted what Kinzinger said:

As Russia continues to spew its disinformation and false narratives, they undermine the United States and its interests in places like Ukraine, while also breeding further instability in these countries,” Kinzinger said. “At a time when countries like Russia and China are engaging in hybrid warfare campaigns, the United States has a unique opportunity to respond to foreign manipulation by encouraging the free flow of truthful information. This can further prevent conflict and ensure future stability,” the congressman added

According to a March 17th article by the Voice of America (VOA) (a CIA sponsored news organization who is funded by the U.S. government along with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty) “U.S. Senators Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, and Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, have introduced a bill aimed at countering propaganda from Russia, China and other countries.” What is interesting is that under the new legislation ‘Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act’ not only counters foreign propaganda but they will “help” local communities in those same countries to protect themselves from their own government’s media manipulation. This means more funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) who already manipulate populations within countries they are trying to destabilize with U.S. propaganda. According to the VOA report:

According to its sponsors, the legislation — called the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” — is aimed at improving the ability of the United States to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation, and help local communities in other countries protect themselves from manipulation from abroad.

Speaking during a conference Wednesday at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research institute, Portman said he believes the U.S. is not making sufficient efforts to counter “destabilizing” foreign propaganda and disinformation

Senator Portman is a hypocrite because what the U.S. has done abroad with their NGOs is to destabilize governments they want to remove from power such as to what happened in the Ukraine. Now Ecuador is on the radar for regime change since Venezuela is in an economic crises and the political crisis in Brazil with the possible removal of its democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff. The VOA report mentions RT News and CCTV:

While much of the public discussion of these issues is focused on the urgent need to counter extremist messaging, and I understand that, I think it is equally important to address the extremely sophisticated, comprehensive and long-term efforts by nation states to manipulate and control information in order to achieve their national objectives, often at the expense of U.S. allies; our interests, our values,” Portman said. “These countries spend vast sums of money on advanced broadcast and digital media capabilities, targeted campaigns, funding of foreign political movements, and other efforts to influence key audiences and populations.”

According to the Ohio Republican, the scale of spending on the U.S. government’s Voice of America, and that of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S. Congress, is dwarfed by the money spent on RT, a Kremlin-funded satellite TV channel, and the Chinese government’s CCTV

Senator Portman also mentioned the importance of restructuring U.S. counter-propaganda under a single government agency “Surprisingly,” he said, “there is currently no single U.S. governmental agency or department charged with the national level development, integration and synchronization of whole-of-government strategies to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.” Senator Murphy (D-Conn) said “The simple suggestion in our bill is to have an umbrella strategy that unites all of the different agencies that are playing roles, so that we can have a coordinated strategy.” In other words, the MSM will operate under one umbrella run by the U.S. government (although the MSM has followed Washington’s script for a very long time) to produce propaganda. Who would be leading the new agency?

Under the bill, a new Center for Information Analysis and Response would play the coordinating role. This center, Portman said, would be led by the U.S. State Department, but with the “active participation” of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (which oversees VOA and RFE/RL, among others), “the intelligence community and other relevant agencies.”

The bill also would set up an Information Access Fund, which would assist in the training of local journalists, as well as award grants and contracts to non-government and civil society organizations, research centers, private sector companies, media organizations and other experts outside the U.S. government that have experience in identifying and analyzing disinformation methods used by foreign governments

So which organizations and experts would be involved? Of course the NED, USAID as mentioned earlier, but you can add the International Republican Institute (IRI), Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Amnesty International, the Open Society Foundation, the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), National Democratic Institute(NDI), CBS, ABC, PBS, the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times and the list goes on. What is laughable is what Senator Murphy said “This fund, said Murphy, would “simply seek to seed good information efforts — telling the truth, telling counter-narratives to the Russian story, to the Chinese propaganda stories all around the world.” Telling the truth? The MSM has lost credibility for the lies they have been pushing on the public. According to the Associated Press (AP):

Trust in the news media is being eroded by perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans’ skepticism about what they read on social media. Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public’s view of other institutions

With Washington’s new agenda, the remaining 6 percent (it’s amazing the MSM stills gets that much!) who still trust the media will be reduced to less than 1 percent. It won’t be long before they also target the alternative media. This is good news because Washington and their MSM presstitutes realize that they lost the information war and that is positive news.

The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars On The World

BY LUCIANA BOHNE

COUNTER PUNCH

Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21st century.

If not stopped, it will be a short century.

Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s people. In the 19thcentury, America exterminated another kind of “red menace,” writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (“Indian reservations”), in the name of civilizing the “savages.” By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab—internal imperialism– was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.

American external imperialism was born.

Then, something utterly dreadful happened in 1917—a successful social revolution in Russia, the second major after the French in 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the world—US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes—put aside their differences and united to stem the awful threat of popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded Russia, fomented a civil war, funding and arming the counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in 1939. But Hitler’s war of extermination on the USSR ended in a spectacular victory for Moscow.

For a while, after 1945, the US had to behave as a civilized country, formally. It claimed that the USSR had a barbarian, all-conquering ideology, rooted in terror, disappearances, murder, and torture. By contrast, the US was the shining city on the hill, the beacon of hope for a “the free world.” Its shrine was the United Nations; its holy writ was international law; its first principle was the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations.

All this was rubbish, of course. It was an apartheid society. It nuked Japan not once but twice, deliberately selecting civilian targets. It shielded from justice top Nazi criminals to absorb them as partners in intelligence structures. It conducted virtual “show trials” against dissidents during the hysteria of the McCarthy congressional hearings, seeding the country with a harvest of fear. It waged a genocidal war on Vietnam to prevent independence and unification. It assassinated African independence leaders and bestowed fascist dictators on Latin America. It softly occupied Western Europe, tied it to itself through military “cooperation” in NATO, and it waged psy-op war on its opposition parties. Behind the civilized façade was a ruthless effort to take out the Soviet Union and crush self-determination in the colonial world.

By hook and by crook, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and America went berserk with triumphalism. Now, at last, the conquest of the world, interrupted in 1917, could resume. The global frontier reopened and America’s identity would be regenerated through violence, which had delivered the American West to the European invaders in the 19th century. The benign mask dropped. Behind it came a rider on a pale horse. According to the ideologically exulted, history had ended, ideologies had died, and the messianic mission of the US to become the steward of God’s property on earth could be fulfilled.

The “civilizing mission” was afoot.

A cabal of neo-conservative policy wonks first sketched what I call the Great Leap Backward into lawlessness as a revival of the myth of the frontier in the 1990s. “The Plan for a New American Century” (PNAC) envisaged the 21st century as a unilateralist drive to entrench American values globally—what the PNAC ideologues call “freedom and democracy”—through preemptive wars and regime change. This frenzied delirium of US military domination turned into official foreign policy with the Bush Doctrine after 9/11, but it was the Clinton administration’s Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare before 9/11, that shut the door on the prohibition of aggressive wars by the UN Charter, remaking the map of the world into a borderless American hunting reserve by removing the principle of sovereignty and replacing it with “right to protect” (R2P)—or humanitarian pretext for use of force.

Clinton’s doctrine was an act of supreme, even witty, exploitation of liberal principles and commitment to policies of human rights. It was how the liberal left was induced to embrace war and imperialism as the means of defending human rights. The Carnegie Endowment cooked up the doctrine in 1992. Its report, “Changing Our Ways: America’s Role in the New World,” urged “a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” The report recommended that the US use NATO as the enforcer. It must be noted, too, that the principle of “humanitarian war” has no authority in international law. The Charter of the United Nations sought to outlaw war by making it impossible for unilateral interventions in the business of sovereign states by self-appointed guardians of human rights. The reason behind the proscription was not heartlessness but the consciousness that WW II had been the result of serial violations of sovereignty by Germany, Italy, and Japan—by militarist imperialism, in other words.

The bell tolled for the UN and the old order in the 1999 Kosovo War. The bi-partisan effort to dismantle the architecture of the post war’s legal order played out there. With the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration launched the first humanitarian war and set the precedent for waging war without Security Council clearance of many to follow by both Republican and Democrat administrations. The Clintonites who used NATO to bomb Serbia to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from non-existing Serbian genocide may or may not have appreciated the fact that Hitler had used the pretext of R2P—humanitarian intervention—to launch WW II by claiming to protect German minorities in Poland, but they certainly knew that the monopoly on use of force rested with the UN’s Security Council. This monopoly was secured after WW II precisely to prevent unilateral attacks on sovereign states through bogus claims of altruistic interventions, such as Hitler had championed and pursued. Ironically for critics of the Soviet leader, it was Stalin who insisted at the Yalta Conference that if the USSR were to join the United Nations a veto in the Security Council was a must to insure that any war would be a multilateral consensus and a multilateral action.

As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go. In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally and deliberately destabilized the United Nations, substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill, Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not the only way to skin a country– especially one chosen by the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a cynic might add.

So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent “genocide”; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rain—in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.

Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious, and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (“the Arab coalition”) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight its own creature? Are we stupid yet?

$4 trillion dollars later, spent on the War-on-Terror/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic globalization through trade pacts—TTP, TTIP, etc.—that virtually abolish the constitution of states, including our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the periphery and the entire world is the so-called “Washington Consensus.”

It hugs the market-fundamentalist idea that global neoliberalism and core finance capital’s economic control of the planet by means of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the option to poverty and social chaos.

Neither military nor economic war on the sovereignty of nations has yielded anything close to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world. It had delivered death, destruction, debt, market crises, tidal waves of refugees and displaced persons, and concentrated masses of wealth in a few but powerful hands. What the poet W.H. Auden called “the international wrong,” which he named “imperialism” in his poem “September 1939,” is the crisis that stares out of the mirror of the past into our faces, and it bodes war, war, and more war, for that is where imperialism drives.

In this scenario, no potential presidential candidate—even establishment-party dissenter—who does not call for both the end of the bi-partisan “Washington Consensus” and the end of bipartisan militarist aggression can reverse the totality of the “international wrong” or stem the domestic descent into social brutalization. If none calls this foreign policy debacle “imperialism,” elections will be a sleepwalker’s exercise. Nothing will change. Except, almost certainly, for the worse.


Luciana Bohne is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at: lbohne@edinboro.edu

Equatorial Guinea, Gabon Expelling Central African Migrants

BY MOKI EDWIN KINDZEKA

VOA NEWS, MAY 14, 2016

KIOSSI, CAMEROON—Several hundred people from Central African nations are stranded in southern Cameroon after being expelled from neighboring Equatorial Guinea and Gabon this month.

Equatorial Guinea and Gabon say they are expelling foreigners who do not have proper identification papers.

The majority of those being expelled are economic migrants from around Central Africa. They complain that authorities in those two countries ransacked their homes, seized their money and deposited them on the border at Kiossi.

Some had only just arrived in those countries while others had been living there for years.

Bakari Zhouli, a 45-year old engineer from Chad, says his documents were taken and he is stuck.

He says he is surprised that the government of Equatorial Guinea is chasing out the people who helped to transform many parts of their country from mere foot paths, forests and abandoned cocoa plantations into a developing country. He says he helped transform the capital, Bata, in the 15 years he was there.

Gabon and Equatorial Guinea say they are expelling foreigners who do not have proper identification papers for security reasons, saying some migrants are engaged in illegal mining and criminal activities.

Felix Nguele Nguele, governor of Cameroon's southern region, says the government is investigating.

"We insisted that forces of law and order should have information on who was expelled and why he was expelled. We took an assessment of all the control posts on the borders and equally sent a team to the field to try to sensitize all stakeholders," said Nguele.

Most of the people now stranded in Cameroon said they went to Gabon and Equatorial Guinea looking for work. The oil-producing nations have long been destinations for economic migrants.

Nchama Theodoro is senior adviser to the governor of Woleu-Ntem, one of Equatorial Guinea's nine administrative provinces. He says the global drop in price of oil and other commodities is taking a toll and many companies are having to lay off workers.

He says central African states should be able to provide opportunities for their young people who instead see Equatorial Guinea as the solution to their problems. He says Equatorial Guinea is helping to build Africa’s workforce by allowing people to come and work freely, but that cannot be the only solution to unemployment.

The International Monetary Fund said earlier this month that the rate of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to slow to a 16-year low. Central Africa is feeling the slump with countries reporting record increases in debt.

Hundreds of Cameroonians have returned home after being expelled from Gabon.

Nigeria Faces Oil Output Slump As Exxon Shuts Flows

REUTERS

* Exxon declares force majeure on major crude stream

* Nigerian output already down to 1.65 mln bpd from 2.2 mln

* Output could fall to lowest since 1970 (Updates with further detail throughout)

By Florence Tan and Simon Falush



SINGAPORE/LONDON (REUTERS), May 13 U.S. oil major Exxon Mobil has suspended exports from Nigeria's top crude stream, adding to economic strains from unrest and violence that have cut production to its lowest in decades.

Exxon Mobil confirmed on Friday that it had declared a force majeure -- a suspension of deliveries because of events beyond its control -- on Nigeria's Qua Iboe crude oil grade BFO-QUA, and that a portion of production had been curtailed.

The producer said on Thursday it had reduced output after a drilling rig damaged a pipeline.

Brent crude has surged to $47 per barrel from $27 in January, in part because of production problems in Africa's former largest producer as well as a decline in U.S. output.

Oil prices have jumped around 20 percent so far this quarter, their biggest such rise since 2011.

Exxon Mobil declared a force majeure on the country's largest export grade Qua Iboe BFO-QUA, traders said on Friday.

The outage adds to production problems at two of the other largest crude streams, Bonny Light and Forcados, which have already taken Nigeria's output to a 22-year low.

A Geneva-based trader said that output of Qua Iboe had stopped completely and that it was unclear when it would re-start.

Nigeria's oil production has fallen to 1.65 million barrels per day (bpd) due to militant attacks, Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun said, from 2.2 million bpd.

If outages at Qua Iboe and other streams are prolonged, Nigerian output could fall to around 1.2 million barrels per day, according to Reuters calculations. This would be the lowest output since 1970, according to BP's statistical review.

Up until this year Nigeria had been Africa's largest crude exporter with its economy heavily reliant on oil.

However rampant oil theft and corruption has kept production well below its capacity of above 2 million barrels per day.

As a result, Angola has overtaken Nigeria as the continent's largest producer since March, according to OPEC figures.

Nigeria was due to export 337,000 barrels per day (bpd) in May, according to initial loading programmes released in March.

Royal Dutch Shell's local operation also shut a major pipeline earlier this week and declared force majeure on Bonny Light crude exports on Wednesday.

An attack in February on a Shell oil pipeline also shut the 250,000 barrel-a-day Forcados export terminal.



Last week, Chevron said its platform in the Delta was attacked by militants. (Additional reporting by Libby George in Washington D.C. and Felix Felix Onuah in Abuja; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)

Malaysia: 2 More Pieces 'Almost Certainly' From Flight 370

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Well wishes are written on a wall of hope during a remembrance event for the ill fated Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Malaysia's government said Thursday, May 12, 2016, that two more pieces of debris, discovered in South Africa and Rodrigues Island off Mauritius, were "almost certainly" from Flight 370, which mysteriously disappeared more than two years ago with 239 people on board.


KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA (AP) — Malaysia's government said Thursday that two more pieces of debris, discovered in South Africa and Rodrigues Island off Mauritius, were "almost certainly" from Flight 370, bringing the total number of pieces believed to have come from the missing Malaysian jet to five.

The aircraft mysteriously disappeared more than two years ago with 239 people on board, and so far an extensive underwater search of a vast area of the Indian Ocean off Australia's west coast has turned up empty.

Though the discovery of the debris has bolstered authorities' assertion that the plane went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean, none of the parts have thus far yielded any clues into exactly where and why the aircraft crashed. Those elusive answers lie with the flight data recorders, or black boxes, which may never be found, said Geoff Dell, a specialist in accident investigation at Central Queensland University in Australia.

"It shows they're looking in the right ocean — that's about it," Dell said. Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the two new parts were an engine cowling piece with a partial Rolls-Royce logo and an interior panel piece from an aircraft cabin — the first interior part found from the missing plane.

An international team of experts in Australia who examined the debris concluded that both pieces were consistent with panels found on a Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 aircraft, Liow said. "As such, the team has confirmed that both pieces of debris from South Africa and Rodrigues Island are almost certainly from MH370," he said in a statement.

All five pieces have been found in various spots around the Indian Ocean. Last year, a wing part from the plane washed ashore on France's Reunion Island. Then in March, investigators confirmed two pieces of debris found along Mozambique's coast were almost certainly from the aircraft.

The jet, which vanished on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, is believed to have crashed somewhere in a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean about 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) off Australia's west coast. Authorities had predicted that any debris from the plane that isn't on the ocean floor would eventually be carried by currents to the east coast of Africa.

Investigators are examining marine life attached to the debris to see if it could somehow help them narrow down where it entered the ocean, but haven't discovered anything useful yet. The interior part, identified by its decorative laminate, is a panel from the main cabin and believed to be part of a door closet, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said in a technical report.

But even this interior piece is also unlikely to prove very helpful to investigators, said Dell, the accident investigation expert. It won't, for example, answer the question that some have raised about whether anyone was still at the controls of the plane at the end of its flight, or whether the plane spiraled uncontrollably into the water after running out of fuel.

"I wouldn't hang your hat too much on what it says, other than it's got to come out of the airplane somehow and that suggests there was a structural failure in the fuselage that allowed it to get out," he said. "But how, exactly — who knows?"

That part was found by tourists on Rodrigues Island, while the piece with part of a Rolls-Royce logo was found by an archaeologist while walking along South Africa's southern coast. So far, crews have combed more than 105,000 square kilometers (40,000 square miles) of an underwater search zone to no avail. They expect to complete their sweep of the area by the end of June.

__ Associated Press writer Kristen Gelineau in Sydney contributed to this report.

AP Interview: Trump Narrows VP List As He Moves Into General

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump takes a telephone call from his daughter Ivanka during an interview with The Associated Press in his office at Trump Tower in New York, Tuesday, May 10, 2016.


NEW YORK (AP) — Shifting swiftly to the general election, Donald Trump says he's narrowed his list of potential running mates to "five or six" people and doesn't want to accept public money to finance a fall campaign against likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

But in a break from recent major party nominees, Trump does not plan to invest heavily in a data-driven effort to target voters in the fall campaign. Despite pressure, the billionaire businessman also doesn't expect to release his tax returns before November, citing an ongoing audit of his finances. He said he will release them after the audit ends.

"There's nothing to learn from them," Trump told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday. He also has said he doesn't believe voters are interested. Trump's comments came as he begins to prepare for a long, expensive general election campaign. His two remaining Republican rivals suddenly dropped out of the race last week, anointing him the party's presumptive presidential nominee faster than even the confident candidate expected.

As part of his general election planning, Trump told the AP at his office in New York that he's moving aggressively to identify a running mate with deep political experience. While he would not provide a full list of names, he did not rule out New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the former rival whom he's already tapped to head his transition planning.

Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, is running the vice presidential vetting effort "with a group," Trump said, that includes former competitor Ben Carson and himself. "Honestly, we're all running it. It's very much a group effort," said Trump.

A first-time political candidate, the celebrity businessman said there's no need for another business person on the Republican ticket and he wants a running mate who can help him pass legislation as president. By joining forces with a political veteran, Trump would also signal a willingness to work with the Republican establishment that he's thoroughly bashed during his campaign.

Trump said he doesn't plan to announce his running mate until the Republican National Convention in July, a four-day event that he's planning to remake with a showman's touch. "The concept of some entertainment from a great singer, a great group I think would be something maybe to break things up," Trump said. "You'll be hearing plenty of political speeches."

In the interview, Trump outlined a general election campaign that banks heavily on his personal appeal and trademark rallies while spurning the kind of sophisticated data operation that was a centerpiece of Barack Obama's winning White House runs.

"I've always felt it was overrated," Trump said. "Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine. And I think the same is true with me." He also ruled out for the first time the option of taking public financing for his campaign, money that would have saved him the time-consuming task of raising vast sums but would have dramatically limited the amount he would have been able to raise.

"I don't like the idea of taking taxpayer money to run a campaign. I think it's inappropriate," he said. Trump stunned the political world at every turn during the Republican primary season, prioritizing large rallies over intimate voter interactions in early voting states and operating with a slim campaign operation. Even as he brings in new staff for the general election campaign, he says his emphasis will continue to be on raucous rallies to put him in front of thousands of voters and generate free media coverage.

"My best investment is my rallies," Trump said. "The people go home, they tell their friends they loved it. It's been good." The businessman said he'll spend "limited" money on data operations to identify and track potential voters and to model various turnout scenarios that could give him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency. He's moving away from the model Obama used successfully in his 2008 and 2012 wins, and which Clinton is trying to replicate, including hiring many of the staff that worked for Obama.

Still, the Republican National Committee has invested heavily in data operations, eager to avoid another defeat to a more technologically savvy Democrat. Trump could make use of that RNC data if he wished.

Trump and his aides have been meeting with RNC officials this week to discuss the mechanics of his campaign. He is also planning a trip to Washington Thursday to meet with party leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, who have had a mixed reaction to his primary success.

Though Trump has vowed to be tough in taking on Clinton, he also suggested he might avoid running negative ads against her, saying, "I just don't find them to be very effective." "I've had over $100 million in negative ads spent on me and every time it's boosted my numbers," he said.

As Trump was speaking, however, his campaign posted a new ad on Instagram assailing Clinton for her response to the attacks on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

AP writer Julie Bykowicz contributed.

Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC and Jill Colvin at http://twitter.com/colvinj

Labour's Sadiq Khan Elected 1st Muslim London Mayor

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sadiq Khan, Labour Party candidate, arrives on the podium to hear the results of the London mayoral elections, at City Hall in London, Saturday, May 7, 2016.

LONDON (AP) — Sadiq Khan became London's first Muslim mayor Saturday, as voters rejected attempts to taint him with links to extremism and handed a decisive victory to the bus driver's son from south London.

Khan hailed his victory as the triumph of "hope over fear and unity over division." His win was the most dramatic result in local and regional elections that produced few big changes but underscored Britain's political divisions ahead of a referendum on whether to remain in the European Union.

Labour Party candidate Khan received more than 1.3 million votes — 57 percent of the total — to Conservative rival Zac Goldsmith's 43 percent, after voters' first and second preferences were allocated.

Turnout was a relatively high 45.6 percent, up from 38 percent in 2012. Khan's victory seemed certain for hours from partial results, but the official announcement came past midnight — more than 24 hours after polls closed — after delays due to what officials called "small discrepancies" in the count.

Khan was elected to replace Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson after a campaign marked — and many said marred — by U.S.-style negative campaigning. Goldsmith, a wealthy environmentalist, called Khan divisive and accused him of sharing platforms with Islamic extremists — a charge repeated by Prime Minister David Cameron and other senior Conservatives.

Khan, who calls himself "the British Muslim who will take the fight to the extremists," accused Goldsmith of trying to scare and divide voters in a proudly multicultural city of 8.6 million people — more than 1 million of them Muslim.

The attacks, criticized by some senior Conservatives, appear not to have deterred voters from backing Khan. London has seen attacks by Islamic extremists, including July 2005 suicide bombings that killed 52 bus and subway commuters, but has avoided the level of racial and religious tensions seen in some European cities.

"Fear does not make us safer — it only makes us weaker," Khan said in his victory speech. "And the politics of fear is simply not welcome in our city." Former Conservative strategist Steve Hilton told the BBC that Goldsmith's campaign had brought back "the 'nasty party' label to the Conservative party" — and said Khan's victory sent a "positive and powerful message about London."

Even Goldsmith's sister criticized his tactics. Journalist and socialite Jemima Goldsmith tweeted: "Sad that Zac's campaign did not reflect who I know him to be - an eco-friendly, independent-minded politician with integrity."

Labour, Britain's main opposition party, performed strongly in the capital, taking more than 40 percent of Londoners' votes. That and Khan's victory were bright spots for Labour, which was pushed into third place in Scotland, where it was once dominant.

The Conservatives under popular Scottish leader Ruth Davidson became the main opposition in Scotland's Edinburgh-based parliament — an unprecedented situation in a region that shunned the party for decades.

The pro-independence Scottish National Party secured a third term in government in the county's parliamentary elections, but failed by two seats to retain a majority. That may lessen the party's appetite to push for a new referendum on Scottish independence.

SNP Leader Nicola Sturgeon said the party had "won a clear and unequivocal mandate" and would form a minority government rather than seek a coalition. While Labour's losses in Scotland were humiliating, the party fared less badly overall than many had predicted. It lost only a handful of council seats and held on to control of major English cities including Birmingham, Newcastle and Sunderland.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the party had "a lot of building to do" in Scotland, but had "hung on" in England. But the results will do little to soothe restive Labour lawmakers who think Corbyn's left-wing policies are a turn-off for many voters.

In Wales, which has traditionally been pro-Europe, the anti-EU U.K. Independence Party gained seven Welsh Assembly seats, and the party also won two London Assembly seats, their first ever. Votes were also being counted in the contest for Northern Ireland's Catholic-Protestant power-sharing assembly. Full results there were not expected until later Saturday, but the major British Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists, appeared on course to retain its leading role in power.

Britons will vote on June 23 on whether the country should leave the European Union. Andrew Blick, a constitutional expert at King's College London, said the results underscore how difficult the referendum campaign will be, as attitudes nationally seem to be so complex.

"We don't know where the mood is," he said. "There are lots of different moods. What message do you push ahead with in the campaign when you have so many different opinions?"

Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin and Paul Kelbie in Glasgow, Scotland contributed to this report.

Trump To Face Trial After Election In Trump University Suit

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves to supporters after speaking at a rally, Friday, May 6, 2016, in Omaha, Neb.


SAN DIEGO (AP) — Donald Trump will go to trial in a class-action lawsuit against him and his now-defunct Trump University after the presidential election but before the inauguration, setting the stage for a president-elect to take the witness stand if he wins the White House.

U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel on Friday scheduled trial for Nov. 28 in the suit that alleges people who paid up to $35,000 for real estate seminars got defrauded. The likely Republican nominee planned to attend most, if not all, of the trial and would testify, Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli said.

"He has very, very strong feelings about this case," Petrocelli told reporters. Petrocelli asked for a trial after Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, but the judge raised concerns about distractions if Trump wins the election. The attorney said the period between the election and swearing-in is extremely hectic for a president-elect but that it was preferable to holding a trial during the campaign.

The lawsuit is one of three that accuse Trump University of fleecing students with unfulfilled promises to teach secrets of success in real estate. The San Diego suit says Trump University, which no longer operates and was not accredited as a school, gave seminars and classes across the country that were like infomercials, constantly pressuring students to buy more and, in the end, failing to deliver.

Trump, who appears on a list of defense witnesses for the trial, has repeatedly pointed to a 98 percent satisfaction rate on internal surveys. But the lawsuit says students were asked to rate the product when they believed they still had more instruction to come and were reluctant to openly criticize their teachers on surveys that were not anonymous.

Curiel, a judicial appointee of President Barack Obama, has been eager to get to trial and had planned for it this summer before Trump's surge in the primaries. The case was filed in 2010, making it the second-oldest on his docket.

Still, he expressed concern about a trial during the campaign, partly out of concern for jurors' safety. "Will they be able to stay clear of the media frenzy?" he asked. "Ultimately that's my Number 1 concern."

Since the early 1980s, Trump personally has been sued at least 150 times in federal court, records show. Only a handful of those cases are pending, with the ones involving Trump University — two in California and one in New York — being the most significant.

Trump has railed against the judge in the San Diego case, calling him hostile and suggesting his positions may be the result of Trump's stance on border security. The likely GOP nominee has noted Curiel's ethnicity.

Trump said of the judge at an Arkansas rally in February: "I believe he happens to be Spanish, which is fine. He's Hispanic — which is fine." Petrocelli said he would not ask for the judge to be removed from the case, despite Trump's views.

"He's got very strong views about everything and he expressed his own views," Petrocelli said. Jury selection may begin shortly before Nov. 28, and the trial was expected to last a month or longer, the judge said.

21 Indicted In New Jersey Theft, Carjacking Ring

ABC 7 EYEWITNESS NEWS

TRENTON, N.J. -- A total of 21 people were indicted on racketeering charges after an investigation into a car theft ring in New Jersey that, investigators say, partly relied on carjackings.

Another person has been charged in connection with the case. Four people also charged have pleaded guilty.

The ring targeted vehicle makes such as BMW, Land Rover, Mercedes Benz, Maserati, Porsche, Jaguar and Bentley, according to an indictment released within the past week.

Acting New Jersey Attorney General Robert Lougy said that within the ring, suspects filled various roles including carjacker, car thief, wheel man, fence, shipper and buyer.

The cars would be loaded into shipping containers, Lougy said, and then shipped to west Africa, where they would command premium prices, investigators say.

Some cars would be stolen from locations where the thieves could also get a hold of the electronic keys, which Lougy said were critical to the resale value of the cars. Some of those cars were stolen while the owners left them running, while others were stolen while unlocked - with keys still inside the car.
Other cars were stolen from dealerships and, in other cases, the suspects would simply rent the desired car from a car rental agency and never return.

The most worrisome cases, however, were thefts involving violent carjackings, targeting some drivers in their own community.

"In their quest for luxury vehicles, members of this ring ambushed people in suburban driveways and outside malls and restaurants, at times brandishing handguns," Lougy said.

The 21 suspects were identified by the attorney general's office by their alleged role in the ring. They are:


Alleged Leaders
1. Tyja Evans, 39, of Watchung, N.J.;and
2. Ibn Jones, 37, of Newark, N.J.

Alleged Shippers and High-Level Fences
3. Peter Cleland, 33, of East Orange, N.J.;
4. Sowah Anan, 31, of Elizabeth, N.J.;
5. Adama Fofana, 53, of the Bronx, N.Y.; and
6. Alpha Jalloh, 27, of New York, N.Y.
Rental Car Thefts
7. Julian Atta-Poku, 34, of Queens Village, N.Y. (allegedly coordinated sales of stolen rental cars); and
8. Andrea Brown, 25, of Jamaica, N.Y. (allegedly used fraudulent credit cards and driver's licenses to rent cars which she stole).

Alleged Street-Level Fences
9. Eric Aikens, 40, of Newark, N.J.;
10. Levell Burnett, 39, of Newark, N.J.; and
11. Damion Mikell, 33, of Newark, N.J.


Alleged Carjackers, Car Thieves and/or Wheel Men
12. Derrick Moore, 36, of Keansburg, N.J.;
13. Rashawn Gartrell, 37, of Irvington, N.J.,
14. Kenneth Daniels, 30, of Newark, N.J.;
15. Tyree Johnson, 23, of Newark, N.J.;
16. Donnel Carroll, 28, of Newark, N.J.;
17. Khalil Culbreath, 38, of Newark, N.J.;
18. Terrence Wilson, 39, of Newark, N.J.;
19. Marquis Price, 32, of Newark, N.J.;
20. Frazier Gibson, 29, of Montclair, N.J., and
21. Alterique Jones, 41, of Maplewood, N.J.

The 22nd defendant is accused of helping one of the suspects. He is charged with third-degree attempted theft.

The four who have previously pleaded guilty are:

Eddie Craig, 36, of Beverly, N.J., pleaded guilty on Feb. 11 to first-degree racketeering and faces a recommended sentence of nine years in prison, including nearly eight years of parole ineligibility.

Nasir Tuner, 36, of Newark, N.J., pleaded guilty on March 1 to first-degree racketeering and faces a recommended sentence of 11 years in prison, including more than nine years of parole ineligibility.

Manuel Olivares pleaded guilty on Jan. 13 to second-degree racketeering and faces a recommended sentence of seven years in prison.

Panel Dalce, 43, of South Orange, N.J., pleaded guilty on Dec. 22, 2015 to second-degree racketeering and faces a recommended sentence of six years in prison.

Nigeria, France Step Up Joint Fight Against Boko Haram

AFP, APRIL 28, 2016

President Muhammadu Buhari. Image: Punch

Nigeria and France on Thursday signed an agreement on closer military cooperation, including intelligence sharing, to strengthen the fight against Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region.

Nigerian Defence Minister Mansur Dan Ali said the agreement was evidence of a "growing partnership" between Abuja and Paris, as he met his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian in the capital.

France has provided satellite images and surveillance footage from Rafale fighter jets based in Chad's capital, N'Djamena, which have flown over the main conflict area in northeast Nigeria.

Some 2,000 surveillance images have been shared and Nigerians have also been trained by French military intelligence in how to interpret them, French officials indicated.

Nigeria's neighbours, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, are all former French colonies where Paris continues to have influence and its support is vital, Dan Ali acknowledged.

Relations between anglophone Nigeria and its francophone neighbours have often been tense but Dan Ali said the French army can act as an intermediary for dialogue.

Boko Haram, whose insurgency has killed some 20,000 in Nigeria since 2009, has been pushed out of captured territory over the past year, leading to more cross-border attacks.

- Greater co-operation -

Le Drian for his part said France was primarily concerned with "the common fight against terrorism and particularly against Boko Haram".

Maritime security is also a key factor in cooperation, he added, with incidences of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea off Nigeria's oil-rich south increasing sharply since the turn of the year.

Both armies signed an operational cooperation document detailing 28 areas to be tackled before the end of the year, including training against improvised explosives and combat rescue.

Cross-border military exercises and joint maritime operations with other countries are also included.

A regional security summit is scheduled to take place in Abuja on May 14 with French President Francois Hollande in attendance, as well as representatives from Britain and the United States.

Britain and the United States have provided military personnel to the counter-insurgency in the form of special forces advisors in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, and training.

Some 300 US troops have been sent to Cameroon's remote north, where Washington is operating a drone base for surveillance flights above Nigerian territory.

- Regional force -

Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin have agreed to set up a new regional force against Boko Haram with African Union backing but the deployment of its 8,700 troops has been severely delayed.

The troops were supposed to have been operational in July last year, commanded by a senior Nigerian officer from N'Djamena, where France has a base for anti-Islamist operations in the Sahel region.

"It (the regional force) is far from being perfect but it's starting to function," said one French military source.

"By speaking to one another they'll end up cooperating and understand their common interests are more important than their differences," he added.

Nigeria has struggled to acquire military hardware for troops fighting Boko Haram, with Western governments reluctant to provide arms and ammunition because of its army's poor human rights record.

A former national security advisor is currently on trial over a multi-billion arms deal scandal, in which cash earmarked for weapons procurement was allegedly diverted for political ends.

But French sources said Abuja could consult them about their requirements.