YOLA, Nigeria – Nigeria's top opposition candidate is urging the military not to be involved in the upcoming presidential election, saying the army "has no role to play in the conduct" of the poll.
Speaking on national television Tuesday, Atiku Abubakar criticized President Muhammadu Buhari's earlier remarks in which he ordered Nigeria's security forces to be "ruthless" with those found interfering with the voting process.
Nigeria's presidential election, initially scheduled for Feb. 16, was at the last minute postponed for a week to Feb. 23, raising political tensions. The electoral commission said it needed more time to organize a credible election.
Both the ruling party and the opposition have criticized the delay.
The race between Buhari and Abubakar appears to be tight.
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Congressional Democrats are displaying ‘Transgender Equality’ flags outside their offices in protest of the so-called military ‘trans ban’ proposed by the Trump administration.
The National Center for Transgender Awareness announced that the flags had been delivered to every member of Congress as part of ‘Trans Visibility Week.’
“To mark this year’s Trans Visibility Week, we’ve done something UNPRECEDENTED: With the help of community members & volunteers, we delivered trans pride flags to EVERY member of the Congress, from every party, including voting members and non-voting delegates,” the group tweeted. “Our request: Fly them outside your office for Trans Visibility Week.”
Many Democrats have complied, sharing photographs to social media calling the military policy “hateful” and an act of “bigotry.”
Discrimination has no place in our society. I am proud to display this flag as a symbol of my support for transgender people across the country. We must stand with transgender people in all of our communities. pic.twitter.com/W6Esa16vzP
As we recognize #TransVisibilityWeek, I’m proud to fly the Transgender Pride Flag in the halls of Congress as a symbol of my support and commitment to ensuring equality for all people across the country. You are seen. You are heard. You #WontBeErased. pic.twitter.com/lZ0UKAzRnh
It is #TransVisibilityWeek – a critical recognition of the extraordinary, daily courage and dignity of the transgender community. I am committed to fighting for justice and equality for trans individuals – in our classrooms, armed forces, health care systems, and everyday life. pic.twitter.com/cqDGbF4ySo
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) March 29, 2019
House Democrats passed a non-binding resolution opposing the partial ban on transgender military personnel this week. Only five House Republicans joined them.
The Supreme Court has ruled the restrictions can be implemented, however transgender troops will reportedly be allowed to serve if they do so as their biological sex, and other transgender personnel already serving will be grandfathered in.
A Smithsonian poll published in January revealed only 39% of active and retired servicepeople supported transgenders serving in the military.
This is a compilation of videos and newscasts showing the dark intentions to Drag Queen Story Hour programs that are sprouting up across America.
FILE PHOTO: Jayne-Anne Gadhia, when Chief Executive of Virgin Money, speaking at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) annual conference in London, Britain November 9, 2015. REUTERS/Toby Melville/File Photo
April 5, 2019
By Carolyn Cohn and Lawrence White
LONDON (Reuters) – Major financial services firms in Britain have made very little progress in narrowing the gap between male and female pay and more than a third have gone backwards, a Reuters analysis of gender pay data shows.
Financial firms have on average reduced pay disparities by just over half a percentage point in the last year, the analysis of 89 of the biggest companies showed, highlighting the lack of progress in the sector with the worst average pay gap in Britain.
The poor figures come despite finance companies publicizing a raft of initiatives to close the gap, from hiring more women in senior roles to mandating mixed gender shortlists and promoting flexible working.
Pay disparities in Britain have come under the spotlight since the government forced businesses to submit gender pay gap figures annually from last year.
The data shows the difference between average hourly male and female pay, and tends to reflect the smaller number of women at senior levels, where financial services firms have a poor record.
Reuters surveyed 89 major banks, asset managers, hedge funds, insurers and other financial services firms in Britain, including all the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 financial services firms that had reported gender pay data by Thursday.
On average, the firms showed a narrowing in the mean gender pay gap of just 0.6 percentage points compared with a year earlier, the survey showed.
For a graphic on UK financial sector gender pay gap, see – https://tmsnrt.rs/2I3vy6C
For an interactive version of the graphic, click here https://tmsnrt.rs/2HYgZkH.
Jayne-Anne Gadhia, the former chief executive of Virgin Money, who runs the government-backed Women in Finance charter, criticized finance firms for not doing enough.
“Businesses need to realize that they will not succeed unless they embrace diversity as a key driver of results and growth,” she said.
“They need to focus on it, measure it, set targets and hold senior executives accountable for making progress – year in year out.”
Virgin Money – which was bought by rival CYBG last year – had itself faced criticism for reporting a wide gender pay gap of 32.5 percent for 2017. The bank narrowed the gap to 29.7 percent last year.
Only three firms had a gender pay gap below last year’s mean national average.
Fifteen of the 48 major British, U.S. and other international banks surveyed reported a widening in the gender pay gap of their UK employees, and 32 of all the firms did so.
Firms with more than 250 employees in Britain had until April 5 to submit gender pay data, the second year of this government requirement.
The overall mean hourly gender pay gap based on employers who reported in 2018 was 14.3 percent, according to government data, but that widened to 30 percent for the financial sector according to an Investment Association (IA) study published this week.
In addition to a “motherhood penalty” and behavioral biases, the IA said that in financial services, there were “limitations in real meritocracy”.
HSBC had the biggest gender pay gap of the companies surveyed, at 61 percent, a widening of two percentage points from a year ago.
“We are committed to improving our gender balance and recognize that this will require sustained focus over the long-term,” the bank said in a statement.
It added it was taking a number of specific steps, including an “aspirational target” for 30 percent of senior leadership roles to be filled by women by 2020. On this measure, it said it had progressed from 22 percent in 2012 to 28.2 percent at the end of 2018.
Within some of the companies looked at, individual operating units performed particularly badly.
Across all the firms surveyed, State Street Global Advisors, the asset management arm of custody bank State Street, showed a year-on-year widening in the pay gap of 13.9 percentage points. The overall bank, though, saw a 0.1 percentage point reduction.
“While we have made significant on-going efforts to improve, we recognize that there is much more work to be done,” a spokeswoman for State Street said.
FTSE 100 asset manager Hargreaves Lansdown was most successful in narrowing its pay gap, more than halving it to 13.7 percent from 28.8 percent, which the firm attributed to hiring more women in its third to sixth tiers of seniority although it noted its median gap rose.
Consumer credit firm Provident Financial’s home credit division had the smallest gender pay gap, at 4.9 percent.
(Reporting by Carolyn Cohn, Lawrence White, Simon Jessop, Maiya Keidan, Iain Withers and Sinead Cruise; Editing by Mark Potter)
Appearing Thursday on CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper said special counsel Robert Mueller’s report is “devastating” and provides a “road map” for impeachment of President Donald Trump despite exonerating him of criminal conspiracy with Russia.
CHRIS CUOMO: First of all, your take on how the AG has handled this process culminating today?
JAMES CLAPPER: Well, to be honest Chris, I’m a bit disappointed. I think the Attorney General is clearly trying to paint as favorable a light on the Mueller report as possible and when you read it, it’s pretty devastating. I’ll tell you though, the big deal for me in this is laying out in very rich detail the magnitude and pervasiveness of the Russia interference in our election in 2016. And it’s personally gratifying because the intelligence community’s assessment that we rendered on January 6th of 2017, briefed President-elect Trump on about the Russia interference. But this report, we only scratched the surface and I hope Americans will take the time to read that, the collusion, obstruction aside. The big deal to me is the magnitude of the Russian interference. No one can say they didn’t interfere and, in fact, taint the election.
CUOMO: And like the president did on the world stage with Putin right by his side, where he said, “I don’t know why it would be Russia,” and then they tried to say after that he said “wouldn’t.” That was about as clumsy as all the other cover-ups that we see in this report. They knew there was interference, they tried to benefit from it. They did things that were wrong. They lied about the same. But those don’t equate with crimes. So, Mr. Clapper, where does that leave us in terms of what to do with that information? What would be a righteous move by Congress?
CLAPPER: It really is a conundrum as others have commented earlier, particularly for the Democrats, the Democrats in the House, whether to pursue this in terms of impeachment. Clearly, at least my read of the Mueller report is that there is a road map laid out there if the Congress chooses to follow it.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on Monday was one of the most powerful launched ever by Gaza militants, flying nearly 120 kilometers (70 miles) before it slammed into a house in central Israel, wounding seven people.
Over more than a decade, the Islamic militant Hamas group has built up a large arsenal of rockets and missiles. It started with crude short-range projectiles and now possesses rockets that can strike virtually anywhere in Israel.
Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, prompting Israel and Egypt to impose a blockade on the territory, largely to prevent the militants from amassing more weapons. But the blockade and three wars with Israel — the most recent in 2014 — failed to prevent Hamas from expanding its arsenal.
A network of smuggling tunnels along the Egyptian border is believed to have helped Hamas bring in advanced weapons and raw materials, though Egypt shuttered most of the tunnels around 2013.
In 2018, Gaza's Hamas chief Yehiya Sinwar boasted that the group had not only replenished the rockets it fired during the 50-day war in 2014, but had many more at its disposal. He said that what had been fired in 50 days "would be fired within five minutes" of any future Israeli offensive.
Monday's rocket strike was the furthest a Gaza rocket has landed since 2014, when Hamas struck the northern Israeli city of Haifa, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) away.
Hamas doesn't release details about its military capabilities.
Gabi Siboni, an Israeli military analyst, said Hamas "has a variety of advanced, precise, and effective weaponry." He said this includes guided anti-tank missiles and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, both produced by Russia, as well as some drones.
ROCKETS
—Qassams: In 2001, a year after the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising against Israel, Hamas first fired a cross-border rocket toward Israel, calling it "Qassam" after the group's military wing. The homemade rockets, aimed at Israeli border towns, had an irregular trajectory and sometimes landed inside Gaza.
—R-160: Hamas calls this its longest-range home-grown rocket. It was first fired in the 2014 war and at one point hit Haifa. The "R'' in the name refers to Abdel-Aziz Rantissi, a senior Hamas official who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2004. The number refers to the range, in kilometers.
—J-80: This rocket, also produced locally, is named after Hamas military wing commander Ahmed Jabari, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his car in 2012, setting off an eight-day war. Israel reportedly believes the rocket that hit central Israel on Monday was this model and blamed Hamas. The group has not claimed responsibility.
—M-75: Hamas unveiled this rocket in 2014, claiming it was homemade. But experts believe it is a version of the Iranian Fajr 5 rocket, which Iran acquired in the 1990s and is based on Chinese technology.
—Hamas also possess a variety of Russian Grad rockets. These projectiles, with a range of about 20 kilometers (12 miles), are believed to have been delivered via Iran.
___
TUNNELS
In recent years, Hamas has built a sophisticated network of tunnels. These include attack tunnels that run under the Gaza-Israel perimeter fence, for use by assailants to infiltrate Israel. Defensive tunnels, located away from the border, are used to store weapons and serve as hideouts.
Hamas first used tunnels in a 2006 cross-border attack in which it killed two Israeli soldiers and captured a third. The soldier, Gilad Shalit, was swapped for more than 1,000 prisoners in 2011.
Hamas also used the tunnels in the 2014 war, killing five soldiers in one cross-border raid.
During the fighting, Israel said it discovered and destroyed 32 tunnels. Since then, it says it has discovered and destroyed several additional tunnels.
To combat the tunnel threat, Israel has begun building an underground barrier running the length of the Gaza Strip, and this year it said it was reinforcing the Gaza fence with 20-foot-high galvanized steel.
___
IMPORTED WEAPONS
—Mortars. Hamas has fired hundreds of mortars at short-range targets just across the border. The mortars are believed to have been smuggled from Libya through Egypt.
— Laser-guided anti-tank missiles made by Russia. Last November, Hamas fired such a missile, known as Kornet, at a bus from which Israeli soldiers had just exited. One soldier was seriously wounded. In a 2006 war, the Lebanese Hezbollah militia killed dozens of Israeli tank soldiers using these weapons.
—Drones: Hamas has developed an early-stage drone program, displaying images of Israeli fields purportedly filmed by these aircraft. It's not known whether they have been used for attacks.
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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, 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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