FILE PHOTO: Special Counsel Robert Mueller (R) departs after briefing members of the U.S. Senate on his investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 21, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File Photo
March 22, 2019
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Special Counsel Robert Mueller has handed in a keenly awaited report on his investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election and any potential wrongdoing by U.S. President Donald Trump, the Justice Department said on Friday.
Mueller submitted the report to Attorney General William Barr, the top U.S. law enforcement official, the department said. The report was not immediately made public – Barr will have to decide how much to disclose – and it was not known if Mueller found criminal conduct by Trump or his campaign, beyond the charges already brought against several aides.
Mueller, a former FBI director, had been examining since 2017 whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Moscow to try to influence the election and whether the Republican president later unlawfully tried to obstruct his investigation.
During a speech on Tuesday, potential presidential candidate Joe Biden blamed “a white man’s culture” for violence towards women.
The former VP asserted that Anita Hill, who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, should not have been forced to forced to face a panel of “a bunch of white guys.”
Biden went on to suggest that English common law, the foundation of the western legal system, was anti-women.
“I realize I get a little too passionate about this sometimes, but we all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture in this country. Not just the laws, we changed laws — change the culture. The culture. You all know what the phrase rule of thumb means? Where it’s derived from? In English common law, not codification or common law, back in the late 1300s, so many women were dying at the hands of her husbands because they were chattel, just like the cattle or the sheep, that the Court of Common Law decided they had to do something about the extent of the deaths. So, you know what they said? No man has a right to chastise his woman with a rod thicker than the circumference of his thumb. This is English jurisprudential culture a white man’s culture. That’s got to change it’s got to change.”
While lambasting “white man’s culture” for violence against women, Biden failed to mention the fact that black hip hop culture is dominated by actual misogyny and disrespect for women.
According to the CDC, “Non-Hispanic black and American Indian/Alaska Native women experienced the highest rates of homicide” in America from 2003-2017, clearly indicating that white men are not overrepresented when it comes to violence against women.
A 2014 study of college campus rape statistics by the BJS found that 19% were committed by black males, despite them making up only about 6% of the U.S. population.
This is not the first time that Biden has caused controversy with his remarks about white people.
He previously celebrated the fact that white people were in demographic decline, insisting, “Whites will be an absolute minority in America – that’s a source of our strength.”
Some may point to Biden’s creepy behavior around women in asserting that the former Vice President shouldn’t be treated as an authority on the issue.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., blasted Republicans calling him to step down from his post as chair of the House Intelligence Committee for his repeated claims of collusion between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.
Schiff on Sunday refused to back down from his claims that the evidence of wrongdoing by Trump “is in plain sight” and said he has no regrets calling out the president for what he believes is “deeply unethical and improper conduct.”
“I think there is a different standard here between the Republicans and the Democrats,” Schiff said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “The Republicans seem to think that as long as you can't prove it's a crime, all is fair in love and war...I don't feel that way, I don't think most Americans feel that way.”
For two years, Schiff routinely sounded ominous warnings about what Special Counsel Robert Mueller might find on Trump.
In March 2017, Schiff told MSNBC that "there is more than circumstantial evidence now" of a relationship between Russia and Trump's associates. In December of that year, Schiff said on CNN: "The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the president made full use of that help. That is pretty damning, whether it is proof beyond a reasonable doubt of conspiracy or not."
And in May of last year, Schiff said on ABC that the Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee emails is "like Watergate in the sense that you had a break in at the Democratic headquarters, in this case a virtual one, not a physical break in, and you had a president as part of a cover up." Schiff said later that the Russia investigation is "a size and scope probably beyond Watergate."
Despite Schiff’s claims, Mueller found no evidence of coordination or conspiracy involving Trump, his campaign and the Russian government, Attorney General William Barr wrote in a letter released late last month.
Now Trump’s Republican allies – from White House adviser Kellyanne Conway to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy – are calling on Schiff to do everything from vacating his committee chairmanship to leaving office.
“He owes an apology to the American public," McCarthy said. “There is no place in Adam Schiff's world or in Congress that he should be chair of the intel committee."
McCarthy added: "There is no way he could lead the intel committee and he should step back."
Schiff remains steadfast in his claims that there is evidence of wrongdoing “in plain sight.”
“I don't regret calling out this president for what i consider deeply unethical and improper conduct and the moment we start to think that we should back away from exposing this kind of malfeasance and corruption is a dangerous point,” he said.
Schiff added: “There is a risk when you have an immoral president, a president who lacks in basic character who violates the norms of office. There is even a greater risk in doing too little oversight. I make no apologies for that and I’m going to continue holding this administration responsible.”
Joshua Boyle arrives at court in Ottawa on Monday, March 25, 2019. Boyle is on trial in Canada, accused of repeatedly assaulting his wife. He faces 19 charges, including sexual assault. A partial gag order was lifted at the trial, revealing that all but one of 19 charges relate to his American wife, Caitlan Coleman of Stewartstown, Pa. Boyle and his wife were taken hostage in 2012 by a Taliban-linked group while on a backpacking trip in Afghanistan. The couple had three children during their five years in captivity. The family was rescued in 2017 by Pakistani forces. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP)
A Canadian man who with his wife was held hostage by the Taliban for five years has been accused of repeatedly assaulting her before, during and after their captivity, including tying her ankles and wrists with rope and forcing her to have sex.
Joshua Boyle, 35, is facing 19 charges, including sexual assault, after his estranged wife Caitlan Coleman, 33, alleged that she suffered at his hands. Court records show that one charge is related to another person, whose identity has not been divulged due to a court order.
Both Boyle and Coleman were captured by a Taliban-linked group in 2012 while on a backpacking trip in Afghanistan. During their five years in captivity, she gave birth to three children. The family was freed in 2017 by Pakistani forces.
Caitlan Coleman, seen with husband Joshua Boyle and their children, broke her silence after being rescued from captivity. (AP, File)
Coleman testified on Friday that during their captivity Boyle was controlling. His behavior “was just like my captors,” she told the court, according to the Guardian.
“I was never to disagree with him, even on small things,” she said. “In the past, he made it clear he didn’t feel any guilt hurting me.”
She described behavior by Boyle that she said led to a violent assault after they returned to Canada, in which he demanded sex, then hit her after she refused.
“Josh told me to get on the bed. He took ropes he kept in a bag … and he started to tie my hands and legs,” she said, adding that he sexually assaulted her and refused to release her. “He said he couldn’t trust me, so he wasn’t going to untie me.”
Boyle was arrested in December 2017 and pleaded not guilty to all charges. He was released from jail last June with strict bail conditions that include living with his parents in Smiths Falls, Ontario, and wearing a GPS ankle bracelet that tracks his movements.
Coleman previously testified that she met Boyle when she was 16 and that he was her first kiss, but he soon became physically abusive and controlling.
She said that during their captivity, Boyle would spank, bite, and choke her as forms of punishment, and sometimes forced her to stay in a bathroom stall for hours because he couldn’t stand her, the newspaper reported.
Coleman said Boyle continued the abuse and controlling behavior after they returned to Canada.
She told the court earlier this week that Boyle forced her to take powerful sleeping medication. “He stood in the bathroom and watched me take them that time … I took them because I knew that if I didn’t he would hit me harder.”
Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, was asked specifically about a recent decision by California Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign an executive order halting executions for 737 death row inmates. (AP)
Several hours after announcing his bid for the White House, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, defined one significant aspect of his platform, saying he'd suspend capital punishment at the federal level.
O’Rourke hit the campaign trail on Thursday in Iowa. On his way to an appearance at Fort Madison High School, O’Rourke, who drove himself, spoke to Radio Iowa.
The three-term congressman from El Paso was asked specifically about a recent decision by California Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign an executive order halting executions for the state’s 737 death row inmates.
“As president, would you suspend capital punishment at the federal level?” he was asked.
“I would. It’s not an equitable, fair, just system right now -- the guarantees and safeguards against wrongful prosecution, the disproportionate number of people of color who comprise our criminal justice system,” O’Rourke said.
“And on moral grounds," he added, "I oppose the death penalty.”
O’Rourke’s comments came just a day after the Democratic Governor Newsom signed an executive order that placed a moratorium on all executions at San Quentin State Prison. The order also withdrew lethal injection regulations but left convictions intact.
“The intentional killing of another person is wrong. And as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual,” Newsom said in a prepared statement obtained by the Southern California News Group.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Tuesday she's "ashamed" of some of her previous stances on immigration, but insisted she recognized some of her views "really did need to change" once she became a senator in 2009.
"When I was a member of Congress from upstate New York, I was really focused on the priorities of my district," the New York Democrat and presidential candidate said during a CNN town hall. "When I became senator of the entire state, I recognized that some of my views really did need to change. They were not thoughtful enough and didn't care enough about people outside of the original upstate New York district that I represented. So, I learned."
Gillibrand entered national politics when she won a House seat in a largely Republican district near Albany, New York in 2006, and at that time she called securing the border a "national security priority," advocated blocking some benefits for undocumented immigrants, and called for establishing English as an official language.
She said her changing stance shows strength, not weakness.
"For people who aspire to be president, I think it's really important that you're able to admit when you're wrong and that you're able to grow and learn and listen and be better, and be stronger," Gillibrand said.
"That is something that Donald Trump is unwilling to do," the senator added. "He's actually incapable of it. And I think it's one of the reasons why he is such a cowardly president."
She also pointed out that she's made comprehensive immigration reform a key priority while in the Senate, and she plans to continue to fight to reunite families who have been separated at the border.
William “Rick” Singer propped himself up as a college counselor who knew all the ways to get a child admitted to their desired college -- but his specialty was the “side door.”
Parents said Singer, who is the ringleader of one of the largest college admissions scams the U.S. history, approached them saying he could get their children into college, but not the conventional way. A well-known Silicon Valley investor told Axios on Thursday about once hiring Singer as a college counselor for his son and receiving the “side door” pitch.
The investor, who was not identified, said he reached out to Singer after someone mentioned the 58-year-old as a college counselor. Singer, from Newport Beach, Calif., was the founder of for-profit college prep business Edge College & Career Network, also known as "The Key.” He also ran the charity, Key Worldwide Foundation, which authorities revealed Tuesday was a front for his bribery scheme.
“He came to our house four, maybe five times...Test prep. Getting all the applications in order. Things like that,” the investor told Axios. “But then it got weird. He sort of said: ‘I think I can get your kid into USC, but he's going to be a football player.’ Now my kid only played freshman football and wasn't sure he wanted to go to USC.”
William "Rick" Singer pleaded guilty to several charges in his college admissions cheating scheme. (AP)
“Singer tells me there would be a spot and he doesn't actually have to play football. He makes it all sound so reasonable, except that he also says he'll need a picture and asks if I have one from freshman football,” he recalled.
The investor said Singer told him: “Your kid can't really get in here, but I've got a way to get him in the side door.”
“I finally just said to give some other child the opportunity. No money was ever discussed with me, outside of the regular monthly fee to do the standard stuff. But the idea of doctoring up an application was not my sort of thing,” the parent said.
In June 2018, Singer gave his elevator pitch to client Gordon Caplan, the chairman of a top law firm, and boasted about how he aided nearly 770 students into gaining acceptance to “certain schools” by using the “side door” method, documents stated.
William "Rick" Singer, front, founder of the Edge College & Career Network, exits federal court in Boston on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, after he pleaded guilty to charges in a nationwide college admissions bribery scandal. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
“[These wealthy families] want in at certain schools. So, I did 761 [of] what I would call, ‘side doors,’” Singer said in a phone call with Caplan, according to court documents. “There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is ten times as much money. And I’ve created this side door in.”
Parents who agreed to use the “side door” would make a “financial commitment” that ranged from thousands of dollars up to $6.5 million, authorities said.
In total, 50 people, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, were charged Tuesday for their alleged involvement in the cheating scandal. Singer appeared in court Tuesday and pleaded guilty to several charges of racketeering and money laundering.
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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