Cruz’s 2016 strategy focuses on turning out white voters
Cruz’s 2016 strategy focuses on turning out white voters
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. (AP) — Ted Cruz has mapped out a path to the White House that all but ignores the explosion of minority voters in America.
The Texas senator’s general election strategy depends almost wholly upon maximizing turnout among millions of conservative white voters — mostly evangelical Christians and the white working class — who didn’t participate in the last presidential contest.
At the same time, Cruz’s team is banking on a sharp decline in black and Hispanic support for the 2016 Democratic nominee, whoever it is, returning to voter trends before Barack Obama shook up the electorate as the nation’s first black president and won an overwhelming share of support from non-white voters.
It is a strategy that defies the conventional wisdom in the GOP that says the party can win the White House again only if it appeals to political moderates and non-white voters who are becoming a greater share of the voting-age population as each day passes.
“I’m an outlier,” said longtime Cruz aide Jason Johnson, the chief architect of the Cruz playbook, which he concedes is not in line with modern-day Republican thinking.
In Brazil, pregnant women urged to be cautious with a kiss
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — In a sign of mounting global concern over the Zika virus, health officials on Friday warned pregnant women to think twice about the lips they kiss and called on men to use condoms with pregnant partners if they have visited countries where the virus is present.
U.N. officials also called on many Catholic-majority countries in Latin America to loosen their abortion laws to allow women to terminate pregnancies if they fear the fetus may be at risk for a rare birth defect that causes brain damage and an abnormally small head, which may be linked to the virus.
The flurry of recommendations began in Brazil, where a top health official warned pregnant women to be cautious with their kisses.
Paulo Gadelha, president of the Fiocruz research institute, told a news conference that scientists have found live virus in saliva and urine samples, and the possibility it could be spread by the two body fluids requires further study.
He said that calls for pregnant women to take special precautions, and suggested they avoid kissing people other than a regular partner or sharing cutlery, glasses and plates with people who have symptoms of the virus.
Speeches that earned Clinton millions remain a mystery
MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — Hillary Clinton told voters in the latest Democratic debate there’s “hardly anything you don’t know about me.”
Just minutes later, she got tangled in a question about a part of her resume that is an enduring mystery.
In the 18 months before launching her second presidential bid, Clinton gave nearly 100 paid speeches at banks, trade associations, charitable groups and private corporations. The appearances netted her $21.7 million — and voters very little information about what she was telling top corporations as she prepared for her 2016 campaign.
What she said — or didn’t say — to Wall Street banks in particular has become a significant problem for her presidential campaign, as she tries to counter the unexpected rise of Democratic rival Bernie Sanders. He’s put her in awkward position of squaring her financial windfall with a frustrated electorate.
Asked in the debate — and not for the first time — about releasing transcripts of those speeches, she said: “I will look into it. I don’t know the status, but I will certainly look into it.” She added: “My view on this is, look at my record.”
Assange sex case sinks in international quagmire
LONDON (AP) — It started more than five years ago as what appeared to be a fairly simple sex crime case: two women in Sweden came forward to accuse Julian Assange of sexual misconduct.
Now the case has mutated into a complicated international drama involving Britain, Sweden, the United States, Ecuador, a host of human rights lawyers and the United Nations.
But when the dust settles from an unexpected U.N. working group’s finding Friday that Assange has been unlawfully detained, the painful stalemate is expected to continue, and Assange — though claiming full vindication — will most likely remain cooped up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
The panel said his stay at the embassy — which he entered voluntarily in 2012 — constitutes arbitrary detention and that he should be set free and compensated for lost time.
Lawyer and legal blogger Carl Gardner said the finding “beggars belief” and pointed out it isn’t legally binding.
Twitter moves to actively seek out terrorist supporters
WASHINGTON (AP) — Twitter is now using spam-fighting technology to seek out accounts that might be promoting terrorist activity and is examining other accounts related to those flagged for possible removal, the company announced Friday.
The effort signaled efforts by Twitter to automatically identify tweets supporting terrorism, reflecting increased pressure placed by the U.S. government for social media companies to respond to abuse more proactively. Child pornography has previously been the only abuse that was automatically flagged for human review on social media, using a different kind of technology that sources a database of known images.
Twitter also said Friday it has suspended more than 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts, mainly related to Islamic State militants, in the last eight months. Social media has increasingly become a tool for recruitment and radicalization that’s used by the Islamic State group and its supporters, who by some reports have sent tens of thousands of tweets per day.
Tech companies are dedicating increasingly more resources to tracking reports of violent threats. Twitter said Friday that it has increased the size of its team reviewing reports to reduce their response time “significantly.” The San Francisco-based company also changed its policy in April, adding language to make clear that “threatening or promoting terrorism” specifically counted as abusive behavior and violated its terms of use.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Twitter’s announcement “a very positive development.”
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, 6th man on moon, dies in Florida
MIAMI (AP) — Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who became the sixth man on the moon when he and Alan Shepard helped NASA recover from Apollo 13’s “successful failure” and later devoted his life to exploring the mind, physics and unexplained phenomena such as psychics and aliens, has died in Florida. He was 85.
Mitchell died Thursday night at a West Palm Beach hospice after a short illness, his daughter, Kimberly Mitchell, said. Mitchell’s passing coincides with the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 14 mission from Jan. 31-Feb. 9, 1971.
Mitchell, one of only 12 humans to set foot on the moon, was not a typical strait-laced astronaut: In later years, he said aliens visited Earth and faith healers were legit. He attempted to communicate telepathically with friends at home during his Apollo mission. He had an “epiphany” in space that focused him on studying consciousness, physics and other mysteries.
“What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness,” Mitchell wrote in his 1996 autobiography. “It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me.”
In an emailed statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden called Mitchell, “one of the pioneers in space exploration on whose shoulders we now stand.”