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Ocasio-Cortez impersonator, 8, takes on Green New Deal, socialism in adorable Twitter video

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., may have a new challenger in the form of an 8-year-old girl whose adorable impression of the progressive has won over hearts and minds on social media.

Ava Martinez poked fun at the freshman congresswoman’s Green New Deal, legislation that calls for a massive overhaul of the nation’s economy and energy use—estimated to cost tens of trillions of dollars.

AOC NARRATES VIDEO FROM FUTURE IN WHICH HER 'GREEN NEW DEAL' SAVES US FROM ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE

“Like, I want to talk about, like, climate change. Because, like, there’s no doubt cow farts are making the climate change,” Martinez says, donning Ocasio-Cortez-inspired glasses and red lipstick.

“Like, in July, the climate was 96 degrees and in February the climate was 36 degrees. OMG, like that’s a huge change in the climate in”—the mini-AOC looks down to count her fingers—“only four months!”

Social media users praised the impression as “pure gold,” with some suggesting Martinez would make a “much better Congresswoman.”

Martinez’s stepdad, Salvatore Schachter, told the New York Post that the 8-year-old’s resemblance to Ocasio-Cortez was noted amongst family members and thought that doing a video would be fun.

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“I thought it would gain attention, because she’s adorable, but not like this,” he said of its over 1 million combined views across two tweets.

Martinez closes out her impression with her thoughts on socialism, saying, “Like, socialism is actually short for social media. I do social media, so I’m a socialist.”

Source: Fox News Politics

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Family of Utah girl who fell from ski lift at resort credits helmet for saving her life

The family of a Utah girl who fell 30 to 40 feet off a ski lift Saturday credited the 8-year-old’s helmet with saving her life.

Saylor Reeve was captured on a skier’s GoPro video laying on the hard-pack snow after she plunged from the ski lift at Park City Mountain Resort. Saylor’s family said the girl suffered a seizure while on the lift, which caused her to fall.

“Horrific is not even a strong enough word to describe it,” Saylor’s mother, Cydney Reeve, told FOX13 Salt Lake City.

Brian Bosworth told FOX13 he saw the child fall and hit the snowy ground.

AVALANCHE BURIES BACKCOUNTRY SKIER IN UTAH BEFORE DRAMATIC RESCUE, HELMET VIDEO SHOWS

“She wasn't moving at all,” Bosworth recalled. “I just couldn't believe my eyes. It's one of those things you always think about but you never think it's going to happen or you never think you're going to witness and just to see it was just shocking and nauseating.”

Cydney Reeve said she began frantically screaming for help while she was stuck on the lift. She credited her daughter’s helmet with saving the girl’s life.

“We're so grateful people responded to my screaming my frantic screaming to help her. That's all we could do is ask for help,” Reeve said. “If she had not had a helmet on this would have been a completely different story.”

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Saylor was hospitalized and is recovering from injuries, including a compression fracture in her spine.

She is expected to make a full recovery.

Despite the fall, her family said Saylor will “be back out there no doubt.”

Source: Fox News National

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VIDEO: Migrant Clips Barbed Wire Off U.S. Border Fence In Broad Daylight

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Source: InfoWars

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Catalan leader says Spanish PM might back down on independence vote

Jailed Catalan politician Jordi Sanchez gestures during a news conference from prison in Soto del Real
Jailed Catalan politician Jordi Sanchez gestures during a news conference from prison in Soto del Real, Spain, April 18, 2019. EFE/Pool via REUTERS

April 18, 2019

By Joan Faus and Isla Binnie

MADRID (Reuters) – A jailed Catalan separatist leader standing in Spain’s national election this month said on Thursday he expected Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to consider a possible referendum on the region’s independence to help secure a second term in office.

In a news conference from the Madrid prison where he is being held, Jordi Sanchez – his party’s top candidate in the April 28 ballot – suggested the likely need for coalition deals would spur his namesake to cooperate.

Sanchez is standing trial for sedition for his role in a failed independence bid in 2017, and the wealthy region’s undimmed ambition to split from Spain is among the most emotive campaign issues in the election.

Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists are expected to win the most seats, but will need support from one or more other party – possibly including the Catalan separatists – to form a parliamentary majority.

He has taken a more conciliatory tone towards political dialogue with Catalonia than his conservative predecessor.

But, along with other mainstream leaders in Madrid, he has consistently rejected the idea of an independence referendum or any unilateral secession bid, and hardened his position as the election campaign has heated up.

On Thursday, in an interview with radio station Onda Cero given after the Catalan leader’s comments, he reiterated that there would be “no referendum, no independence” for the region.

Jordi Sanchez, a member of exiled former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont’s PDeCAT party, said he thought political circumstances might persuade the outgoing prime minister – to whom he is not related – to have a rethink.

The secessionist movement would act on “the will that the citizens express themselves democratically at the ballot box, and we are convinced that sooner or later the Spanish Socialist party will accept this way,” Sanchez said.

Speaking to reporters via a videoconference organized by national news agency EFE, he said any other decision would “lead either to a permanent blockage (of the Catalonia independence debate) or pave the way for a government of the right.”

Opposition to Catalan independence has been a core rallying cry for the conservative People’s Party, center-right Ciudadanos and far-right Vox, which could potentially win enough seats combined to form a viable coalition.

Jordi Sanchez and three other jailed Catalan politicians said last week the separatists should be more flexible about entering negotiations with Madrid, provided a vote on independence remained an option.

During Thursday’s news conference he spoke mainly Catalan and sat in front of two symbols of Spanish unity: the red and yellow flag and a portrait of King Felipe.

(Reporting by Isla Binnie and Joan Faus; Editing by Ingrid Melander and John Stonestreet)

Source: OANN

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Maryland Democratic official takes heat for calls to 'dox' gun rights activists

A Democratic Party leader in Maryland is facing criticism for last month posting on Facebook a call to “dox” gun rights activists.

Maryland Democratic Party Secretary Robbie Leonard took to social media to post photos from a Maryland House Judiciary Committee meeting in late February, where gun rights activists wore “We Will Not Comply” shirts during the hearing on additional gun control measures, along with a message calling the advocates “homegrown terrorists” and calling on his followers to “dox” them.

“I hope the FBI runs the name of every witness who is wearing a t-shirt that says ‘We Will Not Comply,’ Leonard said in one Facebook message. “They’re a bunch of terrorists in the making.”

CALIFORNIA DEMS FLEX NEW SUPERMAJORITY, WITH PLANS TO PURSUE GUN TAX AND MORE

In another message, Leonard posted a photo of a protestor along with the comment: “Time to dox some homegrown terrorists.”

Doxing is a practice of researching and broadcasting over the Internet the personal and private information of an individual or organization, normally with malicious intent.

Gun rights groups and lobbyists were quick to condemn Leonard for his comments on social media, pointing out that Maryland’s criminal code prohibits doxing and that the gun rights activists are protected under the First Amendment.

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“The bizarre posts offer a glimpse into the fevered mind of the gun control advocate,” the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action said in a post. “Revealing a severe dearth of knowledge regarding the Bill of Rights, in Leonard’s view, federal law enforcement should be employed to intimidate his political enemies for conduct expressly protected under the First Amendment.”

The Maryland Democratic Party did not respond to Fox News’ request for comment.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Japan faces recession risks with dearth of ammunition

FILE PHOTO: Pedestrians are silhouetted as they walk past the Tokyo Tower in Tokyo
FILE PHOTO: Pedestrians are silhouetted as they walk past the Tokyo Tower in Tokyo, Japan December 26, 2017. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo

April 8, 2019

By Leika Kihara and Stanley White

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan appears to have dodged a thanks to resilient business spending but tanking factory and export sectors and a lack of policy options leave it particularly vulnerable if a projected recovery in the global economy fails to materialize.

If domestic growth crumbles, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could postpone yet again a scheduled sales tax hike in October or offer a modest increase in fiscal spending, some analysts say.

The Bank of Japan, too, may be forced to ramp up monetary support, though many analysts say the central bank is left with few effective tools to prop up growth.

While the chances of such actions are small, they cannot be ruled out given Japan’s exposure to economic swings in big export destinations like China, analysts say.

“Chances are fifty-fifty that Abe may delay the sales tax hike again,” said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute, who see a 70 percent chance Japan may slide into recession.

“If the sales tax is delayed, the BOJ would come under pressure for further easing.”

More extreme steps like using government spending as a primary policy tool to boost employment and spur inflation – an idea dubbed “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT) backed by some U.S. academics and politicians – are off the table for now, government officials say.

“There is no sense that someone is going to latch onto this and push for a huge increase in fiscal spending,” a government official with direct knowledge on economic policy-making said, when asked by Reuters about MMT.

“However, the government’s position is that fiscal and monetary policy need to work together,” the official said, adding that the priority for government officials is to deal with any downside shocks with additional fiscal spending.

Factory output and exports slumped in January due to a bruising U.S.-China trade war, forcing the government to cut its economic assessment in March for the first time in three years.

But the government held off from declaring Japan in a recession. Central bank policymakers also saw relief in the BOJ’s “tankan” survey last week that showed companies were maintaining their robust capital expenditure plans.

Still, government and central bank policymakers worry that the global slowdown, if it persists, may eventually prompt firms to delay investment, say sources familiar with their thinking.

“External headwinds aren’t hurting capital expenditure yet, so Japan can still expect a second-half rebound in growth,” said one of the sources. “But uncertainty is high,” the source said, adding that much will depend on how quickly global growth – notably China’s economy – will pick up.

Abe has said he will go ahead with a twice-delayed increase in the sales tax rate to 10 percent from 8 percent in October unless a shock to the scale of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 hits the global economy.

The government has already earmarked roughly 2 trillion yen ($17.95 billion) in spending to mitigate the pain, raising the threshold to postpone the tax hike again. But some analysts say another delay could not be ruled out as Abe faces an upper house election in the summer.

The BOJ could be asked upon to ramp up stimulus, though it is running out of ammunition and facing criticism that prolonged easing is inflicting too much pain on financial institutions.

With the cost of its stimulus rising, the BOJ may be left to rely on words rather than action to bolster the business mood and prevent unwelcome yen rises that hurt exports, some analysts say.

“The BOJ is running out of options … It has to sound dovish to prevent the yen from rising,” said Hiroaki Muto, senior economist at Tokai Tokyo Research Center.

“The first step would be using forward guidance to show the direction is toward easing and normalization is very much in the distance.”

(Additional reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto and Kaori Kaneko; Editing by Sam Holmes)

Source: OANN

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Turkish defense minister had ‘constructive’ U.S. talks: Anadolu

FILE PHOTO: Turkey's Hulusi Akar during a military exercise near the port city of Izmir
FILE PHOTO: Turkey's Hulusi Akar, when he was chief of the general staff, during the EFES-2018 military exercise near the Aegean port city of Izmir, Turkey May 10, 2018. REUTERS/Osman Orsal/File Photo

April 17, 2019

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey’s defense minister said he had a “very constructive” talks with U.S. Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and their views have got closer on some subjects, state-owned Anadolu news agency reported on Wednesday.

Defense Minister Hulusi Akar had been visiting Washington with a large Turkish delegation for talks which have in part focused on areas of discord between the NATO allies, chiefly the purchase of a missile-defense system and the war in Syria.

“The talk was very constructive and occurred with a very positive approach,” Akar said of his meeting with Shanahan, according to Anadolu. “We gladly observed that they understood many subjects much better and have got very close to our views on these subjects.”

He did not specify which subjects he was referring to.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week Washington had told Ankara it could face retribution for buying Russian S-400 missile defense systems under a sanctions law known as Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CATSAA).

President Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said on Tuesday Turkey expects President Donald Trump to use a waiver to protect it if the U.S. Congress decides to sanction Ankara over the planned S-400 purchase. [nL5N21Y58Z]

Turkey has not backed down from the acquisition and said it should not trigger sanctions as Ankara is not an adversary of Washington and remains committed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. [nL5N21X4DZ]

U.S. officials have said the S-400 purchase would risk Ankara’s partnership in the joint strike fighter F-35 program because it would compromise the jets, made by Lockheed Martin Corp. Turkish companies produce some of the parts for the F-35 stealth fighter jet.

Akar said Turkey had fulfilled its responsibilities on the issue of the F-35 project and that the training of Turkish pilots and maintenance teams was continuing.

“We expect the other eight countries who are partners in this project to fulfill their responsibilities towards us,” he said.

Ankara has proposed to Washington that the two countries establish a technical committee under the NATO umbrella to determine whether the S-400s endanger the F-35 jets as the Americans argue, and is waiting to hear back from the United States.

The United States and other NATO allies that own F-35s fear the S-400 radar will learn how to spot and track the jet, making it less able to evade Russian weapons.

The disagreement is the latest in a series of diplomatic disputes between the NATO allies, including Turkish demands that Washington extradite cleric Fethullah Gulen, differences over Middle East policy and the war in Syria, and sanctions on Iran.

(Reporting by Daren Butler; Editing by Jonathan Spicer)

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Wells Fargo logo is seen in New York City
FILE PHOTO: A Wells Fargo logo is seen in New York City, U.S. January 10, 2017. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith

April 26, 2019

By Jessica DiNapoli and Imani Moise

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Wells Fargo & Co’s board has retained executive search firm Spencer Stuart to hunt for a new chief executive, ideally a woman who can tackle its regulatory and public perception issues, two people familiar with the matter said.

Wells Fargo’s ambition to become the only major U.S. bank with a female CEO underscores the need to restore its image with a wide range of constituents, including customers, shareholders, regulators and politicians, after it became mired in a scandal in 2016 for opening potentially millions of unauthorized accounts.

Former CEO Tim Sloan left abruptly last month, becoming the second CEO to leave the bank in the scandal’s fallout.

The board plans to approach Citigroup Inc’s Latin America chief Jane Fraser, one of the sources said. During Fraser’s 15-year tenure at Citigroup, she has gained experience running consumer and commercial businesses as well as its private bank.

Fraser could not be immediately reached for comment.

The board also discussed approaching JPMorgan Chase & Co’s Marianne Lake, but after the bank named her to run JPMorgan’s consumer lending business last week, that option became less viable, the source added. The board wants someone who can convince regulators, employees, investors and customers that the bank has fixed problems underpinning the sales scandal, the sources said.

The bank’s board feels that choosing a woman might please lawmakers in Washington who have been critical not only of Wells Fargo’s misbehavior, but of the broader banking industry for a lack of diversity and gender equality, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It also believes that such a move could bolster Wells Fargo’s image with the households of customers where women play a leading role in managing finances, one of the sources added.

The new CEO will also have to resolve litigation and regulatory matters. There are 14 outstanding consent orders with government entities, as well as probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice.

To be sure, Spencer Stuart will approach and consider several male candidates for the CEO job as well, one of the sources said. The top priority is to find an external candidate who can navigate the bank’s regulatory issues, the source added.

Finding an outsider who meets all those qualifications and wants the job will be difficult, the sources said. There are few people with the necessary experience, even fewer of those who are women, and it is not clear if any of the obvious candidates would be open to taking the role.

The sources asked not to be identified because Wells Fargo’s board deliberations are confidential.

Spokespeople for Wells Fargo and Spencer Stuart declined to comment.

Wells Fargo’s board has not made any public statements about its requirements for a new CEO, beyond Chair Betsy Duke saying the job should attract the “top talent in banking.”

The board wants to complete the search within the next three to six months, one of the sources said.

STALLED SHARES

After Sloan’s ouster, Wells Fargo’s board appointed Allen Parker, who had been general counsel, as interim CEO. The board has said it is looking for an external candidate as a permanent replacement. It is not clear whether Parker will stay at the bank.

Others whose names have been mentioned by analysts, recruiters and industry sources as perspective CEO candidates include Alphabet Inc finance chief Ruth Porat and Bank of America Corp’s chief technology officer Cathy Bessant.

Wells Fargo shares have stalled since Sloan’s departure on March 29th, while the KBW Bank index has rallied more than 7 percent.

Wells Fargo would be “the best stock on earth to buy” if it had the right CEO, said Greg Donaldson, chairman of Donaldson Capital Management in Indiana.

Donaldson held about 50,000 Wells Fargo shares, but sold the stake last year as problems mounted. The CEO change could convince him to re-invest, depending on who it is, he told Reuters.

“It would be very smart for them to get a woman,” he said.

(Reporting by Jessica DiNapoli and Imani Moise in New York; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra, Greg Roumeliotis and Susan Thomas)

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A worker walks on the roof of a new home under construction in Carlsbad
FILE PHOTO: A worker walks on the roof of a new home under construction in Carlsbad, California September 22, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Blake

April 26, 2019

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. economy is growing at a 2.08% annualized pace in the second quarter based on upbeat data on durable goods orders and new home sales in March, the New York Federal Reserve’s Nowcast model showed on Friday.

This was faster than the 1.92% growth rate calculated by the N.Y. Fed model the week before.

(Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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Extraordinary European Union leaders summit in Brussels
FILE PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte arrives at an extraordinary European Union leaders summit to discuss Brexit, in Brussels, Belgium April 10, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman

April 26, 2019

(Reuters) – Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Friday he had assured China’s Huawei Technologies that it would not face discrimination in the rollout of Italy’s 5G telecoms network.

Conte was speaking on a visit to China where he said he met Huawei’s chief executive, Ren Zhengfei. The prime minister’s comments were carried in Italy by TV broadcaster Sky Italia.

“I told him that we have adopted some precautions, some measures to protect our interests that demand very high levels of security … not only from Huawei but any company entering into the 5G arena,” he said.

Huawei, the world’s biggest producer of telecoms equipment, is under intense scrutiny after the United States told allies not to use its technology because of fears it could be a vehicle for Chinese spying. Huawei has categorically denied this.

(Writing by by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Angelo Amante)

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U.S. President Trump departs for travel to Indianapolis from the White House in Washington
U.S. President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he departs for travel to Indianapolis, Indiana from the White House in Washington, U.S., April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

April 26, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Friday was expected to announce his intention to revoke the United States’ status as a signatory of the Arms Trade Treaty, which was signed in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama but never ratified by Congress, two U.S. officials said.

Trump was expected to announce the decision in a speech in Indianapolis, to the National Rifle Association, the officials said. The NRA, a powerful gun lobby group, has long been opposed to the treaty, which was negotiated at the United Nations.

(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Bill Trott)

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