FILE PHOTO: Pascal Canfin, head of WWF France, attends the French employer's body MEDEF union summer forum on the campus of the HEC School of Management in Jouy-en-Josas, near Paris, France, August 30, 2016. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo
March 29, 2019
By Michel Rose
PARIS (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron has set his sights on the green vote in May’s European elections, aiming to tap into deepening environmental concerns to build as broad a coalition as possible in the EU parliament and increase his party’s influence.
On Wednesday, the French leader’s party announced its list of candidates for the May 26 vote, surprising rivals with the presence of a long-time member of the Green party, Pascal Canfin, in second place.
It was a signal that Macron hopes to capitalize on the renewed surge in environmental activism, especially among the young, evidenced by the success of Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg’s “school strike for climate”.
After the electoral successes of Green parties in Bavaria, Luxembourg and Belgium in recent months, Macron is keen to ensure France’s greens, who usually do better in European elections than national ones, don’t steal a march on his party.
But beyond the purely domestic appeal to environmentally conscious voters, the 41-year-old president is also betting that green names on his list will convince other Green parties in Europe to join a future coalition in Strasbourg.
That coalition — which Macron aims to build with like-minded centrist or “progressive” parties — will be critical in determining whether Macron gains influence in Brussels and ends up at the forefront of shaping legislation and filing key jobs, such as the next European Commission president.
Canfin, a former European lawmaker and minister for development who headed conservation group WWF’s French operation until he was poached by Macron, did not waste time spelling out the goal he has been tasked with.
“We’ll champion a coalition deal and clearly we’ll offer the European Greens the opportunity to join,” he told French radio this week.
Macron has confused many in Brussels with his reluctance to agree to join the liberal-centrist family in the European parliament, known as ALDE, which would seem his natural home.
Partly that is because the word “liberal” in France has long held negative associations with Anglo Saxon-style free market economics, which French officials have mentioned as a branding problem. But the main reason is Macron’s desire to build a broader church, one that, as well as the Greens, might pull in centrist MEPs from the two main groups, the centre-right EPP and the centre-left S&D.
Such a coalition, in which Macron’s potential 20-24 MEPs would likely be the biggest contingent, could put the French leader in the position of kingmaker, since polls show the EPP and the Socialists are both unlikely to win a majority.
“SUPERFICIAL GREEN REPACKAGING”
The biggest prize Macron is hoping to win is Germany’s Greens. Because of the size of the German contingent – the Gruenen currently have 13 MEPs but are likely to increase that number in the election – that could help Macron beef up the ranks of his ‘progressive’ grouping.
Macron’s campaign director, Stéphane Séjourné, named the German Greens in an interview with Reuters last October as one of the parties he was hoping to partner with.
Macron’s call to “make our planet great again” in 2017, and his self-endorsed role as defender of the Paris climate accord, have burnished his green credentials, Séjourné said.
“We’ve put a lot of political capital into European climate diplomacy,” he told Reuters. “This is how we’re identified abroad, the president is identified as a climate leader.”
Séjourné said Germany’s Greens, who are accustomed to the demands of coalition compromises, would be a better fit for Macron’s En Marche than France’s Greens, who are to the left.
But it remains to be seen whether the Gruenen would shake hands with Macron, whose high-profile environment minister quit on him last August, criticizing the former investment banker’s pro-nuclear policies in particular.
In a party that was founded on anti-nuclearism, some German Greens openly express scepticism about the sincerity of Macron’s environmental outreach.
Reinhard Buetikofer, a Gruene European lawmaker and co-chair of the European Green Party, tweeted that Macron was giving his En Marche party an environmental makeover out of simple fear of losing votes to the French Greens.
But a source in the party says the German Greens are divided over Macron. “There are ones that put his pro-Europeanism first and his slight greenness second and therefore are favorable to collaboration with him,” the source said.
“On the other side there are people who see his right-wing economic policies and see him getting cozy with the Greens as ‘greenwashing’ and they don’t really believe it.”
Jon Worth, a German green party member and EU blogger, says the fact party members shape what the party does makes it unlikely they would agree to join Macron’s ranks, especially considering the profile of candidates put forward this time.
“Many of them are quite independent-minded, quite left-wing people,” he said. “I can’t see many Macron-favourable people there on the list.”
(Reporting by Michel Rose; Editing by Luke Baker and Peter Graff)
Shocking video is being filmed at America’s southern border on a daily basis as civilian patriots captured footage of a 70-bus caravan and a “lookout” drone Thursday night.
Infowars has covered the group, United Constitutional Patriots (UCP), multiple times this week after they caught a group of over 300 illegals Tuesday night and another group of more than 90 on Wednesday.
The group is now under fire by MSM, the New Mexico government and the New Mexico ACLU over their work.
Patriot border patroller Conservative Anthony has captured footage of over 70 buses arriving at the border and a “lookout” drone used by smugglers.
At the 26:45 timestamp in the following video, a drone can be seen monitoring the border to ensure the illegals safe entry into the U.S. as they try to avoid Border Patrol or citizen patrols.
“Lookout” drones are frequently used to assist smugglers who sneak illegal immigrants into the country.
At the 26:30 timestamp, the next video shows what is reported to be a caravan of over 70 buses arriving into Anapra, Mexico in the middle of the night.
Anthony will join The War Room Friday at 4:30 P.M. CST for an exclusive interview where he’ll discuss the latest footage he’s captured and what life is like patrolling the southern border.
United Constitutional Patriots vow to patrol the border until President Trump’s wall is built.
Yoon Chang-hyun works on his Youtube clip in Seongnam, South Korea, February 12, 2019. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji
March 31, 2019
By Cynthia Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) – Yoon Chang-hyun’s parents told him to get his sanity checked when he quit his secure job as a researcher at Samsung Electronics Co in 2015 to start his own YouTube channel.
The 65 million won ($57,619) a year salary – triple South Korea’s average entry level wage – plus top-notch healthcare and other benefits offered by the world’s biggest smartphone and memory chip maker was the envy of many college graduates.
But burned out and disillusioned by repeated night shifts, narrowing opportunities for promotion and skyrocketing property prices that have pushed home ownership out of reach, the then 32-year old Yoon gave it all up in favor of an uncertain career as an internet content provider.
Yoon is among a growing wave of South Korean millennials ditching stable white collar jobs, even as unemployment spikes and millions of others still fight to get into the powerful, family-controlled conglomerates known as chaebol.
Some young Koreans are also moving out of city for farming or taking blue collar jobs abroad, shunning their society’s traditional measures of success – well-paid office work, raising a family and buying an apartment.
“I got asked a lot if I had gone crazy,” Yoon said. “But I’d quit again if I go back. My bosses didn’t look happy. They were overworked, lonely…”
Yoon now runs a YouTube channel about pursuing dream jobs and is supporting himself from his savings.
Samsung Electronics declined to comment for this article.
Chaebols such as Samsung and Hyundai powered South Korea’s dramatic rise from the ashes of the 1950-53 war into Asia’s fourth-largest economy in less than a generation. Well-paid, secure jobs provided a gateway to the middle-class for many baby boomers.
But with economic growth stagnating and competition from lower cost producers weighing on wages, even milliennials who graduated from top universities and secured chaebol jobs say they are less inclined to try to fulfill society’s expectations.
Similar issues among younger workers are being seen globally. However, South Korea’s strict hierarchical corporate culture and oversupply of college graduates with homogeneous skills make the problem worse, says Ban Ga-woon, a labor market researcher at state-run Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education & Training.
South Koreans had the shortest job tenure among member countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as of 2012, just 6.6 years compared to the average of 9.4 years and 11.5 years in neighboring Japan.
The same survey also showed barely 55 percent of South Koreans were satisfied with their jobs, the lowest rate in the OECD.
This January, ‘quitting jobs’ appeared on the nation’s top 10 new year resolution list on major social media sites.
‘DON’T TELL THE BOSS’
Some workers are even going back to school to learn how to do just that.
A small three-classroom campus in southern Seoul, named “School of Quitting Jobs”, has attracted over 7,000 attendees since opening in 2016, founder Jang Su-han told Reuters.
The 34-year-old Jang, who himself quit Samsung Electronics in 2015 to launch the school, said it now offers about 50 courses, including classes on how-to-YouTube, manage an identity crisis, and how to brainstorm a Plan B.
The school’s rules are displayed at its entrance: “Don’t tell your bosses, say nothing even if you run into a colleague, and never get caught until your graduation.”
“There is strong demand for identity-related courses, as so many of us were too busy with cram schools to seriously think about what we want to do when were teenagers,” he said.
To be sure, the lure of a prestigious chaebol job remains strong, especially with the country mired in its worst job slump since 2009 and youth joblessness near a record high.
Samsung Electronics is still the most desired workplace for graduates as of 2019, a survey of 1,040 job seekers by Saramin, a job portal, showed in February.
However, many entering the workforce are much less willing to accept the long hours or mandatory drinking sessions synonymous with the country’s hierarchical, cutthroat corporate life, says Duncan Harrison, country head of London-based recruitment agency Robert Walters Plc.
“The mindset of people entering the workforce is very different from past generations,” Harrison said.
YOUTUBER, SPORTS STAR, CLEANER
Among elementary school students, YouTube creator is now the fifth-ranked dream job, behind being a sports star, school teacher, doctor or a chef, a 2018 government poll showed.
Some are choosing a simpler life in the country.
Between 2013 and 2017, South Korea saw a 24 percent increase in the number of households who ditched city life for farming – more than 12,000 in total.
And in the face of dwindling opportunities at home, nearly 5,800 people also went abroad for jobs last year using government-subsidized programs, more than tripling from 2013, according to government data.
Others left without support or new jobs lined up.
Plant engineer Cho Seung-duk bought one-way tickets to Australia in December with his wife and two kids.
“I don’t think my son could get jobs like mine in South Korea,” said 37 year-old Cho, who moved from Hyundai Engineering & Construction to another top construction firm in 2015 before he emigrated.
“I will probably clean offices in Brisbane, but that’s ok.”
(Reporting by Cynthia Kim; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Lincoln Feast)
The U.S. Senate appeared poised to pass a proposal to terminate President Donald Trump's declaration of an emergency at the southern border, despite his threat to veto the measure and heavy lobbying of his fellow Republicans.
Republican Senator Mike Lee, who had been shopping a second bill that would keep the emergency declaration in effect temporarily, said on Wednesday the White House had said Trump would not support his proposal, so he would be voting on Thursday to end the emergency declaration.
"For decades, Congress has been giving far too much legislative power to the executive branch," Lee said in a statement. "I will be voting to terminate the latest emergency declaration."
The Utah lawmaker was the fifth Republican senator to say they back a measure passed by the Democratic-led House of Representatives to terminate Trump's declaration. In the 100-seat Senate, votes from at least four Republicans are needed to pass the measure, along with all 45 Democrats and two independents.
Given Trump's threat to veto the legislation, it is unlikely to become law.
"We'll see whether or not I have to do the veto. And it will be, I think, all very successful, regardless of how it all works out, but it's going to be very successful," Trump told reporters on Wednesday.
At stake are billions of dollars in funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that Trump is demanding but Congress has refused to fully provide. The stalemate led to a 35-day partial government shutdown that ended in January.
Under the emergency declaration Trump signed on Feb. 15, he would take money from other federal programs to build the barrier he says is needed to curb illegal immigration and the flow of illicit drugs. There are also court challenges asserting Congress, not the president, decides how taxpayer money is spent.
Republicans who oppose the national emergency are worried that future Democratic presidents could usurp the power of Congress to fund the government and use the tactic to pass their own pet programs.
Lee had introduced a second measure that would end future emergency declarations after 30 days unless Congress votes to extend them. That 30-day approval window would apply after Trump's current border declaration expires in one year, meaning it could remain in place for at least a year without congressional approval.
Vice President Mike Pence met with Republican senators this week to push Lee's plan, saying Trump would support it. Lee said on Wednesday the White House had subsequently made clear his bill did "not have an immediate path forward" and he hoped it could be the "starting point for future work."
FILE PHOTO: Britain's Home Secretary Sajid Javid is seen outside Downing Street in London, Britain March 14, 2019. REUTERS/Toby Melville
March 15, 2019
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s interior minister Sajid Javid said social media firms must take action to stop extremism on their channels after Friday’s shootings at two mosques left at least 49 people dead.
Online accounts linked to the gun attacks had in recent days circulated white supremacist imagery and extreme right-wing messages celebrating violence against Muslims.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube said they would take down content involving the mass shootings which were posted online as the attack unfolded.
“You really need to do more @YouTube @Google @facebook @Twitter to stop violent extremism being promoted on your platforms,” Javid wrote on Twitter. “Take some ownership. Enough is enough.”
(Reporting by Michael Holden; editing by Stephen Addison)
Brennan Conrad, 18, died Wednesday after he fell from the roof of his apartment building in the Dominican Republic, LDS Church said. (FOX13)
A missionary from Utah died Wednesday after he fell off an apartment building roof in the Dominican Republic, the church said.
Brennan Conrad, an 18-year-old missionary from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was pronounced dead Wednesday morning in the Dominican Republic, where he had been serving since August, FOX13 reported.
“Our deepest condolences go out to his family,” LDS Church said in a statement. “We pray they will be comforted as they deal with this tragedy and mourn Elder Conrad’s passing.”
Conrad, who was from Hyde Park, Utah, was assigned to the Dominican Republic Santo Domingo East Mission.
FILE - In this Nov. 18, 2016 file photo, University of New Mexico Chicana and Chicano studies professor Irene Vasquez holds a letter with hundreds of signatures, asking school president Bob Frank to declare the campus a "sanctuary university," in Albuquerque, N.M. Vasquez and other Mexican American scholars from universities across the country are gathering in Albuquerque on Wednesday, April 3, 2019, for an annual four-day national conference amid uncertainty on immigration and ethnic studies battles on college campuses. (AP Photo/Russell Contreras, File)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Mexican American scholars from universities across the country are gathering in New Mexico this week for an annual national conference amid uncertainty over immigration and the future of ethnic studies at some colleges.
Members of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies are scheduled Wednesday to start their four-day conference in Albuquerque as President Donald Trump has pledged to close a section of the southern U.S-Mexico border.
The conference also comes as activists work to save sites linked to Latino civil rights history across the U.S. Activists in New Mexico, for example, want to launch preservation efforts for the birthplace of civil right leader Dolores Huerta in Dawson, a northern New Mexico ghost town.
Aureliano DeSoto, chair of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies and a professor at Metropolitan State University in St, Paul, Minnesota, said the group was happy to hold the event in New Mexico because of its long Chicano history.
DeSoto said the current political climate will be on the minds of many scholars but that "it's also important to remember that this is not new and there has always been a pattern of seeing Mexican people are foreign and outsiders," DeSoto said.
Trump has threatened to close sections of the border over the rise of migrants from largely Central American countries seeking asylum. Meanwhile, shelters in El Paso, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico are struggling to keep up to provide temporary shelter for migrants.
Irene Vasquez, chair of the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at the University of New Mexico, said the national group is coming to the state at a time when advocates are pushing for the expansion of ethnic studies.
For example, the University of New Mexico recently approved a plan for its Chicano Studies department to start issuing Master's and Doctoral degrees because of vocal support from local advocates, she said.
That's a different climate from some campuses. Last week, 13 Yale faculty members announced their withdrawal from the university's Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program over allegations the administration was ignoring the program and failing to fulfill promises to strengthen it.
Yale President Peter Salovey said it hired two new senior faculty members for the program last year and expects to hire two others this year.
DeSoto said Chicano and Ethnic Studies are constantly under attack from critics who question its purpose but now have more diverse student bodies who are seeking such classes.
Chicano, which refers to Mexican Americans, gained popularity during the militant Chicano Movement of the 1970s, when advocates staged school walkouts and protested the war in Vietnam.
About 500 professors and students from Arizona, California, Texas and the Midwest are expected to attend the conference, DeSoto said.
Founded in 1972, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies supports Mexican American academics in social sciences, the arts and the humanities. The group pushes for faculty diversity at the nation's universities.
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Russell Contreras is a member of The Associated Press' race and ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/russcontreras
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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