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Modi government advertising blitz dries up as Indian poll rules kick in

FILE PHOTO: India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits the National Cemetery in Seoul
FILE PHOTO: India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits the National Cemetery in Seoul, South Korea, February 22, 2019. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji/File Photo

March 11, 2019

By Aditya Kalra and Alasdair Pal

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – An advertising blitz by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration, which saw more than 150 newspaper ads exulting over its performance in 10 days, stopped on Monday, a day after the schedule for the next general election was announced.

The election will be held over seven stages from April 11 in what will be the world’s biggest democratic exercise, the Election Commission said on Sunday, when a code of conduct over election campaigning came into force.

Citing the code, the commission said “no advertisements shall be issued in electronic and print media highlighting the achievements of the govt. at the cost of public exchequer”.

Leading English-language national dailies including the Times of India, the Hindustan Times and the Indian Express carried no government ads on Monday.

The New Delhi editions of the same three newspapers had 162 government ads between March 1 and March 10, according to Reuters calculations. Of those, 93 were full page.

Most included a picture of Modi and highlighted government initiatives from rural development and solar power to airport infrastructure and social security benefits, among others.

One of the full-page ads took a broad view to highlight 12 achievements in different sectors, saying it was “putting farmers first” and “national security is top priority”. It ran with a slogan: “impossible is now possible”.

Some people took to Twitter to express their frustration with what they regarded as the excessive advertising.

One user, Dhruv Rathee, last week tweeted a video in which he flipped pages of the Times of India newspaper and said: “Every page you turn has Modi’s face on it”. The video received nearly 82,000 views. (https://bit.ly/2JeDMtQ)

Another Twitter user, Shashank Rajak, said: “It’s so much annoying to read newspapers these days … Do we really need all this nonsense? Pure waste of OUR money.”

Modi faces growing anger about a shortage of jobs and weak farm prices but he is expected to get a popularity boost from his decision to send warplanes into Pakistan to attack an alleged militant site after a Pakistan-based group claimed a suicide bombing that killed 40 Indian paramilitary police in Kashmir.

The Directorate of Advertising & Visual Publicity, a government agency which coordinates with ministries on government ads, did not respond to a request for comment. Modi’s office also did not respond.

It wasn’t immediately clear how much money the government had spent on the ads.

(Reporting by Aditya Kalra and Alasdair Pal; Edited by Martin Howell and Nick Macfie)

Source: OANN

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New York prosecutors pursuing criminal charges against Manafort: source

Manafort arrives for arraignment on charges of witness tampering, at U.S. District Court in Washington
FILE PHOTO: Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort arrives for arraignment on a third superseding indictment against him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on charges of witness tampering, at U.S. District Court in Washington, U.S., June 15, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

February 22, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Manhattan district attorney’s office is pursuing criminal charges against Paul Manafort, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, whether or not Trump pardons him for his federal convictions, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The charges originate from unpaid state taxes and likely are also related to loans, the source said. Manafort, 69, was convicted last August in a federal court of bank and tax fraud and pleaded guilty in a parallel criminal case in Washington, D.C..

(Reporting by Karen Freifeld; Writing by Makini Brice; Editing by Lisa Lambert)

Source: OANN

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Trial of white officer fatally shooting black teen continues

Prosecutors will call more witnesses to the stand in the trial of a white former East Pittsburgh police officer charged in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager.

Michael Rosfeld's trial continues Thursday into its third day in a Pittsburgh courtroom.

The first two days of testimony included compelling statements from witnesses and neighbors, one of whom said he heard Rosfeld panicking, repeatedly saying "I don't know why I shot him. I don't know why I fired."

Rosfeld fired three bullets into 17-year-old Antwon Rose II after pulling over an unlicensed taxicab suspected to have been used in a drive-by shooting minutes earlier. Rose was a front-seat passenger in the cab and was shot as he fled.

The trial is expected to take a week or more.

Source: Fox News National

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Guardian Writer Suggests White People Aren’t Human in Bizarre Tweet


A writer for the Guardian and Rolling Stone received a backlash after appearing to suggest in a tweet that white people were not human.

In what was an apparent response to the terror attack on a mosque in New Zealand, Jamie Peck, a “regular Guardian contributor” who also writes for Rolling Stone and Broadly, tweeted, “We are in a war between those who choose to be human and those who choose to be white. In order to effectively stamp out fascism, we must take on all hierarchies at once. White supremacy cannot be disentangled from patriarchy and class oppression. Liberalism is not the answer.”

Quite what Peck meant by ‘choosing’ to be white is not known, given that no one can choose their skin color (unless they’re Rachel Dolezal).

The tweet is a direct violation of Twitter’s rules, which state, “You may not dehumanize anyone based on membership in an identifiable group.”

Peck has a history of anti-white racism, having previously tweeted, “white genocide is good as hell” in response to a comment about white men watching pornography.

Following the tweet, many users called on the Guardian and Rolling Stone to sever ties with Peck.

“This is what accelerationism looks like. White people no longer human according to this person,” commented Breitbart writer Chris Tomlinson.

Tomlinson also posted a series of tweets from Peck’s podcast Twitter account, which features a communist hammer and sickle in its handle.

“White genocide is good as FUCK,” said one tweet.

“Real genocide is horrific, white genocide is fine,” said another tweet.

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Source: InfoWars

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U.S. aid helped Guatemalan farmers stay rooted to their lands

Rigoberto Leon carries his son while touring a greenhouse where the community produces tomatoes, peppers and potatos for self-supply and for sale, as part of a farming program backed by U.S. Aid, in the small village of Xecachelaj
Rigoberto Leon carries his son while touring a greenhouse where the community produces tomatoes, peppers and potatos for self-supply and for sale, as part of a farming program backed by U.S. Aid, in the small village of Xecachelaj, Santa Maria Chiquimula, Guatemala April 3, 2019. Picture taken April 3, 2019. REUTERS/Luis Echeverria

April 5, 2019

By Milton Castillo and Daina Beth Solomon

SANTA MARIA CHIQUIMULA, Guatemala (Reuters) – After a U.S.-funded program gave Guatemalan farmer Rigoberto Leon and his neighbors tools to plant new crops like tomatoes and chili peppers, many of them stayed to live off their drought-prone lands even as droves of villagers left for the United States.

    More programs like the climate change adaptation scheme backed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that helped Leon are in jeopardy after U.S. President Donald Trump said he will end Washington’s aid to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. He has accused the Central American countries of failing to halt an influx of migrants to the United States.

    Leon fears an aid cutoff would make it harder for farmers to survive in villages around the small indigenous Mayan town of Santa Maria Chiquimula, in Guatemala’s western highlands, which is suffering deforestation and low rainfall.

    “Here, there’s no money to invest in materials, in what’s needed,” he said. “If there were more opportunities for work here, there would be no need to go to the United States.”

    For decades, hundreds of programs throughout Central America have worked to slow the steady outflow of men – and increasingly, children and entire families – through efforts such as assisting farmers, educating teens, improving police and strengthening governance.

    While these programs have not stopped the overall rise of migration, proponents of international aid say the situation would be worse without them and that the United States should invest more, not less.

    U.S. assistance expanded under former President Barack Obama, whose administration sought to tackle root causes of immigration. In his last full fiscal year in office, funds appropriated for Central America hit a high of $754 million.

    That aid has steadily decreased under Trump, however, to $700 million the first year and to $627 million in 2018.

    Leon, who grows hundreds of pine tree seedlings in a greenhouse equipped with a sprinkler-based irrigation system, both donated by USAID, said the number of families he knew living off the dry hillside more than doubled to 40 as a result of the program, which ran from 2014 to 2017.

    Local project organizers say they still receive bare-bones U.S. funding to organize training, but are lobbying for more in order to buy storage tanks and tubing to bring water from a nearby river.

    The Mayan people suffer some of the highest poverty rates in Latin America. Guatemala’s paltry tax take and low public investment have contributed to worsening social indicators.

    Sebastian Charchalac, an agricultural engineer who helped lead the climate change program, lamented that its funding evaporated after Trump took office, saying it could have been extended to additional locations.

“The results are still very good, because they rooted people to their communities,” he said.

    While data is not clear on which projects have been affected by the change in government, the Trump administration has signaled a desire to shift funding away from economic aid and climate change-oriented programs, in favor of security and policing.

    USAID did not respond to a question about why funding was reduced for the Santa Maria program. Instead, it said it was evaluating the impact of Trump’s directive to end fiscal year 2017 foreign assistance funding.

Approximately $450 million in 2018 funds would be affected, they said.

It is also unclear how much funding Trump can cut off without the support of Congress.

    Rachael Shenyo, a former USAID coordinator in Guatemala who now runs climate change programs funded by non-profit groups and the private sector, said further reductions in U.S. assistance would create an opportunity for China.

    Since 2017, El Salvador, Panama and the Dominican Republic have all forged closer ties with Beijing, Washington’s strategic rival.

    “China has been increasing its presence more or less across Latin America. You’re going to see a lot more investment,” Shenyo said.

             

    SELF-SUFFICIENCY       

    Critics of foreign aid say it is not always effective, or helps only small numbers of people, while sometimes acting as a political tool and forcing an underdeveloped country to become dependent on a stronger one.

    In El Salvador, where migration has been shrinking along with the homicide rate, President-Elect Nayib Bukele said he welcomes funding, but that he wants the country to ultimately stop relying on outside help.

    “We Salvadorans should be self-sufficient,” he told reporters this week. “It’s somewhat a sense of low self-esteem to think that we can’t get ahead without humanitarian aid.”

    U.S. help in El Salvador includes training police and developing strategy. Ever Manzano, the country’s police spokesman, said he did not think Trump’s vow to cut aid would materialize.

    “They have a lot of interest and have had a big presence, substantial investment, and excellent relations with the police force,” he said.

    U.S. Representative Eliot Engel, the Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said ending aid would make it harder for Trump to crack down on gangs and crime.

During a visit last week to El Salvador, he visited a program that teaches software coding to teens to steer them from crime, and an FBI-backed anti-gang project.

    “We’re cutting off our nose to spite our face. The very things (Trump’s) complaining about, will make it tougher for us to do,” said Engel.

(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon in Mexico City; additional reporting by Milton Castillo in Santa Maria Chiquimula, Guatemala, Nelson Renteria in San Salvador, Patricia Zengerle, Richard Cowan and Arshad Mohammed in Washington; writing by Daina Beth Solomon; editing by G Crosse)

Source: OANN

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Mexico asks Vatican, Spain to apologize for centuries-old conquest, says it was carried out with 'sword and cross'

Mexico's left-wing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has asked Spain and the Vatican to apologize to his country for the conquest of the Americas five centuries ago, a move met with a stark rebuttal in Spain.

The president said Monday that he sent a letter addressed to King Felipe VI of Spain and Pope Francis urging to issue a formal apology for what he described as an “invasion” and the “many misdeeds that were committed.”

“There were killings, impositions,” Lopez Obrador said in a video posted on social media. “The so-called conquest was carried out with the sword and the cross. They raised churches on top of temples.”

“There were killings, impositions ... the so-called conquest was carried out with the sword and the cross. They raised churches on top of temples.”

— President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

He said an apology is warranted to “the original peoples for the violations of what are now known to be human rights.”

RESIDENTS IN WORLD’S MOST VIOLENT CITY ARE BUYING STOLEN US-MEXICO BORDER WIRE FOR PROTECTION, REPORT SAYS

But the attempt to elicit an apology was shot down by the Spanish government, which rejected the letter and its content “with all firmness.”

“The arrival, 500 years ago, of Spaniards to what is today Mexican territory cannot be judged in the light of contemporary considerations,” the Spanish rebuttal read.

“Our sibling peoples have always known how to read our shared past without anger and with a constructive perspective, as free peoples with a common inheritance and an extraordinary projection.”

The rejection letter stressed the Spanish government’s willingness to cooperate with Mexico in a bid to strengthen the relations and tackle future problems.

DISCOVERY OF GRISLY AZTEC WAR SACRIFICES COULD LEAD TO LONG-LOST EMPEROR’S TOMB: REPORT

The Mexican president says that 2021, which is the 500-year anniversary of the conquest of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, on what is today Mexico City, should be a year of “historic reconciliation.”

“It is time to say we will reconcile but first let us apologize,” he said. “I am going to as well because after the colonization there was much repression of the original peoples.”

There was no immediate reaction from the Vatican following the letter from Mexico, though an apology to Mexico wouldn’t be unprecedented.

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In 2015, Pope Francis formally apologized to Bolivia for crimes of the Roman Catholic Church during the conquest of the Americas.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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PewDiePie Roasts Maker of Petition Seeking to Ban Him For ‘White Supremacy’

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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FILE PHOTO: A Wells Fargo logo is seen in New York City, U.S. January 10, 2017. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith

April 26, 2019

By Jessica DiNapoli and Imani Moise

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wells Fargo & Co’s board has retained executive search firm Spencer Stuart to hunt for a new chief executive, ideally a woman who can tackle its regulatory and public perception issues, two people familiar with the matter said.

Wells Fargo’s ambition to become the only major U.S. bank with a female CEO underscores the need to restore its image with a wide range of constituents, including customers, shareholders, regulators and politicians, after it became mired in a scandal in 2016 for opening potentially millions of unauthorized accounts.

Former CEO Tim Sloan left abruptly last month, becoming the second CEO to leave the bank in the scandal’s fallout.

The board plans to approach Citigroup Inc’s Latin America chief Jane Fraser, one of the sources said. During Fraser’s 15-year tenure at Citigroup, she has gained experience running consumer and commercial businesses as well as its private bank.

Fraser could not be immediately reached for comment.

The board also discussed approaching JPMorgan Chase & Co’s Marianne Lake, but after the bank named her to run JPMorgan’s consumer lending business last week, that option became less viable, the source added. The board wants someone who can convince regulators, employees, investors and customers that the bank has fixed problems underpinning the sales scandal, the sources said.

The bank’s board feels that choosing a woman might please lawmakers in Washington who have been critical not only of Wells Fargo’s misbehavior, but of the broader banking industry for a lack of diversity and gender equality, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It also believes that such a move could bolster Wells Fargo’s image with the households of customers where women play a leading role in managing finances, one of the sources added.

The new CEO will also have to resolve litigation and regulatory matters. There are 14 outstanding consent orders with government entities, as well as probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice.

To be sure, Spencer Stuart will approach and consider several male candidates for the CEO job as well, one of the sources said. The top priority is to find an external candidate who can navigate the bank’s regulatory issues, the source added.

Finding an outsider who meets all those qualifications and wants the job will be difficult, the sources said. There are few people with the necessary experience, even fewer of those who are women, and it is not clear if any of the obvious candidates would be open to taking the role.

The sources asked not to be identified because Wells Fargo’s board deliberations are confidential.

Spokespeople for Wells Fargo and Spencer Stuart declined to comment.

Wells Fargo’s board has not made any public statements about its requirements for a new CEO, beyond Chair Betsy Duke saying the job should attract the “top talent in banking.”

The board wants to complete the search within the next three to six months, one of the sources said.

STALLED SHARES

After Sloan’s ouster, Wells Fargo’s board appointed Allen Parker, who had been general counsel, as interim CEO. The board has said it is looking for an external candidate as a permanent replacement. It is not clear whether Parker will stay at the bank.

Others whose names have been mentioned by analysts, recruiters and industry sources as perspective CEO candidates include Alphabet Inc finance chief Ruth Porat and Bank of America Corp’s chief technology officer Cathy Bessant.

Wells Fargo shares have stalled since Sloan’s departure on March 29th, while the KBW Bank index has rallied more than 7 percent.

Wells Fargo would be “the best stock on earth to buy” if it had the right CEO, said Greg Donaldson, chairman of Donaldson Capital Management in Indiana.

Donaldson held about 50,000 Wells Fargo shares, but sold the stake last year as problems mounted. The CEO change could convince him to re-invest, depending on who it is, he told Reuters.

“It would be very smart for them to get a woman,” he said.

(Reporting by Jessica DiNapoli and Imani Moise in New York; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra, Greg Roumeliotis and Susan Thomas)

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

(Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Bill Trott)

Source: OANN

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