Upcoming shows
Real News

NOW ON AIR
Now On Air

Alex Jones – Info Wars

12:00 pm 4:00 pm



Maga First News

Upcoming Shows

Join The MAGA Network on Discord

0 0

Trump Slams Pelosi’s ‘Puff Piece’ ’60 Minutes’ Interview

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “puff piece” interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” failed to hit on major news topics, including the “Mueller No Collusion decision,” President Donald Trump tweeted late Sunday.

“Her leadership has passed no meaningful Legislation,” Trump said. “All they do is Investigate, as it turns out, crimes that they instigated & committed. The Mueller No Collusion decision wasn’t even discussed-and she was a disaster at W.H.”

Pelosi during a wide-ranging interview with “60 Minutes” pushed back on claims the Democratic Party is embracing socialism, described a tense meeting with Trump over the border wall and a government shutdown last year and said she believed Democrats could work with Trump.

She also pushed for the release of the Mueller report and said she didn’t trust Attorney General William Barr.

“Do you think that the attorney general is covering anything up?” CBS’ Lesley Stahl asked.

“I have no idea,” Pelosi said. “I have no idea. He may be whitewashing, but I don't know if he's covering anything up. There's no use having that discussion. All we need to do is see the Mueller report.”

Pelosi saw Trump’s tweet and responded: “Thanks for watching! We will continue to do our work #ForThePeople.”

Source: NewsMax Politics

0 0

Yes, Julian Assange Is a Journalist — But That Shouldn’t Matter

Julian Assange was arrested last week in London, and he awaits legal proceedings designs to extradite him to the United States to be tried on hacking charges.

At least, those are the charges currently known. Experience suggests that US authorities are likely to add additional charges once they have Assange in the US.

The US government has sought to prosecute Assange since at least 2010 when Wikileaks released video footage of US forces murdering civilians — including two Reuters reporters — during 2007 air strikes.

Many additional leaks followed, which served to make Wikileaks and Assange the enemies of a diverse number of politicians, bureaucrats, and government intelligence agencies. Thus, his arrest has long appeared nearly inevitable.

“Journalists” Against Assange

Given Assange’s role in exposing government lies, corruption, and abuse, one would think that most journalists — most of whom fancy themselves as warriors against government abuse — would call for his release.

That’s not what happened. Instead, many self-described journalists have claimed that Assange isn’t a journalist at all.

In the wake of his arrest, The Washington Post and USNews both dispatched columnists to define Assange as not-a-journalist. Not surprisingly, the right-wing media — e.g., National Review and Commentary — which reliably sides with the military establishment, has also denied Assange is a journalist.

But why exactly is he not a journalist?

According to Kathleen Parker, writing for The Washington Post: “He is not, after all, a journalist, despite his claiming to be, because he isn’t accountable to anyone. No filters, no standards.”

Parker goes on to claim that real journalists must subject their work huge corporate media outlets like The New York Times or The Washington Post, thus allowing editors at those organizations to then decide what information ought to be considered worthy of public disclosure.

Writing for US News, Susan Milligan claims Assange is not a journalist because his motivations are not sufficiently pure. She claims Assange released certain information for the purposes of retribution or personal amusement.The fact that this information was also potentially significant in identifying government abuse and corruption is apparently irrelevant to Milligan. In her mind, “legitimate journalism” is defined by your feelings about the information being released.

Not all journalists fallen victim to the fetish for making journalism a special protected class of approved experts.

Demanding that Assange be afforded the usual protections afforded to journalism demanded by the establishment media, Glenn Greenwald has supported Assange, as has  James Ball at The Atlantic.The editorial boards of some small American newspapers — being outside the DC-NewYork axis — have taken a more principled stand on exposing government crimes, declaring Assange to be a journalist, indeed. The Pittsburg Post-Gazette’s editors write:

Mr. Assange’s critics dispute the notion that charging him is an attack on the First Amendment. They say Mr. Assange isn’t a journalist, just the curator of a website that puts secrets on display. One might argue about the craft of journalism. One might argue about the quality of journalism. But in terms of the exercise of First Amendment freedoms, revealing what is hidden is journalism. That makes Mr. Assange, apart from his personality or his politics, a journalist.

An Arbitrary Standard

Most of the “standards” the media establishment are using to redefine Assange as a non-journalist are purely arbitrary. Whether or not one gets the approval of someone at The Washington Post or some other “official” media outlet has exactly nothing to do with whether or not one is a journalist.

After all, the standards used by journalists today to define their exclusive group were invented less that a century ago. They were pushed by those who wanted to popularize  the idea of “expert” journalists who could dictate to the general public as to what information was relevant to the public interest.

In her column against Assange, Milligan defines journalism as “collecting information, checking the facts, getting the perspectives of the people affected by the information, and then putting all of it together in a way that puts the details in perspective.” But she’s just repeating quaint bromides they teach undergraduates in journalism school.

Prior to the triumph of the Progressive myth of journalist “experts,” the definition of journalism was far more broad, and far more flexible. Although today’s J-school priesthood insists not just anyone can call himself a journalist, that certainly wasn’t the case in the days when anti-slavery activists routinely set up their own newspapers to report on the realities of slavery in America.

Yes, people like William Lloyd Garrison and Elijah P. Lovejoy were ideological anti-slavery activists. But they were also journalists. Virtually no one disputes this today, although pro-slavery activists at the time certainly denounced these newspapermen as mere agitators and Jacobins.

Unfortunately for the slave drivers of the antebellum South, Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post wasn’t around to demand that the first-hand testimonies of escaped slaves — a common feature in the abolitionist newspapers — be submitted first to the wise editors of The New York Times. Only then, it seems, could we know if anti-slavery information was in the “public interest.” Given that the mainstream press of the period opposed abolitionism for the most part, we could expect that the slave narratives would have been deemed “irresponsible” and not up to the standards of “journalism.”

Thank goodness out modern-day gatekeepers weren’t around then.

Yes, Assange is Comparable to Daniel Ellsberg

Although many establishment journalists are going to great pains to pave the way for Assange’s prosecution, they face a problem: there is nearly universal agreement among journalists that Daniel Ellseberg is a hero.

Ellsberg, of course, is the former RAND Corp. employee who stole government secrets from his employers and sought (successfully) to have them published in major news outlets. Today, these documents are known as The Pentagon Papers, and their release was a watershed moment in journalism and in the Vietnam War. The documents showed, among other things, that President Lyndon Johnson lied to both the puiblic and to Congress about US involvement in Vietnam. It was an embarrassment for the US government overall, and the military establishment. It helped hasten the end of the Vietnam War and helped to cast a pall of illegitimacy over the entire endeavor. At the time, the information was classified.

Ellsberg was eventually prosecuted for theft and espionage. The case was dismissed.

Ellsberg’s reputation, however, means it becomes necessary for journalists to claim that Ellsberg and Assangeare fundamentally different in some way.

For his part, Ellsberg himself sees no difference. In an April 11 interview, Ellsberg denounces the arrest of Assange, and clearly considers Assange’s actions to be comparable to his own.

The primary difference it seems, is that the methods of disseminating information as much different in today’s world than was the case in 1971 when Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers. The distinction between Ellsberg and Assange appears to be merely one of technology.

The American State’s Attack on Real Journalism

But why is so much ink being spilled on whether or not Assange a journalist? Yes, some of it is just the usual narcissism we’ve come to expect from reporters. Journalists regard themselves as an exclusive club, and they like to excommunicate those whom they suspect of moving in on their territory.

But the stakes are higher than that.

If Assange is a journalist, then his arrest and prosecution is an attack on what investigative journalists do everyday.

While there have been some attempts in the media to define Assange’s investigative methods as substantially different form journalism in general, no real distinctions are clear. Much of the rhetoric surrounding claims of Assange’s criminality stem from the assertion that he asked Chelsea Manning to give him more government information.

Yet, this behavior is common to journalists everywhere.

Ellsberg, for instance, states “if that’s a crime, then journalism is a crime,” noting he had been asked on numerous occasions by numerous journalists to provide them with more information. He adds “unauthorized disclosures of this kind are the life’s blood of a republic.”

Do Journalists Have Special Rights?

At the heart of the matter, we find an additional problem: the idea that journalists enjoy special rights that ordinary people don’t. Consequently, if Assange is a journalist, then he gets special legal privileges in whistleblowing and releasing sensitive government documents. If he’s not a journalist, he’s then presumably open to prosecution.

The authors of the First Amendment, though, did not envision any such distinction. In the late eighteenth century — as in the days of the antebellum abolitionist press — newspapermen were simply people who set up a printing press and sold newspapers. If you could convince someone to buy your papers, you were a journalist.

Governments hated this, of course. The ease with which journalists could print nearly any opinion or revelation was why John Adams wanted the Alien and Sedition Acts — to shut journalists up.

But the freedom of speech was so ingrained in the American mind by that point that there was little the federal government could do about them. After all, the First Amendment says simply that Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” It doesn’t say anything about these freedoms being restricted only to people who are deemed journalists by The Washington Post. Had the authors of the Bill of Rights wanted this to be the case, they could have said so.

Today, things are quite different. Lawmakers, courts, and their accomplices have managed to define down who is a journalist in order to protect the government from embarrassment.

Establishment journalists have been happy to play along, claiming special privileges for themselves while demanding those outside their circle of friends be sent to federal prison.



Alex Jones talks over the phone with callers and gauges their reactions to AG Barr discussing the redacted first part of Mueller’s report.

Source: InfoWars

0 0

UGA fraternity suspended after racist video spread online

Four students were expelled from a University of Georgia fraternity on Saturday after a video depicting them using racial slurs and mocking the mistreatment of slaves went viral on social media.

According to UGA student newspaper The Red and Black, the video that surfaced online on Friday showed four members of the Xi-Lambda chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon pretending to use a belt as a whip while saying "pick my cotton," followed by a curse word and a racial slur.

The fraternity said that the incident took place off-campus at a non-Tau Kappa Epsilon function and condemned the students' behavior in a statement posted online.

AS CRUCIAL BREXIT VOTES LOOM, THERESA MAY BACKED BY MINISTERS AMID COUP REPORTS

"Tau Kappa Epsilon is disgusted, appalled and angered by the remarks shown in a video of four expelled members," the fraternity said in a statement. "TKE will not tolerate any actions such as these that would be defined as racist, discriminatory and/or offensive."

The video had attracted the notice of UGA's student government association, which said the chapter of TKE was "currently suspended" pending an investigation.

The university also rebuked the video in its own statement on Saturday.

THOUSANDS ATTEND NEW ZEALAND VIGIL TO MOURN CHRISTCHURCH VICTIMS AND PROTEST RACISM

"The University of Georgia condemns racism in the strongest terms. Racism has no place on our campus. We will continue our efforts to promote a welcoming and supportive learning environment for our students, faculty and staff," the university said on Twitter.

The University of Georgia, which was founded in 1785 and is one of the country's oldest public universities, was racially integrated in 1961.

Source: Fox News National

0 0

French prosecutor seeks jail for Orange CEO over Tapie affair

French telecom group Orange CEO Stephane Richard arrives for a trial over a disputed state payment at the Paris courthouse
French telecom group Orange CEO Stephane Richard arrives for a trial over a disputed state payment at the Paris courthouse, France, April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier

April 1, 2019

PARIS (Reuters) – A French prosecutor on Monday told judges Orange chief executive Stephane Richard should face three years in jail for his alleged involvement in a disputed compensation payment made in 2008 by the state to tycoon Bernard Tapie.

The prosecutor said 18 months of the sentence should be suspended, and that Richard should be barred from working in the public service for five years.

Richard has denied the allegations, saying he was doing his job and only played a secondary role in the arbitration process in which Tapie was awarded 403 million euros ($452 million) in the state-funded settlement.

Tapie is locked in a fight over the sale of his stake in sportswear firm Adidas in 1993 to Credit Lyonnais, then government-owned, and the compensation he won over the transaction 15 years later.

Richard is accused of complicity over the disputed payment. He was working as chief of staff to then-finance minister Christine Lagarde when it was made.

The prosecutor is also seeking a five-year jail term for Tapie. ($1 = 0.8923 euros)

(Reporting by Emmanuel Jarry, Writing by Richard Lough and Bate Felix, Editing by Catherine Evans and John Stonestreet)

Source: OANN

0 0

EU watchdog SRB sees no imminent banking risks from no-deal Brexit

Anti-Brexit demonstrators gather outside the Houses of Parliament, in Westminster, London
Anti-Brexit demonstrators gather outside the Houses of Parliament, in Westminster, London, Britain, March 25, 2019. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

March 26, 2019

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Euro zone banks face no imminent risks from a no-deal Brexit, the head of the European Union agency responsible for dealing with failing lenders said on Tuesday.

Single Resolution Board’s chief Elke Koenig also said a court ruling last week which overturned an EU decision over the rescue of Italy’s Tercas bank in 2014 could open the way for a discussion on the role of deposit guarantee schemes beyond their core function of protecting savers of collapsing banks.

(Reporting by Francesco Guarascio, Editing by Gabriela Baczynska)

Source: OANN

0 0

Rakuten says to book $990 million gain on Lyft investment

FILE PHOTO: Rakuten's network facility for its under-construction mobile network is pictured in Tokyo
FILE PHOTO: Rakuten's network facility for its under-construction mobile network is pictured in Tokyo, Japan, February 20, 2019. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-hoon/File Photo

April 1, 2019

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s Rakuten said on Monday it will book a 110 million yen ($989.74 million) gain in the quarter through March on its investment in Lyft following the U.S. ride-hailing firm’s listing last week.

Rakuten become Lyft’s largest shareholder with a 13 percent stake ahead of its IPO. Lyft shares closed 9 percent higher at $78.29 in their market debut on Friday, giving the loss-making firm a market capitalization of around $22.2 billion.

Rakuten’s shares were down 3 percent by the midday break in Tokyo on Monday, underperforming the broader market. Its shares have climbed 38 percent this year on rising investor expectations of returns on its tech investments.

Those bets include ride-hailing firm Careem, which is being acquired by Uber for $3.1 billion, and image sharing website Pinterest, which has filed for an IPO.

Rakuten’s finances are being squeezed with falling margins at its core e-commerce unit and it is making an ambitious attempt to break into Japan’s mature telecoms market with the start of carrier services in October.

(Reporting by Sam Nussey; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Source: OANN

0 0

U.S. ‘will not be bought off’ by China soy deal in trade talks: Perdue

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue speaks during an event in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue speaks during an event hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump with workers on "Cutting the Red Tape, Unleashing Economic Freedom" in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, U.S., October 17, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

February 25, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States will keep pressing China for intellectual property safeguards in trade talks, regardless of Beijing’s pledge to purchase 10 million tonnes of U.S. soybeans in the near term, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said on Monday.

“Still, the structural core issues of intellectual property transfer have to be dealt with,” Perdue told reporters after a speech in Washington. “We will not be bought off as a country over purchases without eliminating some of these non-trade barriers in China.”

Asked about the time frame of the 10 million-tonne purchase, Perdue said: “That is near term. The impression I had, it is imminent.”

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Source: OANN

NOW ON AIR
Now On Air

Alex Jones – Info Wars

12:00 pm 4:00 pm



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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE RADICAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“HARD TO TAKE”

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

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

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

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

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

Zahran went into hiding once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

Listen to https://magaoneradio.net and Listen Daily! Don't Forget to Share Click a Link Below!
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

Listen to https://magaoneradio.net and Listen Daily! Don't Forget to Share Click a Link Below!
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

Listen to https://magaoneradio.net and Listen Daily! Don't Forget to Share Click a Link Below!
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

Listen to https://magaoneradio.net and Listen Daily! Don't Forget to Share Click a Link Below!
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

Listen to https://magaoneradio.net and Listen Daily! Don't Forget to Share Click a Link Below!

Listen to https://magaoneradio.net and Listen Daily! Don't Forget to Share Click a Link Below!
Current track

Title

Artist