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Japan manufacturers’ mood slumps to 2-1/2-year low – Reuters Tankan

FILE PHOTO: A man cycles past chimneys of facotries at the Keihin Industrial Zone in Kawasaki
FILE PHOTO: A man cycles past chimneys of facotries at the Keihin Industrial Zone in Kawasaki, Japan September 12, 2018. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo

April 17, 2019

By Tetsushi Kajimoto and Izumi Nakagawa

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese manufacturers’ business confidence slipped to a 2-1/2-year low in April, a Reuters poll showed on Thursday, underlining growing concerns the economy could slip into a recession in the face of slowing external demand.

The monthly poll, which tracks the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) closely watched tankan quarterly survey, found the service-sector mood up for the first time in four months, which may help ease some of the pressure on the world’s third-biggest economy.

Manufacturers’ mood is expected to rebound over the coming three months and service-sector morale is also seen edging up slightly, although the pace of recovery appears weak.

Subdued business confidence – on top of weakness in factory output and exports – has raised the specter of a downturn, although BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has maintained a relatively sanguine view on the economy in a signal that policy will remain steady at next week’s rate-review.

In the Reuters poll of 478 large- and mid-sized companies, in which 241 firms responded on condition of anonymity, many managers voiced concerns about China’s economic slowdown and its trade war with the United States.

“A sense of caution is rising due to the global slowdown amid the U.S.-China trade war and Brexit, which are causing companies to hold off on business investment, curbing orders for capex,” a manager of a machinery maker wrote in the survey.

The Reuters Tankan sentiment index for manufacturers stood at 8 in April, down two points from March, weighed on by manufacturers of processed food, transport equipment machinery and chemicals, the April 3-15 survey showed.

The index posted a sixth straight month of falls and hit the lowest reading since September 2016.

It is expected to rebound to 13 in July.

A bruising Sino-U.S. tariff war and slowing global growth have curbed global trade, in turn hurting Japan’s exporters and manufacturing industry. Some analysts warn of the risk of the economy sliding into a recession.

In the fourth quarter, Japan’s economy managed a modest bounce after a contraction in the previous quarter as floods and an earthquake temporarily halted production. The worry is that the recovery is being stunted by a cooling global economy.

The service-sector index grew to 24 in April from 22 in the previous month, led by industries such as construction/real estate and transport/utility.

The index is expected to inch up to 25 in July.

The BOJ’s last quarterly tankan showed the business mood hit a two-year low in the March quarter, highlighting worries that global trade tensions and weakening world demand were taking a toll on the export-reliant Japanese economy.

The Reuters Tankan indexes are calculated by subtracting the percentage of pessimistic respondents from optimistic ones. A positive figure means optimists outnumber pessimists.

(Reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto and Izumi Nakagawa; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

Source: OANN

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Disabled man seeks $13.5M after convictions overturned

Four years after Richard Lapointe's murder conviction was overturned and he was released from prison, Connecticut officials continue to insist the mentally disabled man brutally killed his wife's grandmother in 1987 as they now fight his demand for $13.5 million in state compensation for the 26 years of freedom he lost.

The compensation battle is playing out before the state claims commissioner, with Lapointe's lawyers saying DNA testing exonerated him and state lawyers arguing it did not. It's not clear when Commissioner Christy Scott will rule, and any approval of a payout must be approved by the state legislature.

"The nightmare continues," said Paul Casteleiro, a New Jersey lawyer representing Lapointe. "The case and the facts border on the preposterous yet they maintain he is guilty. They accomplished what they wanted to do — destroy this guy's life."

Lapointe, now 73, is suffering from dementia and living under 24-hour care at a nursing center, said Casteleiro, who works for Centurion Ministries, which advocates for the wrongly convicted.

Lapointe was convicted in 1992 of killing his wife's 88-year-old grandmother, Bernice Martin, who was found stabbed, raped and strangled in her burning Manchester apartment in 1987. A judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of release.

His case became a cause celebre, receiving widespread publicity as advocates for the mentally disabled and other supporters rallied to prove his innocence. Writers Arthur Miller and William Styron were among those who protested the conviction.

Key evidence for the prosecution included Lapointe's confessions during a 9 1/2-hour interrogation by Manchester police. Defense lawyers said Lapointe suffers from Dandy-Walker syndrome, a congenital brain malformation that made him gullible and vulnerable to giving a false confession.

The state Supreme Court overturned Lapointe's convictions and ordered a new trial in 2015, saying he was deprived of a fair trial because prosecutors failed to disclose notes by a police officer that may have supported his alibi defense that he was home at the time the fire began in Martin's apartment. He was freed on bail in April 2015, and prosecutors later decided not to retry him.

Lapointe's lawyers have argued that DNA testing performed after the convictions were overturned excluded him from committing the crimes and proved his innocence.

In documents filed with the claims commissioner last month, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Beizer responded that witnesses for the state will testify "the DNA testing is inconclusive, does not establish the claimant's innocence and would still allow for the claimant to be convicted.

"It remains the state's belief that the claimant is responsible for the killing of Ms. Martin," Beizer wrote.

State law allows for compensation for wrongful imprisonment, if charges are dismissed on grounds of innocence or wrongdoing by officials that contributed to the conviction and imprisonment.

Prosecutor David Zagaja said that while the "touch DNA" tests did not show evidence of Lapointe's presence at the crime scene, that doesn't mean he wasn't there.

Zagaja said the tests turned up several different partial profiles, making it appear that the crime scene was contaminated by several people, likely first responders, forensic experts and other officials.

"The problem is everyone's hands had been on those items," he said. "The integrity of the evidence is gone. It's just not there. The state is not of the opinion that this is an innocent man."

Besides the confessions, Zagaja said other proof included Lapointe suggesting shortly after Martin's death that she was raped, before anyone knew she had been sexually assaulted.

Source: Fox News National

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Future rabbis plant with Palestinians, sow rift with Israel

Young American rabbinical students are doing more than visiting holy sites, learning Hebrew and poring over religious texts during their year abroad in Israel.

In a stark departure from past programs focused on strengthening ties with Israel and Judaism, the new crop of rabbinical students is reaching out to the Palestinians. The change reflects a divide between Israeli and American Jews that appears to be widening.

On a recent winter morning, Tyler Dratch, a 26-year-old rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Boston, was among some two dozen Jewish students planting olive trees in the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani in the southern West Bank. The only Jews that locals typically see are either Israeli soldiers or ultranationalist settlers.

"Before coming here and doing this, I couldn't speak intelligently about Israel," Dratch said. "We're saying that we can take the same religion settlers use to commit violence in order to commit justice, to make peace."

Dratch, not wanting to be mistaken for a settler, covered his Jewish skullcap with a baseball cap. He followed the group down a rocky slope to see marks that villagers say settlers left last month: "Death to Arabs" and "Revenge" spray-painted in Hebrew on boulders and several uprooted olive trees, their stems severed from clumps of dirt.

This year's student program also includes a tour of the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron, a visit to an Israeli military court that prosecutes Palestinians and a meeting with an activist from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, which is blockaded by Israel.

The program is run by "T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights," a U.S.-based network of rabbis and cantors.

Most of T'ruah's membership, and all students in the Israel program, are affiliated with the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements — liberal streams of Judaism that represent the majority of American Jews. These movements are marginalized in Israel, where rabbis from the stricter Orthodox stream dominate religious life.

The T'ruah program, now in its seventh year, is meant to supplement students' standard curricular fare: Hebrew courses, religious text study, field trips and introductions to Jewish Israeli society. Though the program is optional, T'ruah says some 70 percent of the visiting American rabbinical students from the liberal branches of Judaism choose to participate.

The year-long program is split into one semester, focused on Israel's occupation of the West Bank, and another, on alleged human rights abuses inside Israel.

T'ruah claims its West Bank encounters aren't one-off acts of community service, but experiences meant to be carried home and disseminated to future congregations.

"We want to propel them to action, so they invite their future rabbinates to work toward ending the occupation," said Rabbi Ian Chesir-Teran, T'ruah's rabbinic educator in Israel.

The group began its trip in the most Jewish of ways, a discussion about the weekly Torah portion that turned into a spirited debate about the Ten Commandments.

"The Torah says don't covet your neighbor's fields, and we're going to a Palestinian village whose private land has been confiscated for the sake of covetous Jews building settlements," Chesir-Teran said.

As their bus trundled through the terraced hills south of Hebron, students listened to a local activist's condensed history of the combustible West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.

As part of interim peace deals in the 1990s, the West Bank was carved up into autonomous and semi-autonomous Palestinian areas, along with a section called Area C that remains under exclusive Israeli control.

The destinations of the day — the Palestinian villages of At-Tuwani and Ar-Rakkes — sit in Area C, also home to around 450,000 Israeli settlers. Palestinians seek all of the West Bank as the heartland of a hoped-for independent state.

The group was guided by villagers to their olive trees — an age-old Palestinian symbol and a more recent casualty of the struggle for land with Israeli settlers.

Israeli security officials reported a dramatic spike last year in settler violence against Palestinians.

Yishai Fleisher, a settler spokesman, blamed the attacks on the "atmosphere of tension" in the West Bank. "We're against vigilantism, unequivocally," he said.

As Israeli soldiers watched from the hilltop, Palestinians and Jews dug their fingers into the crumbling soil, setting down roots where holes torn out of the field hinted at recent vandalism.

Dratch said he came of age in Pennsylvania during the violent years of the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s. "My religious education was steeped in fear of Palestinians," he said.

But in college, Dratch's ideas about Israel changed. Dratch says he still supports Israel, while opposing its policies in the West Bank. "I realized I could be Zionist without turning my back on my neighbor, on Palestinians," he said.

With hundreds of young American rabbis sharing such sentiments, some in Israel find the trend alarming.

"I worry about a passion for social justice becoming co-opted by far-left politics among future American Jewish leaders," said Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish research center in Jerusalem.

"Future rabbis are marginalizing themselves from the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews," he added.

As Israel heads toward elections in April, opinion polls point to another victory for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his religious, nationalist allies.

In the U.S., meanwhile, surveys show American Jews, particularly the younger generation, holding far more dovish views toward Palestinians and religious pluralism. Netanyahu's close friendship with President Donald Trump has further alienated many American Jews, who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

Two weeks after visiting At-Tuwani, the group received disheartening news: half of the 50 trees they'd planted had been uprooted, apparently by settlers. The students scrambled to make plans to replant.

Dratch said that while his time in Israel has provided him with plenty of reasons to despair, he still harbors hope for change.

"We'll be sharing these stories to give people a full picture of what it means to care about this place," he said.

Source: Fox News World

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Stock futures flat as investors assess U.S.-China trade talks

Traders work on the floor of the NYSE in New York
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., February 19, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

February 20, 2019

By Shreyashi Sanyal

(Reuters) – U.S. stock index futures were subdued on Wednesday after a handful of downbeat earnings reports and as investors weighed the latest developments in trade talks between the United States and China.

Hopes of a progress in trade negotiations have lifted stocks this year, driving all three major indexes to more than two-month highs.

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that trade talks with China were going well and suggested he was open to pushing off the deadline to complete negotiations, saying March 1 was not a “magical” date.

“A market-friendly outcome this week will be for both sides to agree on extending the March 1 deadline, which should provide more time for finding a middle ground on trade policy,” FXTM analyst Lukman Otunuga wrote in a client note.

“Trump stating that the talks are ‘very complex’ and the current March deadline is not a ‘magical date’, a breakthrough deal is still some distance away.”

Tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports are set to rise to 25 percent from 10 percent if the world’s two largest economies fail to settle their trade dispute by March 1.

The benchmark S&P 500 index has climbed 18 percent from its December lows, fueled by optimism on trade, a largely upbeat fourth-quarter earnings season and a dovish Federal Reserve.

Investors will be looking for more clues on monetary policy on Wednesday, as the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is slated to release minutes from its January policymaking meeting at 2 pm ET (1900 GMT).

The minutes are expected to reaffirm the Federal Reserve’s statement last month that it would be “patient” with further rate hikes after markets swooned late in December on fears of an economic slowdown.

“Investors expect more details regarding the shrinking of the Fed’s balance sheet and obviously more clues on the Fed pause,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities in a client note.

At 7:20 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were down 30 points, or 0.12 percent. S&P 500 e-minis were down 2 points, or 0.07 percent and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 0.75 points, or 0.01 percent.

Southwest Airlines Co fell 3.6 percent after the carrier cut its forecast for first-quarter revenue per seat mile, citing weak passenger demand and a $60 million hit from the partial U.S. government shutdown.

CVS Health Corp dropped 5.1 percent after the drugstore chain operator and pharmacy benefits manager missed full-year profit forecast.

LendingClub Corp shares tumbled 8.6 percent after the online lender forecast a bigger-than-expected first-quarter loss, due to seasonal weakness and economic uncertainty in the United States and overseas.

(Reporting by Shreyashi Sanyal in Bengaluru)

Source: OANN

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Why Ballot Fraud Is as Big as Texas, Despite Local Enforcers

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CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – Although part of her job description is making sure elections are fair and square, Nueces County Clerk Kara Sands hadn’t given much thought to ballot fraud until a constable candidate from a nearby suburb visited her office in May 2016.

The ex-cop was familiar with how voter fraud worked, Sands said, and “he was afraid that people in Robstown were using the mail-in ballots illegally” in a Democratic primary runoff.

That galvanized the Republican official, and it wasn't long before her second-floor office became a repository of voter mischief: Cardboard boxes, ballot application envelopes, voter registration lists and other papers heaped on an aged beige couch, a round wooden table and the across the floor. Atop one stack of papers: a list of mail-in ballot applications all signed and witnessed by the same person, a clue to illegal ballot-harvesiting.

Because much of the fraud involves unwitting older voters and the homebound, Sands also visits local nursing homes and knocks on the doors of voters from whom she has received complaints.

Kara Sands, county clerk: “People don’t even realize their votes are being stolen." 

Neuces County

“People don’t even realize their votes are being stolen,” Sands said. “The harvesters come along at election time and bring food, they have these neighborhoods mapped out and they can go door to door and build relationships. Mostly elderly people are being victimized and they don’t even know it.”

Texas leads the nation in prosecutions of election fraud – since January 2018, 33 people have been convicted of election crimes in cases brought by the state attorney general’s office, and 13 more have cases pending.

Still, many election experts believe that only hints at the fraud actually taking place. Texas, then, may hold lessons as voter mischief, especially involving mail-in ballots, is receiving intense national scrutiny: Last November, legal third-party ballot harvesting in California may have helped Democrats score upsets in congressional races, while in North Carolina similar but illegal harvesting operations prompted officials to call a new election.

Texas is like every other state in that it does not have a well-financed bureaucracy responsible for safeguarding ballot integrity. Instead, this duty largely falls to – and is jealously guarded by -- local officials in each of the state’s 254 counties.

As a result, even in Texas, exposing election fraud relies on a disorganized, ad hoc group of aggrieved candidates and political partisans who suspect foul play. Even then, they must hope to find an official like Sands willing to take on the painstaking work required to identify and investigate potentially fraudulent ballots.

In policing vote fraud, "it’s mostly just people on the ground who report incidents.”

Andy Jacobsohn//Dallas Morning News 

“Once in a while you see the secretary of state’s offices take the lead in these in some states, but it’s mostly just people on the ground who report incidents,” said Jason Snead, senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who maintains a national database that tracks voter fraud cases across the country.

These tipsters usually encounter a system geared to dismiss their claims, according to Dallas attorney (and former judge) Dan Wyde, who has represented several candidates who believe they lost because of mail-in ballot shenanigans. Wyde said local officials and courts often lack the will or the resources to handle these cases.

“The judges are under pressure not to grant a new election, and to affirm or bless the system,” said Wyde, who represented a justice of the peace candidate who unsuccessfully challenged a 2010 Democratic primary in Dallas County. Wyde put on 40 witnesses.  

“This is the kind of thing where it has to be the candidate that is reporting it, and they have this vested interest, so it’s hard to find a neutral party to come in and look and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t how it’s supposed to go,’” Wyde said.

Fraud or Voter Suppression?

Local control of elections is often an obstacle to voter fraud investigations, both in Texas and around the country. Jonathan White, an assistant attorney general and the state’s top investigator of voting violations, was reminded of that in June 2017. That’s when he met with officials from the Dallas County district attorney’s office, including assistant DA Andy Chatham, to discuss a series of complaints from senior citizens on the west side of the city who said they had received mail-in ballots for the May municipal election that they had not requested, indicating their signatures on the application may have been forged.

Some said a man had knocked on their door, claimed he worked for the county and was there to collect their ballots.

Chatham dashed any notion of the state’s attorneys getting involved.

“This is a constitutional issue,” Chatham told White, pointing to statutes that allow for witnesses and assistants in the voting process. “We can handle it, but I can tell you, there is no vast voter fraud ring in Dallas.”

Ex-Attorney General and now Texas Governor Greg Abbott: He's accused of targeting Democrats and minorities with fraud enforcement.

Joel Martinez/The Monitor via AP

In this case he was right. The sleuthing in Dallas netted one suspect: Miguel Hernandez, a small-time drug offender, who pleaded guilty to filling in a single mail-in ballot. The unusual thing about this case was the sentence: Hernandez received 180 days in county jail for the misdemeanor, while the vast majority of election fraud convictions in Texas end in plea deals, probation and no jail time. Hernandez, though, was on probation for other crimes when he violated the election law.

White’s heard the objection before -- there’s no significant election fraud in the state. Chatham’s resistance was mild in comparison to the protests of others.

Civil rights groups and others who argue for ballot access also resist voter fraud investigations.

When then-Attorney General Greg Abbott announced in 2005 he was allocating $1.4 million of a federal crime-fighting grant to investigate alleged voter fraud, civil rights groups claimed the action targeted Democrats and minorities and newspapers ran editorials criticizing the move, insisting it would discourage voters.

The Texas Democratic Party and several other plaintiffs, including a city council member in Texarkana who had previously pleaded guilty to unlawfully assisting a mail-in voter, sued the Republican Abbott, who became state’s governor in 2015. They lost. 

Another impediment to electoral fraud crackdowns has been the efforts, mostly led by Republicans, to pass voter ID laws to clamp down on fraudulent in-person voting. Because so little effort is spent investigating such cases, no one knows how many people vote multiple times, or how many convicted felons or illegal immigrants cast ballots. But the consensus is these are rare occurrences and the focus on this form of abuse has given ammunition to those who  crusade for more liberal voting laws and dismiss allegations of voter fraud as political interference into voters’ rights.

This, in turn, reduces efforts to combat mail-in ballot fraud, an abuse that few dispute. For example, in a 2014 ruling on the constitutionality of a Texas voter ID, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos noted, “[W]hile there is general agreement that voting fraud exists with respect to mail-in ballots, the same was not demonstrated to be a real concern with in-person voting.”

Lon Burnam, a Democrat who teamed with a Tea Party group: “Republicans claim a lot of crap around elections, but this was real.”

Nevertheless, election fraud cases often start with aggrieved parties and partisan political operatives rather than eagle-eyed state officials. That’s what happened in some mostly Democratic precincts of Tarrant County, which long been rumored to be a haven for mail-in ballot harvesting.

The investigation started with an unlikely alliance of former Democratic state Rep. Lon Burnam and Direct Action Texas, a Tea Party-backed operation that supports a particularly conservative wing of the state Republican Party.

Burnam was a nine-term incumbent when he was defeated in the Democratic primary in March 2014 by 111 votes. He filed a lawsuit challenging the election, but money issues forced him to drop it.

“I’ve always been in favor of vote-by-mail programs,” Burnam said. “There’s a line there that you cannot step over, and it is defined by legislation. But we need to enforce that law, and it turns out it’s very hard to find out when people do cross that line.”

Tea Party-aligned outfit checks mail-in ballot applications.

Direct Action Texas

A year later, when Burnam heard Direct Action was pulling ballot applications and poring over signatures, looking for forgeries and other inconsistencies in the May 2015 general election in Tarrant County, he called them. They were sympathetic and together these unlikely partners launched a crusade to gather mail-in ballot applications and ballot envelopes to determine just what was going on.

Burnam joined Aaron Harris, then executive director of Direct Action, and a couple of Democratic consultants and headed over the Tarrant County Elections Administration office.

The group inspected the applications for the mail-in ballots. Within an hour, Harris and Burnam realized that the applications were filled out in a machine-like fashion, each address and name of the requestor scrawled in identical handwriting on scores of ballots.

“Republicans claim a lot of crap around elections, but this was real,” Burnam said.

The Mechanics of Mischief

At least half of that comment was surely gratifying to one Republican, Christine Welborn. As director of election integrity for Direct Action, she spends many days at her desk in an aged bleached concrete office building in the suburbs of Fort Worth sifting through mail-in ballot applications. As she demonstrated in January, the work is simple, but laborious. Applications for a ballot by mail must be signed by the voter. Using voter registration applications, Welborn verifies the signatures of the applicant on each document. If they don’t match, it’s a sign of trouble and it needs to be investigated. A person other than the voter can sign as a witness, provided they indicate their relationship to the applicant, but they cannot forge that voter’s name, then send it in.

Top image credit: A detail from this image on an official Texas registration site.

Texas Secretary of State

Welborn shows one such instance – the signatures clearly are mismatched, and yet the ballot application is signed by a witness, as required.

“You see this ballot application, you see this signature and you see this signature,” Welborn said, poring over a stack of copied papers. “Then you look at the original signature from the voter’s registration to vote. And it’s clear that someone other than the voter applied for a mail-in ballot.”

Direct Action has analyzed several elections around the state, from the urban areas to rural counties and heading to points south and east. In some cases, there’s nothing. When Welborn and her associates find potential issues, they send their findings to the state, which takes it from there. Tipsters rarely hear back from investigating agents. Sometimes, there is nothing to find, and dead-ends are part of the job.

Her work, though, has led to one confirmed case by the state.  

Four Tarrant County women were arrested in October for providing false signatures on mail-in ballot applications for the 2016 Democratic primary, based on the initial findings of Direct Action. Among those arrested was Leticia Sanchez, a veteran vote canvasser whose name has shown up as a paid employee of several local candidates over the years. The case is still pending.

“We’ve done this in mostly Democratic races,” Welborn said. “Whatever party, our goal is not to choose who wins and loses, our goal is to find the fraud. You know they don’t want election fraud any more than anyone else.  Everyone, regardless of their politics, wants clean elections.”

Although Direct Action has filed complaints against some Republicans, its partisan bent makes it subject to attack, especially by critics who argue that its work, and its calls to reform mail-in ballots, are really aimed at suppressing minority votes.

Domingo Garcia, Hispanic leader: “They’re trying to rig it so people who are Latino and African-American don’t vote.” 

domingogarcia.com

At a press event at a park on Fort Worth’s north side in the fall of 2016, shortly after Direct Action’s announced its findings that resulted in the October arrests, former Democratic state Rep. Domingo Garcia, a leader in the Dallas/Fort Worth Hispanic community, made it clear he felt Direct Action’s work was politically motivated, aimed at discouraging minority voters who tend to cast ballots for Democrats. 

“We believe there’s a clear attack to rig the system,” Garcia said. “They’re trying to rig it so people who are Latino and African-American don’t vote.” But, he also noted that real instances of voter fraud should be pursued: “Any political thug who is doing it should be reported. “

The investigation in Tarrant County, part of the large Dallas-Fort Worth area, prompted the first reform of mail-in ballot laws in over a decade. State lawmakers passed Senate Bill 5 in 2017, creating heavier penalties for tampering with mail-in ballots and applications, including a provision that would hold a candidate or party responsible if any low-level ballot harvester can be traced to them.

The measure, like Abbott’s 2005 announcement of a crackdown on election fraud, drew criticism from some quarters although by now it was tempered, even timid.

 “I’m kind of here to encourage the Senate to figure out not just criminal penalties,” Matt Simpson, legislative director of the ACLU of Texas, said during testimony on the state senate bill. “Are there civil penalties, are there administrative penalties, are there alternatives to turning to already-filled prisons and jails?”

“We have concerns on the criminal penalty enhancements,” added Yannis Banks, legislative liaison for the Texas NAACP. He worried that having political conversations, or even helping close friends, might end up in breaking the law if an encouragement to vote a specific way were made.

“It would be a shame if someone helping someone were punished,” Banks said.

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Romney says Mueller report left him ‘sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection’

Utah Sen. Mitt Romney on Friday added his thoughts on the release of a redacted version of the special counsel report into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The former GOP 2012 presidential candidate argued that it was “good news” that President Trump could not be charged with conspiring with Russia. “The alternative,” Romney said in a statement, “would have taken us through a wrenching process with the potential for constitutional crisis. The business of government can move on.”

But Romney, who has had a contentious relationship with the president in recent years, said he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President.

“I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia — including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement; and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in Ukraine,” he went on to say.

“Reading the report is a sobering revelation of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report was released into Washington’s partisan scrum Thursday morning. The long-awaited report showed investigators did not find evidence of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia – as Attorney General Bill Barr declared last month and repeated in a morning press conference. But it did reveal myriad actions taken by the president that were examined as part of the investigation’s obstruction inquiry.

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This included President Trump allegedly telling his White House counsel in June 2017 to inform the acting attorney general that Mueller had conflicts of interest and "must be removed." The report said Trump also fumed over the original appointment -- lamenting it would mean the "end of my presidency" -- first telling then-DOJ leader Jeff Sessions he should resign, and later trying to get Sessions to take back control of the probe.

Mueller ultimately did not reach a conclusion on whether the president's conduct amounted to obstruction, stating: "[W]hile this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Morning Consult Poll: Most Voters Oppose Trump's Border Order

Most voters oppose President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the nation's southern border as the Senate prepares to vote on a resolution opposing the measure, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday.

The poll of 1,194 voters, conducted March 8-10, shows 52 percent of voters oppose the declaration, up one percent from February, reports Politico, compared to 38 percent of voters who support the declaration, down one percent.

The Senate is expected to vote against Trump's declaration Thursday, after the House voted last week against it. However, neither chamber has enough votes to override a likely Trump veto.

The poll shows opinions on the declaration generally fell along party lines:

  • 10 percent of Democrats support it.
  • 83 percent of Democrats oppose.
  • 80 percent of Republicans support.
  • 13 percent of Republicans oppose it.
  • 57 percent of independents oppose the declaration.
  • 30 percent of independents support it.

Voters said their opinions of lawmakers could also be affected, depending on how they vote for Trump's order:

  • 33 percent of voters said they would be more likely to vote for their senators or representatives if they supported Trump's emergency declaration.
  • 45 percent said they would be less likely.
  • 11 percent said it would make no difference.

The party splits on the measure were also similar:

  • 74 percent of Democrats said they would be less likely to support a lawmaker who supports the measure.
  • 70 percent of Republicans said they would be more likely.
  • 46 percent of Independents would be less likely.
  • 23 percent of Independents would be more likely.

Source: NewsMax America

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Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond looks on during an interview with Reuters at the British Ambassador's residence in Beijing
Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond looks on during an interview with Reuters at the British Ambassador’s residence in Beijing, China April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Florence Lo/Pool

April 26, 2019

BEIJING (Reuters) – British finance minister Philip Hammond said on Friday that he had a “very constructive meeting” with his counterpart in the opposition Labour Party before leaving for Beijing and that he was optimistic about finding common ground.

Hammond, speaking on the sidelines of a summit on China’s Belt and Road initiative in Beijing, said talks with Labour aimed at finding a way forward on Brexit had not stalled.

“I’m optimistic that we will find common ground,” he said. “Both sides have got clear positions and both sides will have to compromise in order to reach an agreement.”

Hammond added that he absolutely did not favor a no deal exit from the European Union.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; editing by Darren Schuettler)

Source: OANN

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Police secure the area where the body of a woman was discovered near the village of Orounta
Police secure the area where the body of a woman was discovered near the village of Orounta, Cyprus, April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Stefanos Kouratzis

April 26, 2019

NICOSIA (Reuters) – Cypriot police searched on Friday for more victims of a suspected serial killer, in a case which has shocked the Mediterranean island and exposed the authorities to charges of “criminal indifference” because the dead women were foreigners.

The main opposition party, the left-wing AKEL, called for the resignation of Cyprus’s justice minister and police chief.

Police were combing three different locations west of the capital Nicosia for victims of the suspected killer, a 35-year-old army officer who has been in detention for a week.

The bodies of three women, including two thought to be from the Philippines, have been recovered. Police sources said the suspect had indicated the location of the third body, found on Thursday, and had said the person was “either Indian or Nepali”.

Police said they were searching for a further four people, including two children, based on the suspect’s testimony.

“These women came here to earn a living, to help their families. They lived away from their families. And the earth swallowed them, nobody was interested,” AKEL lawmaker Irene Charalambides told Reuters.

“This killer will be judged by the court but the other big question is the criminal indifference shown by the others when the reports first surfaced. I believe, as does my party, that the justice minister and the police chief should resign. They are irrevocably exposed.”

Police have said they will investigate any perceived shortcomings in their handling of the case.

One person who did attempt to alert the authorities over the disappearances, a 70-year-old Cypriot citizen, said his motives were questioned by police.

The bodies of the two Filipino women reported missing in May and August 2018 were found in an abandoned mine shaft this month. Police discovered the body of the third woman at an army firing range about 14 km (9 miles) from the mine shaft.

Police are now searching for the six-year-old daughter of the first victim found, a Romanian mother who disappeared with her eight-year-old child in 2016, and a woman from the Phillipines who vanished in Dec. 2017.

The suspect has not been publicly named, in line with Cypriot legal practice.

A public vigil for the missing was planned later on Friday.

(Reporting By Michele Kambas; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Source: OANN

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An employee looks up at goods at the Miniclipper Logistics warehouse in Leighton Buzzard
FILE PHOTO: An employee looks up at goods at the Miniclipper Logistics warehouse in Leighton Buzzard, Britain December 3, 2018. REUTERS/Simon Dawson

April 26, 2019

LONDON, April 26 – British factories stockpiled raw materials and goods ahead of Brexit at the fastest pace since records began in the 1950s, and they were increasingly downbeat about their prospects, a survey showed on Friday.

The Confederation of British Industry’s (CBI) quarterly survey of the manufacturing industry showed expectations for export orders in the next three months fell to their lowest level since mid-2009, when Britain was reeling from the global financial crisis.

The record pace of stockpiling recorded by the CBI was mirrored by the closely-watched IHS Markit/CIPS purchasing managers’ index published earlier this month.

(Reporting by Andy Bruce, editing by David Milliken)

Source: OANN

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Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad speaks at the opening ceremony for the second Belt and Road Forum in Beijing
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad speaks at the opening ceremony for the second Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Florence Lo

April 26, 2019

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Fewer than half of Malaysians approve of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, an opinion poll showed on Friday, as concerns over rising costs and racial matters plague his administration nearly a year after taking office.

The survey, conducted in March by independent pollster Merdeka Center, showed that only 46 percent of voters surveyed were satisfied with Mahathir, a sharp drop from the 71 percent approval rating he received in August 2018.

Mahathir’s Pakatan Harapan coalition won a stunning election victory in May 2018, ending the previous government’s more than 60-year rule.

But his administration has since been criticized for failing to deliver on promised reforms and protecting the rights of majority ethnic Malay Muslims.

Of 1,204 survey respondents, 46 percent felt that the “country was headed in the wrong direction”, up from 24 percent in August 2018, the Merdeka Center said in a statement. Just 39 percent said they approved of the ruling government.

High living costs remained the top most concern among Malaysians, with just 40 percent satisfied with the government’s management of the economy, the survey showed.

It also showed mixed responses to Pakatan Harapan’s proposed reforms.

Some 69 percent opposed plans to abolish the death penalty, while respondents were sharply divided over proposals to lower the minimum voting age to 18, or to implement a sugar tax.

“In our opinion, the results appear to indicate a public that favors the status quo, and thus requires a robust and coordinated advocacy efforts in order to garner their acceptance of new measures,” Merdeka Center said.

The survey also found 23 percent of Malaysians were concerned over ethnic and religious matters.

Some groups representing Malays have expressed fear that affirmative-action policies favoring them in business, education and housing could be taken away and criticized the appointments of non-Muslims to key government posts.

Last November, the government reversed its pledge to ratify a UN convention against racial discrimination, after a backlash from Malay groups.

Earlier this month, Pakatan Harapan suffered its third successive loss in local elections since taking power, which has been seen as a further sign of waning public support.

Despite the decline, most Malaysians – 67 percent – agreed that Mahathir’s government should be given more time to fulfill its election promises, Merdeka Center said.

This included a majority of Malay voters who were largely more critical of the new administration, it added.

(Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Source: OANN

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The German share price index DAX graph at the stock exchange in Frankfurt
The German share price index DAX graph is pictured at the stock exchange in Frankfurt, Germany, April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Staff

April 26, 2019

By Medha Singh and Agamoni Ghosh

(Reuters) – European shares slipped on Friday after losses in heavyweight banks and Glencore outweighed gains in healthcare and auto stocks, while investors remained on the sidelines ahead of U.S. economic data for the first quarter.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index was down 0.1 percent by 0935 GMT, eyeing a modest loss at the end of a holiday-shortened week. Banks-heavy Italian and Spanish indices were laggards.

The banking index fell for a fourth day, at the end of a heavy earnings week for lenders.

Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland tumbled after posting lower first quarter profit, hurt by intensifying competition and Brexit uncertainty, while its investment bank also registered poor returns.

Weakness in investment banking also dented Deutsche Bank’s quarterly trading revenue and sent its shares lower a day after the German bank abandoned merger talks with smaller rival Commerzbank.

“The current interest rate environment makes it challenging for banks to make proper earnings because of their intermediary function,” said Teeuwe Mevissen, senior market economist eurozone, at Rabobank.

Since the start of April, all country indexes were on pace to rise between 1.8 percent and 3.4 percent, their fourth month of gains, while Germany was strongly outperforming with 6 percent growth.

“For now the current sentiment is very cautious as markets wait for the first estimates of the U.S. GDP growth which could see a surprise,” Mevissen said.

U.S. economic data for the first-quarter is due at 1230 GMT. Growth worries outside the United States resurfaced this week after South Korea’s economy unexpectedly contracted at the start of the year and weak German business sentiment data for April also disappointed.

Among the biggest drags on the benchmark index in Europe were the basic resources sector and the oil and gas sector, weighed down by Britain’s Glencore and France’s Total, respectively.

Glencore dropped after reports that U.S authorities were investigating whether the company and its subsidiaries violated certain provisions of the commodity exchange act.

Energy major Total said its net profit for the first three months of the year fell compared with a year ago due to volatile oil prices and debt costs.

Chip stocks in the region including Siltronic, Ams and STMicroelectronics lost more than 1 percent after Intel Corp reduced its full-year revenue forecast, adding to concerns that an industry-wide slowdown could persist until the end of 2019.

Meanwhile, healthcare, which is also seen as a defensive sector, was a bright spot. It was helped by French drugmaker Sanofi after it returned to growth with higher profits and revenues for the first-quarter.

Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES led media stocks higher after it maintained its full-year outlook on the back of the company’s Networks division.

Automakers in the region rose 0.4 percent, led by Valeo’s 6 percent jump as the French parts maker said its performance would improve in the second half of the year.

Continental AG advanced after it backed its outlook for the year despite reporting a fall in first-quarter earnings.

Renault rose more than 3 percent as it clung to full-year targets and pursues merger talks with its Japanese partner Nissan.

(Reporting by Medha Singh and Agamoni Ghosh in Bengaluru; Editing by Gareth Jones and Elaine Hardcastle)

Source: OANN

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