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UK wage growth at new decade high as employers hire in the face of Brexit

FILE PHOTO: City workers head to work during the morning rush hour in London
FILE PHOTO: City workers head to work during the morning rush hour in Southwark in central London April 16, 2014.REUTERS/Toby Melville

April 16, 2019

LONDON, April 16 (Reuters) – – British workers’ pay grew at its joint fastest pace in over a decade, fueled by further job creation, adding to suggestions that Brexit uncertainty is prompting firms to hire workers rather than make longer-term investment in equipment.

Total earnings, including bonuses, rose by an annual 3.5 percent in the three months to February, the Office for National Statistics said, matching the median forecast in a Reuters poll of economists.

That was the joint highest rate since mid-2008 although in February alone the pace of wage growth slowed.

Average weekly earnings, excluding bonuses, rose by 3.4 percent on the year, also in line with the Reuters poll.

It was the first fall in that measure of pay growth since the middle of last year.

Britain’s labor market has defied the approach of Brexit, helping households whose spending drives the economy.

However, the surge in jobs could reflect nervousness among businesses who have cut investment, making them more likely to hire workers who can be sacked in the event of a downturn in the economy.

The ONS said employment grew by 179,000 in the three months to February, in line with the Reuters poll forecast.

“The jobs market remains robust, with the number of people in work continuing to grow,” ONS statistician Matt Hughes said. “The increase over the past year is all coming from full-timers, both employees and the self-employed.”

The strength of the labor market is pushing up the official measurement of wages more quickly than the Bank of England has forecast, leading some economists to think it might raise interest rates once the uncertainty about Brexit lifts.

The BoE forecast in February that wage growth would slow to 3.0 percent by the end of 2019 as the economy feels the drag of Brexit uncertainty and a global slowdown.

It also forecast that Britain’s economy will grow at its slowest rate in a decade this year, even if it avoids the shock of a no-deal Brexit.

The pace of wage rises remains slower than the 4 percent increases seen before the financial crisis.

(Reporting by William Schomberg and Andy Bruce)

Source: OANN

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Mexico government slams U.S. border slowdown as ‘very bad idea’

Trucks wait in queue for border customs control to cross into the U.S. at the Cordova-Americas border crossing bridge in Ciudad Juarez
Trucks wait in queue for border customs control to cross into the U.S. at the Cordova-Americas border crossing bridge in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico April 8, 2019. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

April 10, 2019

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard criticized on Wednesday a slower flow of goods and people at the U.S-Mexico border as a “very bad idea,” and said he planned to discuss the matter with U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials later in the day.

The slower flow at the border is creating increased costs for supply chains in both countries, Ebrard said in a post on Twitter.

(Reporting by Sharay Angulo)

Source: OANN

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Rep. Ilhan Omar probed for allegedly spending $6,000 of campaign funds on divorce attorney, personal travel

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., will soon learn the conclusions of an investigation into allegations that she violated campaign spending laws during her time as a state lawmaker -- including accusations that she used campaign money to pay for her divorce attorney and personal travel.

The culmination of the state probe is just the latest potential controversy for Omar, an embattled freshman in Congress who has repeatedly faced criticism for comments about Israel and U.S. foreign policy.

REP. ILHAN OMAR'S 'ANTI-SEMITIC TROPES' PROMPT JEWISH NEW YORK DEM TO APOLOGIZE TO CONSTITUENTS

In the state case, Minnesota state Rep. Steve Drazkowski, a Republican, alleged that Omar spent around $6,000 in campaign money on her divorce attorney and travels to Estonia and Boston, Sinclair reported.

The Minnesota Campaign Finance Board was alerted after Omar, who was a state representative between 2017 and 2019, had to repay $2,500 that she accepted for speeches and higher education institutions funded by the government.

The repayment stems from another complaint filed by Drazkowski. The ruling on the investigation is expected within the next month.

“I had observed a long pattern,” Drazkowski told the outlet. “Representative Omar hasn't followed the law. She's repeatedly trampled on the laws of the state in a variety of areas, and gotten by with it.”

“Representative Omar hasn't followed the law. She's repeatedly trampled on the laws of the state in a variety of areas, and gotten by with it.”

— Minnesota state Rep. Steve Drazkowski

2020 DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES CIRCLING WAGONS AROUND ILHAN OMAR AFTER ISRAEL COMMENT UPROAR

Omar, 37, an immigrant from Somalia who came to the U.S. with her family in 1995, previously denied the allegations, insisting that her payment to attorney Carla Kjellberg, who represented her in the dissolution of her marriage, was merely a compensation for providing crisis management services during her run for the Minnesota state House, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

Omar has faced constant controversy since joining the U.S. House in January. She first came under fire after a 2012 tweet resurfaced in which Omar wrote, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

She then drew bipartisan uproar in February after she falsely suggested Jewish politicians in the U.S. were bought by AIPAC, a non-partisan organization that seeks to foster the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.

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Omar then reignited the controversy, saying groups supportive of Israel were pushing members of Congress to have “allegiance to a foreign country,” echoing an anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty.

Source: Fox News Politics

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McCarthy: House GOP didn't let Trump down on border wall

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., defended party actions in the House that ultimately led to President Trump declaring a national emergency, and blamed Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., for forcing Trump's hand to get a wall built on the U.S.-Mexico border.

“It was the House that passed the appropriation bill with $5 billion,” McCarthy told Fox News Radio's "Brian Kilmeade Show." “It takes 218 to pass, but what I think the American public and your listeners have to understand, in the Senate it takes 60 votes.

"It wasn't the president who shut down the government, it's Schumer.”

“It was the House that passed repeal and replace of ObamaCare,” McCarthy added. “It was the Senate that came one vote short, it was the House that wrote the tax bill that passed and went over, it was the House that produced the appropriation bills. So I mean when you sit down and look at history, this is probably one of the most productive Houses we've found.”

Last week Trump decided to avoid a second shutdown by signing compromise spending legislation to fund the government. But he also declared a national emergency in order to get the funds to continue to build the wall -- causing controversy on Capitol Hill.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

McCarthy also blamed the Senate Democrats for delaying appointments to Trump’s administration.

“Everybody sits back there and the Democrats say, 'Oh, you had the White House, you had Congress and you had the Senate,'" McCarthy said. “Yes we did, but we don't have the rule, why wouldn't the president have all of his appointments yet? Because in the Senate, they hold all that time up, it is the Democrats that are making this impossible."

Source: Fox News Politics

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Funeral held for NYPD detective killed by friendly fire

A New York City police detective killed by friendly fire while responding to a chaotic robbery scene was hailed at his funeral on Wednesday as a consummate law enforcer with people skills befitting his lifelong nickname: "Smiles."

Brian Simonsen , whose posthumous promotion to detective first grade prompted a lengthy standing ovation in a crowded Long Island church, was shot in the chest on Feb. 12 outside of a cellphone store in Queens.

He and six other officers opened fire on a robbery suspect who police say was pointing what appeared to be a handgun. Simonsen's partner, Sgt. Matthew Gorman , was hit in the leg and arrived at the funeral in a wheelchair.

"The only two people responsible for Brian's death, the only two, are the career criminals" involved in the robbery, Police Commissioner James O'Neill said firmly, delivering a eulogy in a voice sometimes choked with emotion.

To the devastated men and women of the 102nd Precinct, where Simonsen worked, and to officers around the city, O'Neill said: "Thank you for your dedication."

"Always remember who you are, what you do and why you do it," he said. "Continue to be proud of that" while honoring Simonsen's legacy.

In his 19-year career, Simonsen made nearly 600 arrests, most of them for felonies. "He was exceedingly good at his job," said O'Neill, "making connections with the evidence" and also reconnecting crime victims "with the hope that was stolen from them."

On the night he was shot, Simonsen should have been off for a union meeting. But he opted to go to work so he could continue tracking a string of recent robberies.

"It was never just a job for him," said Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The mayor related a story about Simonsen soothing a crime victim who'd fought off an intruder. She cried on his shoulder so long that his shirt was soaked with her tears.

On Wednesday, the tears of many were evident at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Rosalie in Hampton Bays.

Simonsen and his wife, Leanne, a nurse, lived in Calverton, near the Long Island community where he grew up. Neighborhood kids knew him as "Uncle Brian."

"Smiles, he should have been the mayor. He was the glue. ... He just loved everyone," said Melissa Weir, who had known him since high school.

"There's a lot of people who are hurting," Weir said outside the church. "Last night, I screamed in my car."

"You don't want any of our police to end up that way. But why him? ... A good guy, such a larger-than-life personality," she said. "A stand-up guy."

Source: Fox News National

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T-Mobile, Sprint lobby regulators to win U.S. approval for tie-up

FILE PHOTO: A smartphones with Sprint logo are seen in front of a screen projection of T-mobile logo, in this picture illustration
FILE PHOTO: A smartphones with Sprint logo are seen in front of a screen projection of T-mobile logo, in this picture illustration taken April 30, 2018. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

April 22, 2019

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Senior executives at T-Mobile US Inc and Sprint Corp made the case to U.S. officials in Washington last week that they should approve a planned tie-up between the two wireless companies, arguing a combined firm would have incentives to “aggressively lower prices.”

T-Mobile US Chief Executive John Legere, Sprint executive chairman Marcelo Claure, T-Mobile US chief operating officer Michael Sievert, and other senior executives met with Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel on Thursday, according to a federal filing on Monday.

In a presentation made public on Monday, the firms said they would “focus on taking share from Verizon and AT&T through lower prices.”

If completed, the $26 billion merger would create a carrier with 127 million customers that would be a formidable competitor to the No.1 and No.2 wireless players, Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T, respectively.

A group of eight Democratic senators and independent Senator Bernie Sanders in February urged the Justice Department and FCC to reject the deal, saying monthly bills for consumers could rise as much as 10 percent. Consumer advocates warn the deal will reduce the number of national wireless carriers to three from four.

Sources told Reuters last week that the Justice Department had concerns about the merger in its current structure.

A person briefed on the matter confirmed Legere met on Thursday with the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, as the government’s review nears a conclusion. A decision is likely by early June, people briefed on the matter said.

The Justice Department declined comment.

T-Mobile has said the combined company would be better and faster at building 5G, the next generation of wireless, to compete with AT&T and Verizon.

In its presentation to Rosenworcel, T-Mobile cited Verizon’s decision to charge $10 extra per month for 5G service. “This won’t happen when new T-Mobile introduces 5G,” the presentation said.

The agreement to combine the carriers, struck in April 2018, was approved by both companies’ shareholders in October and has received national security clearance, but still needs approval from the Justice Department and FCC. A number of state attorneys general are also reviewing the deal.

To win support for the deal, T-Mobile had said it would not increase prices for three years and has pledged to use some spectrum for wireless broadband in rural areas. The firms say the combined entity would add 11,000 additional employees by 2024 compared to the standalone firms.

(Reporting by David Shepardson, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

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)

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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