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Migrant Caravan Breaks Guatemalan Border Gate, Forces Way Into Mexico

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Source: InfoWars

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Swedish female soccer players call for unity to tackle inequality

FILE PHOTO: Football - Women's Tournament Gold Medal Match
FILE PHOTO: 2016 Rio Olympics - Soccer - Final - Women's Football Tournament Gold Medal Match - Sweden v Germany - Maracana - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - 19/08/2016. Nilla Fischer (SWE) and Hedvig Lindahl (SWE) of Sweden fight for the ball with Alexandra Popp (GER) of Germany. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci/File Photo

April 5, 2019

By Philip O’Connor

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – With 30,000 tickets sold for their friendly against Germany in Stockholm on Saturday, Sweden’s female players have called for unity to tackle inequalities between men and women in soccer, especially when it comes to money.

Huge crowds have attended women’s games in England, Italy and Spain recently and defender Nilla Fischer told Reuters that fans, players, sponsors and governing bodies would all have to work together to ensure better pay for female players.

“I know that if I’d played in the (German men’s) Bundesliga for six years, I wouldn’t have any financial worries,” Fischer said at the team hotel in Stockholm.

“In terms of percentages, you can’t really compare. What they maybe make in an hour, I make in a year,” the 34-year-old VfL Wolfsburg player added.

The comments come after the U.S. women’s team, the world champions, launched a lawsuit against their own federation last month alleging gender discrimination, which includes complaints about wages.

Goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl, who plays for English club Chelsea, said players campaigning for equality in the women’s game would continue to do so once they’ve hung up their boots.

“When we one day quit, we will fill places in these (soccer) organizations and keep the fight going forward. I do think it needs to be a kind of a public pressure, that we don’t accept the way it is now,” Lindahl told Reuters after a training session at the Friends Arena.

“I do however see the difficulties with these big organizations, FIFA especially, because it’s their members that vote. I think we have to tackle big issues on the world stage in order for it to really change,” she added.

Fischer, who gave a fiery speech on the issue when receiving the Diamond Ball as Sweden’s best female player in 2018, added that everyone in the game has a role to play.

“I think it’s about the whole – I don’t think it’s about one organization or one clique or one part that is responsible,” she said.

Sweden are one of the 24 teams set to compete at the Women’s World Cup in France from June 7-July 7.

(Reporting by Philip O’Connor; Editing by Christian Radnedge)

Source: OANN

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Rep. Ilhan Omar probed for allegedly spending $6,000 of campaign funds on divorce attorney, personal travel

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., will soon learn the conclusions of an investigation into allegations that she violated campaign spending laws during her time as a state lawmaker -- including accusations that she used campaign money to pay for her divorce attorney and personal travel.

The culmination of the state probe is just the latest potential controversy for Omar, an embattled freshman in Congress who has repeatedly faced criticism for comments about Israel and U.S. foreign policy.

REP. ILHAN OMAR'S 'ANTI-SEMITIC TROPES' PROMPT JEWISH NEW YORK DEM TO APOLOGIZE TO CONSTITUENTS

In the state case, Minnesota state Rep. Steve Drazkowski, a Republican, alleged that Omar spent around $6,000 in campaign money on her divorce attorney and travels to Estonia and Boston, Sinclair reported.

The Minnesota Campaign Finance Board was alerted after Omar, who was a state representative between 2017 and 2019, had to repay $2,500 that she accepted for speeches and higher education institutions funded by the government.

The repayment stems from another complaint filed by Drazkowski. The ruling on the investigation is expected within the next month.

“I had observed a long pattern,” Drazkowski told the outlet. “Representative Omar hasn't followed the law. She's repeatedly trampled on the laws of the state in a variety of areas, and gotten by with it.”

“Representative Omar hasn't followed the law. She's repeatedly trampled on the laws of the state in a variety of areas, and gotten by with it.”

— Minnesota state Rep. Steve Drazkowski

2020 DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES CIRCLING WAGONS AROUND ILHAN OMAR AFTER ISRAEL COMMENT UPROAR

Omar, 37, an immigrant from Somalia who came to the U.S. with her family in 1995, previously denied the allegations, insisting that her payment to attorney Carla Kjellberg, who represented her in the dissolution of her marriage, was merely a compensation for providing crisis management services during her run for the Minnesota state House, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

Omar has faced constant controversy since joining the U.S. House in January. She first came under fire after a 2012 tweet resurfaced in which Omar wrote, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

She then drew bipartisan uproar in February after she falsely suggested Jewish politicians in the U.S. were bought by AIPAC, a non-partisan organization that seeks to foster the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.

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Omar then reignited the controversy, saying groups supportive of Israel were pushing members of Congress to have “allegiance to a foreign country,” echoing an anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Doping: Lab director hits back at ex-WADA head over testing criticism

Director General of the World Anti-Doping Agency Howman talks to reporters at the WADA symposium in Lausanne
FILE PHOTO: Director General of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) David Howman talks to reporters at the WADA symposium in Lausanne, Switzerland, March 14, 2016. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

April 23, 2019

By Alan Baldwin

LONDON (Reuters) – The director of a top Belgian laboratory has criticized former World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) head David Howman for suggesting drug testing was stuck in the 1970s and needed to be more innovative.

Howman, in an address to an anti-doping conference in London last week, had said urine analysis had not advanced much over the decades and that testing was not catching the real cheats.

“We’re still in a position where we’re getting the same number of positive cases each year, and many of them are in the category of what I call the ‘dopey dopers’ – the inadvertent dopers, or the ones who are just darned stupid,” he said.

Professor Peter van Eenoo, director of the WADA-accredited laboratory at the University of Ghent, said Howman had got it wrong.

“It’s incredible that somebody said this,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview. “What he says is the percentage of positive samples hasn’t changed much over the years. And therefore science has not made any progress.

“What he completely forgets is that for every step of progress we made, of course, the others adapt.”

Howman, who left the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in 2016, is now chairman of the Athletics Integrity Unit board and has previously criticized his former employers for failing to support clean athletes and for allowing the reinstatement of Russia’s anti-doping agency.

Van Eenoo said the substances being used, the doses and how they were being used by drugs cheats had changed over the decades.

Data from re-testing, using urine samples from the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics, had also demonstrated the advances of science.

“There were about 10,000 samples, 25 positives. What they’ve done is stored all those samples and re-tested 1,000 of these negative samples,” he said.

“Out of those 1,000 samples, 100 at re-testing later turned out to be positive. That is only through scientific progress, because nothing has changed. It’s the same urine.

“And because they know we can now detect substances for a longer period, they (athletes) switch to other substances or take them in smaller doses. So they adapt everything and that is only pushed by scientific progress.”

‘GOLD STANDARD’

Van Eenoo said urine testing, first introduced at an Olympics in 1968, had its limitations but would remain the ‘gold standard’ for some time to come.

He accepted that some substances, such as growth hormone, were hard to detect in urine and that blood was a better indicator of the effectiveness of drugs.

“That’s why we are now investing in looking into blood concentration — dried blood spots, those kind of things — to complement urine,” he said.

“If we are looking at a zero tolerance policy which is important for most of the substances and especially those which are most performance-enhancing — steroids, EPO — then urine is the gold standard and will remain for quite a long time to come.”

Van Eenoo said it was difficult to look for 400 or 500 substances in a drop of blood.

“So that’s why I’m saying urine as a first and then for some of these substances where you have issues… you can re-analyze that drop of blood only for one or two substances,” he added.

“This makes absolute sense and we need to progress in that direction. That’s additional scientific progress, it doesn’t mean that the scientific progress we’ve made so far doesn’t exist.”

(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Christian Radnedge)

Source: OANN

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Hire Achievement: Booming Manufacturing Needs Workers

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Economic commentators are catching on to the story manufacturers have been sharing for a while: In 2018, manufacturers were the stars of the U.S. economy. Our industry had the best year for job creation in more than two decades, adding an average of 22,000 jobs every month—bringing the total number of American manufacturing workers to more than 12.8 million.

Powered by tax reform and regulatory certainty, manufacturers spent the year keeping our promise to secure those tools and invest in our people. In addition to hiring new workers, manufacturers also raised wages and benefits and invested in new operations and new equipment. Reflecting the historic nature of 2018, the National Association of Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey, which has tracked manufacturers’ sentiment for 20 years, hit a new record of optimism. 

Manufacturers entered 2019 with strong momentum, and now we expect the growth and hiring to continue. We have challenges, to be sure, and know there will always be bumps along the way—but the skeptics and naysayers have it wrong when they question the strength of modern manufacturing in America. In reality, manufacturers wish we could hire skilled workers even faster. There just are not enough of them.

Today, manufacturers need to fill 428,000 jobs. And according to Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, the workforce and education partner of the NAM, manufacturers will need to fill 4.6 million jobs over the next decade. But under current conditions, not enough Americans are pursuing these careers, even though they pay on average $84,832 a year in wages and benefits, or $32,000 more than jobs in other fields. Of those 4.6 million jobs that will be open between now and 2028, as many as 2.4 million could go unfilled. 

We need skilled workers—and we need them now. In addition to men and women who create things with their hands, this includes coders, programmers, technicians, designers and other jobs that require some degree of specialized training. We don’t think of these as blue-collar or white-collar jobs but “new-collar” jobs, the jobs that put the “modern” in “modern manufacturing.”

As we deploy new technology—from artificial intelligence and augmented reality to advanced robotics and 3-D printing—manufacturers will require more skilled workers in this next frontier. Across America, manufacturers of all types are saying, “Creators wanted.”

That is the message the NAM is sharing with the country right now on the NAM State of Manufacturing Tour, which this year is taking us to Colorado, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, Minnesota, California and Arizona.

Across America, manufacturers have taken the initiative to be the solution to this workforce crisis, partnering with local schools and offering training, re-training and up-skilling of their own. We have created our own recruiting campaign at CreatorsWanted.org. The Manufacturing Institute, through its Heroes MAKE America program, is training servicemembers for careers in manufacturing after they leave the military—in addition to other initiatives to bring underrepresented groups into the industry.

A strong manufacturing industry should be a priority for all Americans because it is vital to the overall health of the American economy, to our ability to lead in the world and to our security at home. It puts the American Dream in reach for more people, while delivering the products and technology that improve daily life for everyone.

That is why parents, educators and local leaders should be champions for manufacturing careers. It is why leaders in Washington should listen to manufacturers in their home states who are calling on them to invest in our infrastructure, fix our broken immigration system and give us the chance to sell more products around the world through the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement and a new trade agreement to hold China accountable.

Manufacturers are not the type to worry about the future—we build it. That has been our role throughout the history of this country. If more Americans join us in this mission, and if lawmakers in Washington do their part, we can build a future that defies expectations and breaks new records.

Jay Timmons is president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, the largest manufacturing trade association in the United States.

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Motor racing: Leclerc aiming for a first in a thousand

Formula One - F1 - Chinese Grand Prix - Shanghai, China
Formula One - F1 - Chinese Grand Prix - Shanghai, China - April 15, 2018 - Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel leads the race. REUTERS/Aly Song

April 10, 2019

By Abhishek Takle

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – The first Formula One win is special for every driver but Charles Leclerc will feel it magnified by a thousand if he triumphs in China this weekend after being denied by cruel misfortune in Bahrain.

Sunday’s race is the 1,000th in world championship history and the Ferrari driver, who took pole position and set the fastest race lap at Sakhir two weeks ago, can write his name on it with a first victory.

“I hope the car will be as good as it was in Bahrain, so that I can continue to go for the results we deserve,” said the 21-year-old Monegasque.

The same engine that Leclerc used in Bahrain will again be available after Ferrari engineers found a short-circuit in the car’s injection system control unit had robbed him of victory.

Five times world champion Lewis Hamilton, winner in Bahrain after Leclerc slowed while leading, has been more successful than anyone in China and will be aiming to win the race for a sixth time.

Champions Mercedes have won the first two races of the season one-two but against the odds, with Ferrari looking ominously quick in Bahrain until Leclerc’s loss of power.

Despite Mercedes taking five Chinese wins from the last seven races, they have a fight on their hands and they know it.

“We are happy but we are also conscious and aware of how lucky we were today to come away with a one-two,” Hamilton said after the race in Bahrain.

“We all worked so hard through the weekend as we do every weekend but we underperformed.”

Team mate Valtteri Bottas, who leads Hamilton by one point in the standings after winning the opener in Australia, should also be a contender.

The Finn was on course for victory in Shanghai last year until a virtual safety car handed it to then-Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo, who has yet to score a point this season for Renault, instead.

Ferrari, however, are expected to have the edge down the Shanghai circuit’s main straight, which is over a kilometer long.

“If they are able to maintain those power levels…on a power sensitive circuit like Shanghai, they are the favorites, clearly,” said Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff. “The lap time benefit might even be more than in Bahrain.”

Red is seen as a lucky color in China and Leclerc, who hung on for third in Bahrain and a first podium finish, could do with a slice of good fortune after the disappointment in the desert.

Four-time champion team mate Sebastian Vettel, who spun and was outpaced by Leclerc two weeks ago, will also be fired up to re-establish his number one status and close the points gap to Mercedes.

The German has won just once in China, when he handed Red Bull their maiden victory in 2009, before the current V6 turbo hybrid era.

Red Bull will be on the lookout for any opportunity to repeat last year’s success on the 10th anniversary of that first win.

“Overall, Shanghai provides you with a lot of opportunities to fight and set up overtakes,” said Max Verstappen, who botched his chances of victory and a possible one-two last year with scrappy attempts to overtake Hamilton and Vettel.

“I’m looking forward to hopefully having an exciting race there.”

(Editing by Alan Baldwin/Greg Stutchbury)

Source: OANN

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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.

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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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A Wells Fargo logo is seen in New York City
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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