BitGou: Monday Morning Briefing: Trump wants GM CEO 'to do something quickly' to reopen Ohio plant

Highlights

President Donald Trump urged General Motors’ chief executive to “do something quickly” to reopen the company’s Lordstown, Ohio, plant that was idled more than a week ago. The idling of the Lordstown plant is costing 1,500 jobs there. Since 2017, GM cut two of the three production shifts there, eliminating 3,000 jobs amid sagging demand for small cars.

As he had done at several stops in his first campaign trip as a presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke climbed atop a counter at a local Iowa business and addressed a small but adoring crowd. People clapped and cheered. Outside, some waited in the cold, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. O’Rourke was an early member of the oldest hacking group in U.S. history. His membership could explain his approach to politics better than anything on his resume. Read the full Reuters report.

An intriguing area of focus in Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation into the Kremlin’s role in the 2016 U.S. election is a proposed Moscow real estate deal that President Donald Trump pursued while running for president despite denying at the time any links to Russia. Here is an explanation of the Trump Moscow tower project and what the president has said about it.

About 47 million people - one in five American adults - are expected to bet a combined $8.5 billion on “March Madness,” the annual men’s college basketball tournament, a new report said. The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s tournament to determine the Division I men’s basketball champions begins on Tuesday and ends April 8 in Minneapolis. This year is the first time the tournament will be held since a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in May 2018 allowed states to legalize, regulate and tax sports betting.

The U.S. Central Plains states could face more flooding this week as rising temperatures accelerate snow melt across the region, weather forecasters said. Floods in the aftermath of a late-winter storm that dumped snow and rain on the nation’s midsection last week have already killed two people and destroyed homes and businesses.

New Zealand mass shooting

The calm and compassion shown by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in response to the killing of 50 Muslims by a suspected white supremacist has burnished the credentials of a leader whose youth and celebrity had given critics’ doubts. “Within 10 days of this horrific act of terrorism we will have announced reforms which will, I believe, make our community safer,” Ardern said at news conference after her cabinet reached in principle decisions on gun reform laws in the wake of New Zealand’s worst ever mass shooting.

New Zealand firms consider pulling ads from social media after mass shooting. The Association of New Zealand Advertisers and the Commercial Communications Council asked all advertisers on Monday to consider where they place their ads and challenged Facebook and other platform owners to take steps to moderate hate content. The two industry groups said in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Christchurch that was livestreamed on Facebook and redistributed on other platforms.

World

The crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people had “clear similarities” with October’s Lion Air crash, Ethiopia said on Sunday, shown by initial analysis of the black boxes recovered from the wreckage of the March 10 disaster. A Wall Street Journal report on Sunday said that the U.S. Transportation Department was probing the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval of the 737 MAX and in particular its anti-stall (MCAS) system.

Several people were shot, one possibly fatally, in a tram in the central Dutch city of Utrecht, in an incident police said may have had a “terrorist motive”. Prime Minister Mark Rutte said he was “deeply concerned” and that crisis talks were to be held in response to the incident.

“We will not hold discussions with this system, we belong to the people and the people said ‘No’ to the system,” Boualem Amora, one of the leaders of the Algerian education sector unions, told reporters. Thirteen independent unions have refused to back the newly-appointed prime minister’s efforts to form a government he hopes will placate protesters who are pressuring President Bouteflika and his inner circle to step down.

Sixteen-year-old Kefayat Ullah walked to his school in southern Bangladesh in late January, as he had done most days for the previous six years, to find that - despite being one of the top students in his class - he had been expelled. A government investigation had outed him, along with dozens of his classmates, as a Rohingya refugee, a member of the mostly stateless Muslim minority from neighboring Myanmar. Catch up on the latest updates on jailed Reuters journalists.

Business

Deutsche, Commerzbank merger would put 30,000 jobs at risk: union

A merger of Deutsche Bank and its rival Commerzbank could result in as many as 30,000 job cuts over the long term, a representative of German union Verdi who is a Deutsche supervisory board member told n-tv broadcaster.

3 min read

U.S. fintech FIS to buy payment processor Worldpay for about $35 billion

U.S. fintech group Fidelity National Information Services has agreed to buy payment processor Worldpay for about $35 billion, in the biggest deal to date in the booming payments industry.

3 min read

Wastewater - private equity’s new black gold in U.S. shale

Mike Christensen strides among rows of gleaming steel tanks, pointing to pipelines that arrive from miles around to this corner of former farmland near Midland, Texas, the heart of the largest oil patch in the United States. His company is one of dozens opening sites like this one that handles, not the lucrative oil, but the shale industry’s dirty secret: wastewater.

7 Min Read

JPMorgan Chase tests neuroscience-based video games to recruit interns

JPMorgan Chase is testing neuroscience-based video games to help recruit interns, as it seeks to increase the diversity of its workforce by broadening its candidate pool.

2 min read