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U.S. to designate Brazil a major non-NATO ally: sources

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro waves before a meeting with Paraguay's President Mario Abdo at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia
Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro waves before a meeting with Paraguay's President Mario Abdo at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

March 14, 2019

BRASILIA (Reuters) – The United States will designate Brazil a major non-NATO ally during President Jair Bolsonaro’s visit to Washington next week, boosting growing cooperation between the Americas’ two largest militaries, two Brazilian government officials said on Thursday.

The status of “major non-NATO ally” (MNNA) gives a country preferential access to the purchase of U.S. military equipment and technology, including free surplus material, expedited export processing and prioritized cooperation on training.

(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu and Anthony Boadle; Editing by Brad Haynes and Lisa Shumaker)

Source: OANN

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Lara Trump Blasted for Saying Allowing in Refugees Was “Downfall of Germany”

Lara Trump received a huge backlash after she said that Angela Merkel’s policy of allowing millions of “refugees” to enter was the “downfall of Germany”.

During the show on Fox Business, host Stuart Varney said that Merkel’s policy was “catastrophic” for Germany.

“It was the downfall of Germany, one of the worst things that ever happened to Germany – this president knows that, he’s trying to prevent that from happening here,” said Trump.

The president’s daughter was immediately faced with a wave of condemnation from leftists.

While obviously nowhere near on par with what happened during the 1930s and 40s, the outrage directed towards Trump only serves to hide the fact that Merkel’s migrant policy has indeed been a disaster for Germany.

Merkel went from being the most popular leader in Europe to one of the most unpopular, primarily because of her “refugee” policy.

According to figures from the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), migrant crime targeting German citizens soared by over 23 per cent in a single year.

As Reuters acknowledged, Germany has suffered a “two-year increase in violent crime,” rising 10 per cent in 2015 and 2016. 90 per cent of that increase was attributed to “young male refugees”.

German women have also been directly targeted, such as during the mass molestation incident in Cologne and other cities on New Year’s Eve 2015, when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted, with 22 being raped.

Only a tiny number of perpetrators being the attacks were ever identified or charged.

Police are also being ordered to cover-up migrant crimes in order not to stoke tensions.

There have also been numerous high profile murders of German women by “refugees,” including that of 19-year-old Maria Ladenburger, who was found raped and drowned in October 2016.

Her murderer was Afghan migrant Hussein Khavari, who entered Germany as a refugee in November 2015.

In December 2017, another Afghan refugee, Abdul D, stabbed his 15-year-old German girlfriend to death because she broke up with him.

If only leftists were as angry over these cases as they are at Lara Trump for making a silly statement on television.

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Trump Campaign Promises Justice: Mueller Report Exposes Obama’s Failures

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Study: Smoking During Pregnancy Increases Obesity Risk of Baby

Using foreskin tissue from newborn circumcisions, a group of researchers have identified a potential cellular mechanism that connects a mother’s smoking while pregnant with an increased risk of offspring obesity later in life.

Obesity is considered an epidemic in the U.S., with nearly 35 percent of adults and 20 percent of children six to 19 years old deemed obese. Obesity is a serious economic burden as well: more than $150 billion is spent annually on obesity-related healthcare costs in the U.S. alone.

“It has been consistently shown that mothers who smoke during pregnancy confer increased risk of obesity to their baby, but the mechanisms responsible for this increased risk are not well understood,” said the study’s principal investigator Kevin Pearson of the University of Kentucky (UK). “These data mark a first step towards defining those mechanisms with an eye toward potential interventions in the longer term.”

In collaboration with UK’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, a total of 65 new mothers were recruited for the study in two different cohorts: 46 in Cohort 1 (2012-2013) and 19 in Cohort 2 (2015-2016). All of the infants were full-term; approximately half of all new mothers reported smoking during their pregnancies. DNA and RNA were isolated from foreskin tissue which would otherwise be discarded after routine circumcisions and analyzed with a focus on chemerin gene expression.


New York officials are now admitting that the measles epidemic began after foreigners visited the area.

Chemerin is a protein that is produced by fat cells and appears to play a role in energy storage. Previous research had determined that chemerin is present in higher levels in the blood of obese people. However, Pearson said, it has not been measured in neonates exposed to cigarette smoke.

(Photo by Centophobia/Flickr)

Results showed that chemerin was more prevalent in the skin and isolated cells of infants whose mothers smoked during pregnancy, suggesting that smoking in pregnancy could be leading to changes in the regulation of the genes that play an important role in fat cell development and, by extension, obesity.

“Our work demonstrated that expectant mothers who smoke cigarettes during pregnancy induce distinct changes in chemerin gene expression in their offspring,” Pearson said.

The next step is to reproduce their findings in females since they were not represented in the study. Pearson et al propose to use cells from umbilical cords to do so. The group also hopes to study smoke exposure during pregnancy in genetically modified mice as both chemerin and its receptor can be removed to highlight this pathway more directly. The current and future results could provide a springboard for the development of effective treatments against pediatric and adult obesity in babies born to smokers as well as those exposed to other in utero environmental exposures.


Mike Adams joins Alex Jones to break down this dystopian development.

Source: InfoWars

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom kicks off El Salvador tour to offer alternative to Trump’s ‘demoralizing’ rhetoric

California Gov. Gavin Newsom arrived in El Salvador on Sunday to begin a four-day trip to learn more about the root causes fueling migration to the U.S. and offer an alternative to what he regards as President Trump’s "demoralizing" rhetoric about the Central American nation.

The trip comes on the heels of President Trump’s Friday visit to California's stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border. Newsom criticized Trump’s recent move to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, nations who've seen many of their citizens flee north through Mexico in efforts to enter the U.S.

"Right now you have a president that talks down to people, talks past them, demoralizing folks living here and their relatives in the United States," Newsom told reporters. "I think it's important to let folks know that's not our country — that's an individual in our country who happens at this moment to be president."

NEW MIGRANT CARAVAN OF 2,500 SETS OUT THROUGH MEXICO FOR US

Newsom, 51, a Democrat who took office in January after being elected in November to the top job in the nation's most populous state, has taken the Trump administration to task on immigration, having sued over the president's emergency declaration to build a southern border wall and pledging $25 million in state money to help asylum seekers.

Previously, Newsom and Trump battled on social media over costs associated with massive wildfires in California. Soon after Newsom took office, Trump argued that the state needed better forest management so the state would be less reliant on federal dollars for fire recovery.

"Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forrest fires that, with proper Forrest Management, would never happen. Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!" Trump wrote.

Newsom's office said the governor chose El Salvador for his first international trip because California is home to approximately 680,000 Salvadorans – the largest Salvadoran immigrant population in the U.S.

On Sunday, he visited the tomb of Saint Oscar Romero – the Salvadoran priest assassinated in 1980 at the start of the nation's civil war – where he lit a candle and kneeled to pray.

Newsom will meet with President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, U.S. Ambassador Jean Manes and President-elect Nayib Bukele during his visit. He'll also tour a reintegration center that processes Salvadorans deported from the U.S. and Mexico, see a cultural demonstration in a rural town, meet with human rights groups and discuss economic development and gang intervention.

Newsom said he's figuring out what California can do to help tackle the root causes of migration, namely deep poverty and gang violence. El Salvador is one of the world's most violent countries, with the gangs MS-13 and Barrio 18 exerting strong control.

MEXICO TO HAND OUT SOME HUMANITARIAN VISAS AS THOUSANDS OF CARAVAN MIGRANTS GATHER IN CHIAPAS

Republicans in California criticized Newsom’s purported aims, arguing that he should instead focus on poverty at home.

"The tragic circumstances that drive migrants from their homes should remind us that we have people living in crushing poverty in our own communities. Our attention and resources should be focused there," Republican state Assemblyman Devon Mathis said in a statement.

Matt Fleming, a spokesman for the California Republican Party cited by the Sacramento Bee, said Newsom "should spend less time raising his national profile and more time in California serving the people who elected him."

Newsom has defended the trip on the grounds that immigration is, more than in any other state, fundamental to California’s politics.

"How do you understand California without understanding all the diverse cultures that make it the most diverse state?" he said. "It's fundamental, it seems to me, to governing a state. That's why I'm here in the first months."

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Newsom said he hopes to show Salvadorans there's "a completely different conversation" happening in the United States outside of Trump's comments.

"There are people in the U.S. who think folks down here matter and we care to understand their plight and challenges and see if there's ways we can soften things," he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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Watch Live: Hypocrisy! US Charges Assange With Conspiracy – After Statute Of Limitations Has Passed

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Ukraine Probes US Election Meddling in '16 to Aid Hillary

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko announced he has opened a probe into alleged efforts by a Ukrainian to interfere with the 2016 presidential elections on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

"Today we will launch a criminal investigation about this and we will give legal assessment of this information," he told Hill.TV.

The investigation centers on a claim from a Ukrainian parliament member that, Artem Sytnyk, the director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, attempted to help Clinton.

"According to the member of parliament of Ukraine, he got the court decision that the NABU official conducted an illegal intrusion into the American election campaign," Lutsenko said. 

"It means that we think Mr. Sytnyk, the NABU director, officially talked about criminal investigation with Mr. [Paul] Manafort, [Donald Trump's campaign chairman] and at the same time, Mr. Sytnyk stressed that in such a way, he wanted to assist the campaign of Ms. Clinton."

Hill.TV asked Lutsenko about reports a member of parliament obtained a tape of the current NABU head saying he was attempting to help Clinton win the election.

"This member of parliament even attached the audio tape where several men, one of which had a voice similar to the voice of Mr. Sytnyk, discussed the matter," he said.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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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)

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

(Reporting by Richard Leong; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

Source: OANN

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

April 26, 2019

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

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

(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Bill Trott)

Source: OANN

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