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What’s News |
| Good Morning Here’s what we’re watching as the U.S. business day gets under way: |
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Two big regional banks are merging. Ending a decadelong drought in big bank mergers, BB&T struck a deal to buy SunTrust for $28.2 billion. The all-stock deal is the largest bank merger in the U.S. since the financial crisis ushered in a stricter regulatory regime that kept banks on the sidelines of recent deal-making booms. But the deal may not give other banks the urge to merge, writes Heard on the Street's Justin Lahart. |
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Jeff Bezos is accusing a tabloid of attempted blackmail. The owner of Amazon and the Washington Post says the parent firm of the National Enquirer is threatening to release embarrassing photos of the tech tycoon, escalating a fight that began with the tabloid’s revelations of his alleged extramarital affair. |
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Supreme Court temporarily blocks Louisiana regulations on abortion providers. A divided Supreme Court blocked Louisiana from implementing abortion regulations that could limit the availability of the procedure in the state, in an interim action that could set the stage for the court to weigh in on abortion rights in the future. |
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The U.S. military set a target date for leaving Syria. The Pentagon is preparing to pull all American forces out of Syria by the end of April, even though the Trump administration has yet to come up with a plan to protect its Kurdish partners from attack when they leave, current and former U.S. officials said. |
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The acting attorney general is set to testify in Congress. Matthew Whitaker will now give highly anticipated testimony to the House Judiciary Committee today after a dispute between Democrats and the Justice Department over whether he should be forced to disclose his conversations with the White House about the special counsel’s Russia investigation. |
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Pressure grows for the U.S. and China to forge a trade deal. As a deadline approaches for a high-stakes trade deal between the U.S. and China and the two nations remain far from an agreement, some American business figures who fear the economic and market consequences of a failure are pushing both sides to compromise. |
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John Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress, dies at 92. The Michigan Democrat served in Congress longer than any member in history and left his mark on the major civil rights, environmental and health-care laws of the past century. |
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| CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/REUTERS |
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How a tiny cabal galvanized Venezuela's opposition. The plan to unseat Nicolás Maduro came together quickly and secretly, taking many within the country’s notoriously fractious opposition by surprise. It was a big gamble by a small group of leaders who wanted to stop negotiating and take action. |
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Uber and Lyft are on their way to IPOs in 2019. This year’s most anticipated IPOs will hinge on whether investors believe the ride-hailing companies can stop burning money. |
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Gannett is facing a proxy fight. Digital First, the hedge-fund-backed newspaper chain that is one of Gannett’s largest shareholders, nominated a slate of six candidates and will solicit shareholder votes for them to replace a majority of the board members at the Gannett’s annual meeting this spring. |
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Democrats take first step toward obtaining Trump's tax returns. A House Ways and Means subcommittee started laying the groundwork for getting President Trump’s long-secret tax returns, holding a hearing where lawyers argued Congress has authority to obtain the returns. |
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What I learned from the hacker who spied on me. WSJ's Joanna Stern asked an ethical hacker to get into as many of her webcams as he could. Along the way she identified important tips for keeping our computers safe. |
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Soggy fries vs. sagging profits. Business models, much like french fries, don’t always travel well. This is a lesson the restaurant business is learning as eateries struggle to draw diners through the door or the drive-through and look to food-delivery apps to soothe the financial heartburn. |
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Russia's new shield from U.S. sanctions. Beneath this plot of land in southeastern Siberia lie vast stores of gold, according to Russia’s biggest gold producer, and tapping them could provide the Russian central bank with a huge and nearly sanction-proof backstop for its currency. |
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A new prognosis for pain care. Advances in measuring pain could show doctors how much pain a patient feels more vividly and help them dial the treatment up—or down—more precisely. |
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Trump's tax law is spurring job creation—for tax lawyers and accountants. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 continues to generate thousands of jobs for tax professionals as companies analyze the law, restructure operations and rely on tax experts to do all the work flowing from the legislation and IRS regulations, according to lawyers and executives at tax firms. Business is unusually strong and should remain robust for years as a result of the law, they say. |
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Nasdaq Stock Market Begins Trading Founded in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers, or NASD, the Nasdaq began trading, premiering as the world's first electronic stock market. The first stock market in the U.S. to trade online, the exchange attracted new growth companies and modern tech behemoths such as Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Oracle and Dell, growing the Nasdaq to the second-largest stock exchange in the world by market capitalization. |
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