France election: Far-left Melenchon enjoys late poll surge
France election: Far-left Melenchon enjoys late poll surge
PARIS (AP) — With a bleed-the-rich video game and suggestions of a “Frexit,” French far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon is rattling financial markets by rising in polls just 11 days before the country’s presidential vote.
Melenchon’s surge is the latest surprise in a roller-coaster campaign that’s being closely watched around Europe and has featured a strong dose of anti-establishment populism.
Most polling agencies still show that centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen are leading ahead of the April 23 first round presidential vote, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the May 7 presidential runoff. Yet Melenchon, once a distant fifth, has risen in recent polls to roughly third, about even with conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon.
Melenchon’s sharp-tongued wit and eloquent anti-capitalist rhetoric during the two presidential debates helped boost his standing among an electorate frustrated with France’s traditional left and right parties, which have failed to create jobs or pull the country out of its economic stagnation.
Promising to heavily tax the rich and renegotiate France’s role in the EU and trade pacts, Melenchon is also giving financial markets a new reason to worry. A possible French departure from the EU — a “Frexit” — would be devastating to the bloc.
Trump says China won’t be labeled a currency manipulator
WASHINGTON (AP) — Backing away from a campaign pledge, President Donald Trump said Wednesday that his administration won’t label China a currency manipulator in a report due this week, though he does think the U.S. dollar “is getting too strong.”
Trump also said in an interview at the White House with The Wall Street Journal that he would prefer that the Federal Reserve keep interest rates relatively low.
The president also left open the possibility of re-nominating Janet Yellen for a second four-year term as Fed chair. That would mark another shift from his campaign position that he would likely replace Yellen when her term as chair ends in February next year.
In the interview, Trump said, “I do like a low-interest rate policy, I must be honest with you.”
The decision not to label China a currency manipulator represents one of the sharpest reversals of Trump’s brief presidency. Trump began to bash China in the 2015 speech that began his campaign, saying Beijing kept its currency artificially low to give its manufacturers an unfair advantage in global trade.
UN child sex ring left victims but no arrests
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — In the ruins of a tropical hideaway where jetsetters once sipped rum under the Caribbean sun, the abandoned children tried to make a life for themselves. They begged and scavenged for food, but they never could scrape together enough to beat back the hunger, until the U.N. peacekeepers moved in a few blocks away.
The men who came from a far-away place and spoke a strange language offered the Haitian children cookies and other snacks. Sometimes they gave them a few dollars. But the price was high: The Sri Lankan peacekeepers wanted sex from girls and boys as young as 12.
An Associated Press investigation of U.N. missions during the past 12 years found nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel around the world — signaling the crisis is much larger than previously known. More than 300 of the allegations involved children, the AP found, but only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators served jail time.
Legally, the U.N. is in a bind. It has no jurisdiction over peacekeepers, leaving punishment to the countries that contribute the troops.
Manafort firm received Ukraine ledger payout
WASHINGTON (AP) — Last August, a handwritten ledger surfaced in Ukraine with dollar amounts and dates next to the name of Paul Manafort, who was then Donald Trump’s campaign chairman.
Ukrainian investigators called it evidence of off-the-books payments from a pro-Russian political party — and part of a larger pattern of corruption under the country’s former president. Manafort, who worked for the party as an international political consultant, has publicly questioned the ledger’s authenticity.
Now, financial records newly obtained by The Associated Press confirm that at least $1.2 million in payments listed in the ledger next to Manafort’s name were actually received by his consulting firm in the United States. They include payments in 2007 and 2009, providing the first evidence that Manafort’s firm received at least some money listed in the so-called Black Ledger.
The two payments came years before Manafort became involved in Trump’s campaign, but for the first time bolster the credibility of the ledger. They also put the ledger in a new light, as federal prosecutors in the U.S. have been investigating Manafort’s work in Eastern Europe as part of a larger anti-corruption probe.
Separately, Manafort is also under scrutiny as part of congressional and FBI investigations into possible contacts between Trump associates and Russia’s government under President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The payments detailed in the ledger and confirmed by the documents obtained by the AP are unrelated to the 2016 presidential campaign and came years before Manafort worked as Trump’s unpaid campaign chairman.
A spokesman for Manafort said Wednesday that the former Trump campaign manager also will register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. Manafort is the second Trump campaign adviser to have to register as a foreign agent since the election.
Bannon in peril? Trump’s criticism worries his populist base
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has declared: “I am my own strategist.” That would seem to bode poorly for his actual strategist, Steve Bannon.
And Trump now appears to have begun publicly distancing himself.
In an interview with The New York Post, the president said “I like Steve” and called his adviser “a good guy” — but one who wasn’t really all that involved with his winning election campaign. He said his warring senior officials, including Bannon, must “straighten it out or I will.”
The unusual public, lukewarm support from the boss has Bannon’s friends and advisers worried he will soon be out of a job. But shedding Bannon would be no simple staff shake-up. More than any other member of Trump’s orbit, the former media executive and radio host, known as a bare-knuckle political fighter, has a following all his own. He is viewed by many in the conservative core as the ideological backbone in a White House run by a president who boast of his flexibility.
“I think it’s important to recognize the value of the base. It’s important to recognize the base sees their advocate in Steve Bannon,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign adviser who has known the president for decades.