‘Clearly’ Russia’s economy has suffered, IMF chief Christine Lagarde says

There have “clearly” been consequences for the Russian economy because of the crisis in Ukraine, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday.
The IMF said Wednesday that the Russian economy was in recession, and is expected to grow by only 0.2% in 2014.
“If you look at the monetary policy, if you look at the capital flows, if you look at their own forecast, there have been consequences on the Russian economy as a result of the geopolitical situation, the uncertainty, and the sanctions that have been decided,” Lagarde told Amanpour.
In a key sign of international support for Ukraine, the International Monetary Fund approved a $17.1 billion bailout for the country on Thursday.
The bailout, Lagarde, said, is “obviously not without risk, but it's a necessity to respond to a member's request.”

China moving ahead by the day.

It has long been clear that China will one day overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy, but new figures released by the World Bank indicate that that could happen as soon as this year.
(The International Monetary Fund, which unlike the World Bank does not take into account the variation in the purchasing power of a single unit of currency between countries, gives that occurrence a longer time frame. In other words, the difference is just a matter of which indicator they are looking at.)
“We still see China at 7.5 and continuing to grow, probably at the slightly reduced pace over time in the next five years or so because the country's developing so much,” Lagarde said.
The fact that Chinese growth will slow, she said, “is not a bad idea, actually, because the focus from the Chinese authorities would be to produce more quality growth than quantity growth.”
“We are not of those that believe that China will have a hard landing,” on the idea that growth will suddenly collapse.
The IMF has a “really solid partnership and dialogue” with the Chinese government, she said, and praised their efforts to focus on domestic consumption, rather than investment and exports, as the engine of the future Chinese economy.

More Jail term ahead for Chris Brown

 

 

Brown attended a hearing Thursday wearing an orange jail suit, just hours after a cross-country trip from Washington to Los Angeles on the federal government's inmate transport system, informally known as "Con Air."

"He's doing remarkably well under the circumstances," Brown lawyer Mark Geragos told CNN. "It's a challenging situation to be in."

Geragos and Assistant District Attorney Mary Murray agreed to hold talks over the next week concerning Brown possibly admitting that he violated his probation. If that happens, it will be announced at a hearing next Friday. Otherwise, the judge will set a date for a trial on his probation revocation.

"I'm hoping we get it resolved and we get it resolved quickly," Geragos said after the hearing.

Geragos said he would also file a motion to have Brown released from jail, which would be considered at the May 9 hearing.

Brown, who turns 25 next Monday, spent most of the past week traveling back to Los Angeles following a delay in the start of his trial on a misdemeanor assault charge in Washington.

U.S. Marshals, who took Brown from the Los Angeles County jail for extradition to Washington four weeks ago, handed him back to Los Angeles Sheriff's deputies just hours before Thursday's hearing, according to Deputy U.S. Marshal Laura Vegas.

Brown's probation for the 2009 beating of ex-girlfriend Rihanna Fenty was revoked after his Washington arrest. He's spent the past six weeks in custody and previous five months in court-ordered rehab.

The prosecutor said last week that she would "strenuously object" to Brown being released because it appears likely Brown will be found guilty of the assault charge in Washington. Assistant District Attorney Mary Murray argued the only change since Brown was jailed in March is that his case has "gotten worse." The Washington judge who found his bodyguard guilty in the assault case also concluded that Brown was the initial aggressor in the incidence, Murray said.

A Los Angeles judge refused a request last week to free the singer from custody so he could make his own way back from Washington.

He and bodyguard Christopher Hollosy were arrested on assault charges in Washington for allegedly beating a man who tried to take a photo of Brown last October.

The arrest led to a revocation of Brown's probation, but he was allowed to enter a rehab program instead of going to jail. He was ordered to jail last month when he was kicked out of the rehab program for rules violations.

"I think it's a little over the top to have him in custody on this misdemeanor when everybody saw the bodyguard's trial and which was nothing more than a bloody nose," Brown lawyer Mark Geragos told reporters in Washington last week. "And you have got the bodyguard who was convicted and who readily admitted he was the one who did the punching. So all of this is much ado about nothing."

The delay in Brown's Washington trial came after prosecutors refused to grant immunity to Hollosy so he could testify without jeopardizing his own case. On Monday, Hollosy was found guilty of assaulting a man on a Washington sidewalk before Brown's trial was to begin in the case.

The prosecutors cited Hollosy's refusal to talk to them about his testimony as a major reason for the decision not to grant immunity. Their motion also said they suspected he might lie in his testimony to help Brown.

check out egberi papa 1 of bayela's daughter is all grown up

This is what I call rapid growth, Timaya's daughter now a big girl. How fast children grow these days.

she is cute.

Nigerians demand government do more to bring home kidnapped girls

Nigerians took to the streets Thursday to demand the government do more to rescue scores of girls abducted by militants more than two weeks ago.

Militants seized about 230 girls in the dead of the night at a high school in the nation's far northeast, a hotbed for Islamist group Boko Haram.

Armed men herded the girls out of bed and forced them into trucks on April 16 in the town of Chibok. The convoy of trucks then disappeared into the dense forest bordering Cameroon.

Roughly 200 girls are still missing, although the authorities and parents differ on the number.

Nigerians protest over kidnapped schoolgirls

Nigerians have rallied for days to criticize the government's handling of the rescue efforts. Hundreds wept and chanted "bring back our girls" during protests in the capital of Abuja on Wednesday. A day later, protesters gathered in Lagos.

Shortly after the abductions last month, frustrated Chibok residents went into the forest in motorbikes to search for the girls.

During their nine-hour trek, they never saw a single soldier in the forest where authorities believe the militants took the girls, said Enoch Mark, whose daughter and two nieces were among the kidnapped.

"A total of 230 parents registered the names of their daughters who were missing on the day of the kidnap," said Asabe Kwambura, principal of the Government Girls Secondary School. "From my records, 43 girls have so far escaped on their own from their kidnappers. We still have 187 girls missing." Boko Haram still holding the school girls captive.

In Chibok, angry parents accused authorities of playing politics with the lives of their children.

Witnesses have seen militants in dozens of vehicles headed to nearby Cameroon, said Ayuba Alamson, whose two nieces were among the kidnapped. In a statement Thursday, Nigeria's Defense Ministry said it's committed to the search.

"A lot of information has been received in the efforts at securing the freedom of the girls. The armed forces assures all Nigerians that it will continue to appraise every information received during this operation accordingly," it said. .

"While it will not relent in its efforts in this search, the armed forces is mindful of the fact that some of the information with which it has been inundated are actually a ploy to distract it from its goal of dealing with terrorism and other violent crimes aimed at crippling the nation."

former minister of Education Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili leading

US Education Department reveals for the first time the list of colleges under investigation.

US colleges in sex assault investigation

Dozens of universities and colleges across the United States are facing investigation for the way they handle sexual abuse allegations made by students.
For the first time, the US Education Department revealed a list of 55 institutions under investigation on Thursday, as the administration sought to bring more openness to the issue of sexual violence on and around the country's campuses.
The schools range from public universities, including Ohio State University, the University of California, Berkeley University and Arizona State University, to private ones including Knox College in Illinois, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and Catholic University of America in the District of Columbia.
Ivy League schools including Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth are also on the list.
The government emphasised the list was about investigations of complaints, not judgements. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said there was "absolutely zero presumption'' of guilt.
Few details of individual cases are known. Establishments on the list, for the most part, were unwilling to talk about specific incidents, Associated Press news agency reported.

Separately on Thursday, the US Secretary of Defence reported that sexual assaults in the military increased by 50 percent last year. Officials welcomed the news as a sign that victims were more confident their attackers will be prosecuted.
Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel called the increase in reported sexual assaults - from 3,374 to to 5,061 - "unprecedented".
He announced six new directives to expand the fight against sexual assault, including an alcohol policy review and an effort to encourage reporting by male victims. Men are thought to represent about half of the victims of military sexual assault but comprise only 14 percent of the reports that were investigated.
"We believe victims are growing more confident in our system," Hagel told a Pentagon news conference. "Because these crimes are underreported, we took steps to increase reporting and that's what we're seeing."
Critics said the Pentagon's numbers on increased reporting demonstrated little improvement in the proportion of cases going to trial or the percentage of convictions.
A total of 484 cases went to trial in the 2013 fiscal year that ended on September 30 and 370 people were convicted of an offence, the report said. That compared with 302 trials the previous year and 238 convictions.

Amanda Knox says she did not kill her friend( Meredith Kercher) and she will prove her innocence.

Knox spoke in an exclusive interview with CNN on Thursday, two days after an Italian court released an explanation of her conviction.

In a retrial, Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, her then-boyfriend, were found guilty in the 2007 death of Meredith Kercher, Knox's onetime roommate.

"I did not kill my friend. I did not wield a knife. I had no reason to," Knox said.

"In the month that we that we were living together, we were becoming friends. A week before the murder occurred, we went out to a classical music concert together ... We had never fought."

Knox struggled to speak at moments in the interview, seemingly overcome by emotion and thoughts of Kercher. But, for the most part, she was calm, collected and methodical in how she broke down arguments in the case.

 

In its more than 300-page document, the Florence appeals court said a third person convicted in the murder, Rudy Guede, did not act alone, and cited the nature of the victim's wounds.

Ruling Judge Alessandro Nencini, who presided over the second appeal in the case, said Kercher and Knox disagreed over the payment of the rent in the house they shared in Perugia and that "there was an argument then an elevation and progression of aggression."

Knox dismissed those allegations out of hand.

"If I were there, I would have traces of Meredith's broken body on me. And I would have left traces of myself around -- around Meredith's corpse," she said.

"And I -- I am not there. And that proves my innocence."

'I'm not that person'

When asked what type of person Judge Nencini must think she is, Knox cited his report.

"He believes the prosecutor when the prosecutor describes me as a person who was capable of not only completely disturbing everyone around me, but then getting drugged up," she said, trailing off.

"But I'm not that person. And the evidence doesn't show that."

She said she has been haunted by how people perceived her behavior in the immediate aftermath of the murder.

Knox was filmed kissing Sollecito outside the murder scene. At the police station, she reportedly sat on Sollecito's lap, making faces. She told Kercher's friends she must have suffered.

"I think it's true that people seemed to have had a kind of tunnel vision in my regard and that has been something that I've been having to fight against for a long time," Knox said.

The Florence court in January said that Knox, who also was convicted of slander, was sentenced in absentia to 28 1/2 years in prison. Sollecito's sentence was 25 years.

They were first convicted of murder in 2009, but those verdicts were overturned on appeal in 2011.

Claudio Hellman, the judge who tossed their convictions, has lashed out at colleagues.

"The Florence Appeal Court has written a script for a movie or a thriller book while it should have only considered facts and evidence. There is no evidence to condemn Knox and Sollecito," said the judge in a scathing statement obtained by CNN.

"It's a verdict that, seems to me, is the result of fantasy and has nothing to do with evidence."

Guede is the only person in jail for the slaying, and many aspects of the crime remain unexplained.

'It's not a complex case'

Knox's conviction has raised questions about her possible extradition to Italy to serve her sentence, since she was in the United States and did not attend the retrial. She gets one more appeal -- to Italy's highest court.

She said she thought the Florence appeals court would find her innocent, and was caught by surprise when it didn't.

"As this case has progressed, the evidence that the prosecution has claimed exists against me has been proven less and less and less. And all that has happened is that they've filled these holes with speculation," she said.

Separately, Knox added: "What I keep seeing in this case is trying to put an artificial complexity to it. It's not a complex case."

If Italy's highest court affirms her conviction, the country could ask for her to be sent back to Italy, where she spent four years in prison awaiting and during her first trial. U.S. authorities would then have to decide whether to extradite.

Knox said she is hopeful such a scenario can be avoided and that her next appeal will be successful.

She is optimistic her life in limbo will finally be resolved.

"From this whole experience, especially in prison where you have to take everything day by day, right now I'm having to take everything step by step. And if I think about everything that I could possibly be facing, it's way too overwhelming for me to even conceive," Knox said.

"I truly believe that it is possible to win this, and to bring an end to all of the speculation and the nonsensical theories, and really bring peace to everyone who has suffered."