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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it has halted collaborations with Huawei and ZTE over U.S. federal investigations of the Chinese technology companies’ alleged violations of sanctions. Maria Zuber, MIT's vice president for research, said in a letter: "MIT is not accepting new engagements or renewing existing ones with Huawei and ZTE or their respective subsidiaries due to federal investigations regarding violations of sanction restrictions."

The Democratic head of a powerful U.S. House committee asked the Internal Revenue Service for six years of President Donald Trump’s personal and business tax returns, in a long-awaited move widely expected to lead to a long court battle with the White House. The request is viewed by Democrats in the House of Representatives as a vital first step toward oversight of Trump’s income taxes and business network, which some lawmakers believe could be rife with conflicts of interest and potential tax law violations.

Hopes were raised that an Illinois boy missing since 2011 may have been found in Kentucky, after local police agencies were asked to help track down a teen’s claim that he is Timmothy Pitzen, who was last seen with his mother eight years ago. However, details of the case remained murky Wednesday evening.

An American woman who was kidnapped with her driver at Uganda’s most popular wildlife park by gunmen had failed to take an armed ranger as required by the park’s regulations, a spokesman for the country’s wildlife authority said. Kimberley Sue Endecott, 35, and Ugandan driver Jean Paul were on a game drive in Queen Elizabeth National Park when four gunmen ambushed their vehicle on Tuesday evening, police said.

The Australian man arrested over New Zealand’s mosques shooting massacre will face a total of 50 murder charges and 39 attempted murder charges when he appears in court on Friday, police said. As Australia confronts the uncomfortable truth that the man was one of its own, the country is in the midst of an acrimonious debate about its past race policies and whether recent political discourse about immigration and Islam had any role to play in the gunman's radicalization.

Trade talks between the United States and China made “good headway” last week in Beijing and the two sides aim to bridge differences during talks that could extend beyond three days this week, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said. Negotiations continued in Washington on Wednesday after meetings last week in Beijing, spearheaded by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The presence of more than 200 Chinese fishing boats near an island occupied by Manila in the disputed South China Sea is illegal and a clear violation of Philippine sovereignty, the country’s foreign ministry said. “Such actions when not repudiated by the Chinese government are deemed to have been adopted by it,” the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a rare rebuke of Beijing.

Two @Reuters journalists have been imprisoned in Myanmar for 479 days. See full coverage: https://reut.rs/2UePY2R

5:22 AM - Apr 4, 2019

Brexit

With Brexit approaching, Reuters took a 14-day tour along England’s coastline - where most people voted to leave the EU. Many feel the same way they did in the 2016 referendum. From Skegness to Morecambe Bay, people living around the coastline said they were still convinced their fortunes could only improve outside the European Union.

Britain’s Brexit minister said he could not rule out the possibility of the country taking part in next month’s elections for the European Parliament, despite the damage that could inflict on the British political system. “To have European parliamentary elections three years after the country voted to leave would be damaging to our politics as a whole,” Stephen Barclay told parliament on Thursday. But such a prospect could not be ruled out, he said.

Brexit is so confusing it’s even confounding robots. Machine-driven trading systems in the $5.1 trillion-a-day global currency market are struggling to cope with the blizzard of headlines about Britain’s efforts to extricate itself from the European Union, making it more expensive and risky to bet for or against sterling. News-reading algos are a growing part of a wider revolution on the trading floor of banks and asset managers, where machines have supplanted swathes of human traders, slashing costs and boosting the speed at which deals are done. The problem for the computers is that Brexit is producing too many headlines for them to process.

Boeing

The United Arab Emirates has accepted an invitation to join the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s review panel on the Boeing 737 MAX, a senior official told Reuters. China’s aviation regulator has also been invited to join the U.S. FAA review panel, but the Civil Aviation Administration of China has not decided whether to accept the invitation, official in the media relations department told Reuters.

Ethiopian Airlines pilots followed proper procedures when their Boeing MAX 8 airplane repeatedly nosedived before a March 10 crash that killed 157 people, Ethiopia’s minister of transport said on Thursday as she delivered the first official report on the disaster. Ethiopian investigators cannot yet say whether there is a structural problem with the 737 MAX, based on flight and cockpit voice data from the plane, the head of the investigation said.