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Ethiopian report says crew followed procedures: source

FILE PHOTO: People walk past a part of the wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa
FILE PHOTO: People walk past a part of the wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 10, 2019. REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri/File Photo

April 4, 2019

NAIROBI (Reuters) – A preliminary report on the crash of an Ethiopian airliner to be released on Thursday will say that the Boeing 737 MAX crew followed all procedures, a person familiar with the report said.

The report will not explicitly mention Boeing’s anti-stall MCAS software which has been at the centre of attention in the wake of last month’s accident and an earlier deadly crash in Indonesia, but will discuss how the plane dived into the ground, the person and another source briefed on the matter said.

A third source said the report could spark a debate with manufacturer Boeing about how crew responded to problems triggered by faulty data from an airflow sensor.

Boeing has warned against speculating ahead of the report. Ethiopian investigators were due to hold a press briefing in Addis Ababa shortly.

(Reporting by Maggie Fick, Editing by Tim Hepher)

Source: OANN

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HSBC promotes 1300 staff as investment bank overhaul gathers pace: memo

FILE PHOTO: The HSBC bank is seen in the financial district of Canary Wharf
FILE PHOTO: The HSBC bank is seen in the financial district of Canary Wharf in London, Britain, July 13, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Coombs

March 19, 2019

By Sinead Cruise and Lawrence White

LONDON (Reuters) – HSBC is stepping up a root-and-branch overhaul of its global banking and markets division, naming 83 new managing directors in a 1,300-strong promotions spree aimed at revitalizing its investment banking franchise.

After another year of underwhelming performance in 2018, HSBC’s management team – bolstered by new finance chief and ex-investment banker Ewen Stevenson – are plotting a push to recover ground lost to rivals, with a revamp of its trading floor seen as top priority, sources close to HSBC said.

Samir Assaf, chief executive of global banking and markets, distributed a memo last Monday pointing out the significant rise in the number of women promoted this year.

HSBC is trying to close a gender pay gap of 61 percent, the worst among major British firms and largely caused by a lack of women in senior, higher paid roles.

Around a third of the 83 new managing directors are female, the memo seen by Reuters showed, a 13 percentage point rise from the previous year, according to a source at the bank with knowledge of the matter.

A spokesman for HSBC declined to comment.

The wave of promotions comes just weeks after the bank axed dozens of sales and advisory jobs in London following an extended period of turmoil in its investment banking operations.

Last year saw an exodus of high-profile dealmakers in Europe, with sources saying there was frustration at a lack of a clear strategy.

36 of the promotions are in HSBC’s global banking business, which includes its mergers and acquisitions and equity advisory bankers.

The bank has also poached senior hires from rivals, including former JPMorgan banker Greg Guyett as head of global banking and former Goldman Sachs banker Peter Enns as the global head of its financial institutions group.

HSBC tumbled further in investment banking league tables in some key market segments in 2018, with its fourth quarter performance in equities particularly weak.

Revenues there fell 20 percent from a year earlier, the second worst performance among major investment banks after France’s BNP Paribas.

HSBC slipped to 20th among global equity deal bookrunners in 2018 from 16th the previous year, according to Refinitiv data. It also fell to 24th from 19th in the rankings for advising on completed mergers and acquisitions.

The bank fared better in its traditional stronghold of debt underwriting, placing 6th according to Refinitiv data, with revenues growing 14 percent in its transaction banking business.

MOOD LIFT

Investors are pinning their hopes on Georges Elhedery to improve productivity and lift the mood in the bank’s global markets business, after he took over the division from caretaker boss Thierry Roland on Friday.

Elhedery, who is relocating to London from Dubai to take up the role, is filling a position vacated by veteran HSBC banker Thibaut de Roux in September last year.

25 of the new promotions are in global markets, and other high-ranking appointments are in progress.

Nathalie Safar, one of the investment bank’s most senior women, is leaving her position as global equities chief operating officer after eight years in the role, a second staff memo seen by Reuters showed.

She will take up a newly-created position of head of front to back resource and cost management, focusing on making savings that will fund investments in the bank’s growth areas.

A search for her successor is underway, the memo said.

(Editing by Kirsten Donovan)

Source: OANN

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Iranian president meets Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric

Iran's official IRNA news agency says President Hassan Rouhani has met with Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric — the first such meeting for an Iranian leader.

The report says Rouhani met with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on the third and last day of his official visit to Iraq. Wednesday's meeting took place at al-Sistani's base in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf.

Former hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not meet with Iranian-born cleric al-Sistani during his 2008 visit to Iraq.

Al-Sistani rarely meets officials. He received the U.N. envoy to Iraq, Jan Kubis, last November.

Rouhani is likely to score points at home over the meeting. He is under increasing pressure by hard-liners and struggling with an economic crisis that has emboldened critics to openly call for his ouster.

Source: Fox News World

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Turning Back To God To Save Us From The War Against Humanity

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Source: InfoWars

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NSA Bolton: 'We Don't Have Any Illusions' on North Korea

Amid reports from "commercial" satellite images North Korea is rebuilding nuclear weapons testing sites and planning to test a ballistic missile, National Security Adviser John Bolton demurred the knowledge of "experts and pundits" is more advanced than that of the U.S. government.

The U.S. knows the score, knows the "mistakes of prior administrations" with North Korea, is working to make real progress, and finally, "the leverage is on our side right now," Bolton told ABC's "This Week."

"The president has been very clear he is not going to make the mistakes of prior administrations, and one of the mistakes of prior administrations was assuming the North Koreans would automatically comply when they undertake obligations," Bolton told host Martha Raddatz. "The North Koreans, for example, have pledged to give up their nuclear weapons program at least five separate times, beginning in 1992 with the joint North-South Denuclearization Agreement. They never seem to get around to it, though, so that's one reason why we pay particular attention to what North Korea is doing all the time.

"We see exactly what they're doing now. We see it unblinkingly, and we don't have any illusions about what their capabilities are."

Another test of a ballistic missile would be a deal-breaker from what President Donald Trump and North Korea Chairman Kim Jong Un have established in two prior summits – firsts for American leadership amid years of denuclearization efforts.

"As the president said, he'd be pretty disappointed if Kim Jong Un went ahead and did something like that," Bolton said of a feared missile test after a year of none. "The president said repeatedly he feels the absence of nuclear tests, the absence of ballistic missile launches is a positive sign, and he's used that really as a part of his effort to persuade Kim Jong Un that he has to go for what the president called 'The Big Deal: Complete Denuclearization.'"

The fact President has to walk away from the most recent summit with Kim should not be a cause for alarm, nor surprising, Bolton added.

"Nothing in the proliferation game surprises me anymore," he said. "I think Kim Jong Un has a very clear idea where the president stands, what the objectives the president is trying to achieve are.

"It's why the decision to walk away in a friendly way, as the president put it, from the Hanoi Summit was important for Kim Jong Un to understand the president – despite what a lot of the experts and pundits say – is not under pressure to make any deal.

"He wants to make the right deal, and he described it to Kim Jong Un at the Hanoi meeting."

Bolton concluded President Trump has worked to gain leverage on the long failed hope of North Korean denuclearization.

"The historical lesson is time is inevitably on the side of the proliferator in the long run," he said. "Right now I think it's the president's judgment, and I think it's correct, that the economic leverage that we have because of the sanctions puts the pressure on North Korea.

"Now it's one reason why all of the pundits and all of the experts predicting a deal in Hanoi were wrong, because the leverage is on our side right now, not on North Korea's."

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Hispanic Vote Doubles in Florida, Key to 2020

The growth of Hispanic voters in Florida was double the rate of the entire electorate between the midterm elections of 2014 and 2018, with 1.3 million Latinos voting in the state last year compared to 748,000 four years earlier, the Miami Herald reported Monday.

This data, compiled by Univision and Political Data Inc., illustrates the increased importance Hispanics will have in 2020 in determining the swing state so vital to victory in the Electoral College.

The voter turnout rate among Hispanics rose significantly from 38.1 percent of such eligible voters in 2014 to 53.7 percent last year, with Latinos as the fastest-growing portion of the state's electorate heading into the 2020 election.

"This data demonstrates that our community, especially its younger members, played a crucial role in the 2018 election where the Senate seat and various congressional seats in Florida changed parties less than a year ago," Univision CEO Vincent Sadusky said, adding "we have no doubt Hispanic America will play a key role" in 2020.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., focused heavily on Hispanics in his successful campaign last year, spending millions to run Spanish-language ads and emphasizing his visits to Puerto Rico.

Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi said Republicans did a better job of engaging the Latino community in the midterms, though he asserted it will be more difficult for President Donald Trump to duplicate that success in 2020.

But Amandi cautioned Democrats that Republicans did "an extraordinary job of actually engaging them and campaigning and making the case to that electorate. If the Republicans show up, and the Democrats don't, the Hispanic voter is likely going to go with the candidate that's there versus the candidate that's not there."

Source: NewsMax Politics

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Premier Doug Ford Praises Trump Policies And US: ‘Couldn’t Ask For A Better Neighbor’

David Krayden | Ottawa Bureau Chief

OTTAWA — Ontario Premier Doug Ford praised President Donald Trump’s policies Saturday during an address to the 2019 Manning Networking Conference and said he “couldn’t ask for a better neighbor” than the United States.

Ford, who has been likened to Trump because of his populist politics, told the audience that he doesn’t resent the comparison but would only insist that “I’m Doug Ford,” and Trump “has his hands full” with domestic and foreign policies concerns.

But the premier focused on the positive as he addressed a crowd of 1,500 conservative politicians, activists, businesspeople and opinion leaders.

“Let’s look at the polices. Forget the person. All of a sudden Donald Trump gets elected and he cuts all the regulation, cuts the red tape —  and when you cut the regulations it’s even better than giving a tax cut,  because it gets things moving. He ended up lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent down to 21 percent.” (RELATED: 12-T-1: That’s How Many Regulations Trump Reportedly Repealed For Every New One Issued)

FILE PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks at CPAC in Washington

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump hugs American flag at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) annual meeting at National Harbor near Washington, U.S., March 2, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

Ford said the combination of deregulation and a corporate tax cut has created a “booming” American economy “and in my opinion, when the U.S. is booming, Canada is booming.” He said policies like these create an environment for job creation: “government doesn’t create jobs — when government creates jobs we’re all in trouble:”

Ford noted that if Ontario were a sovereign country, it would be America’s third largest trading partner, producing “$350 billion in two-way trade,” adding, “You couldn’t ask for a better neighbor anywhere in the world than the United States of America.”

If Ford had any criticism of his southern neighbor it was only how so many illegal immigrants are coming across the border.

“No matter where you are in the world, you stand in line. You don’t jump the line, because if you jump the line, all heck breaks loose. That’s what’s happening right now. We have some folks coming over here … they’re landing in LaGuardia [airport] or New York,  they’re hopping on a bus and they’re going to up Lacolle, Quebec and they’re walking across the border,” Ford said. (RELATED: Here’s How Much Canada Is Spending On Illegal Immigrants)

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is interviewed by Calgary broadcaster Danielle Smith at the 2019 Manning Networking Conference, held in Ottawa, Canada, March 23, 2019. Daily Caller photo by Janet Krayden

Ontario Premier Doug Ford (R) is interviewed by Calgary broadcaster Danielle Smith at the 2019 Manning Networking Conference, held in Ottawa, Canada, March 23, 2019. Daily Caller photo by Janet Krayden

“And you know who’s frustrated the most? It’s our base: new Canadians … and the new Canadians are ticked-off and the reason they’re ticked-off is because their brother, mother, sister is in this line waiting to get in … ”

Ford said new Canadians are angry that illegals are queue-jumping and getting free medical care, legal aid and “we’re putting thousands of these people up in hotels.”

Ford also shared his media strategy with an appreciative audience that applauded when he remarked that most media are “far left.”

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Source: The Daily Caller

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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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