British Prime Minister Theresa May is seen outside Downing Street in London, Britain March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Toby Melville
March 13, 2019
LONDON (Reuters) – Goldman Sachs said it sees a 55 percent probability of Prime Minister Theresa May getting a Brexit divorce deal ratified even though parliament overwhelmingly rejected the deal for a second time.
Unless May can get a Brexit deal approved by the British parliament, then she will have to decide whether to delay or cancel Brexit or thrust the world’s fifth largest economy into chaos by leaving without a deal.
Goldman said it saw the probability of a no-deal exit at 15 percent and the probability of no Brexit at around 35 percent.
The investment bank said a third vote on version of May’s deal is likely within weeks after the European Union summit on 21-22 March.
(Reporting by Helen Reid and Andrew MacAskill; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
Indonesian President Joko Widodo is utilizing holograms depicting his likeness in his rallies to give his campaign a competitive edge for the coming general election.
The tactic has been successful in reaching voters in the rural far-corners of the world’s 4th most populous country.
“This is really helpful in the campaign,” said a Widodo campaign organizer.
Logistically, using the technology is the right choice as the Muslim-majority nation houses over 17,000 islands sprawling at a length greater than that of the U.S.
Widodo’s main rival, ex-general Prabowo Subianto, has so far not used holograms for his campaign.
The April 17th election will be the first time in the country’s history the president, vice president, and legislative branch (People’s Consultative Assembly) will be elected on the same day.
The use of holograms brings into mind the controversial use of deep fakes, the emerging tech that is capable of portraying politicians inaccurately.
In January, an American news station was caught doctoring a video of President Trump to make him look ridiculous.
For over a year, the media has been scaremongering about Russia exploiting deepfake technology to deceive the American people.
An anti-Trump liberal in Seattle does it during a live presidential Oval Office address and none of them even report on it.
Correspondingly, deep fakes have caught the concern of leaders in President Trump’s intelligence community, like the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.
“The speed and adaptation of new technologies will continue to drive the world in ways we can’t understand,” said Coats. “It becomes a major challenge to the intelligence community to stay ahead of the game and have resources directed toward how we need to address these threats.”
Similarly, elections are also vulnerable to Big Tech interference, whether its Google controlling search results to swing 80% of undecided voters or Facebook allegedly stifling online communities under the pretense of “election integrity” efforts.
Fox Host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly voiced concerns over the power media giants have when it comes to influencing politics.
TUCKER: “You’re not going to get a Republican president elected ever until Google is restrained. Period.”
And while states were seeing a growing number of fentanyl-related overdoses, Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder announced a new policy to ease prosecutions of low-level nonviolent drug offenses, which he said would address overly harsh mandatory-minimum sentences for first-time offenders. The move, law enforcement officials told The Post, led to fewer arrests and affected investigators' ability to reach criminals high up in the drug-trafficking chain through deals offered to lower-level offenders.
That, the newspaper said in its report on Wednesday, slowed law enforcement efforts to get to the sources and understand the networks behind the flourishing fentanyl trade.
From 2013 to 2017, nearly 70,000 people died of synthetic opioid-related overdoses, most tied to fentanyl, which is commonly obtained through the black market. In 2017, The Post noted, fentanyl became the leading causes of fatal overdoses.
“Everybody was slow to recognize the severity of the problem, even though a lot of the warning signs were there,” The Post quoted New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, as saying.
The appeals to the Obama administration were numerous and came from myriad sources.
Federal authorities on Monday seized 110 pounds of fentanyl in a shipment of iron oxide from Area Port of Philadelphia. (cbp.gov)
A group of national public health experts sent a letter to senior Obama administration officials in 2016 begging for immediate action because, they stressed, thousands of people had been dying from fentanyl overdoses since at least 2013.
“The fentanyl crisis represents an extraordinary public health challenge —and requires an extraordinary public health response,” the group said in the letter, which was sent to officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and to the drug czar.
The administration, it said, acknowledged the letter but took no action.
One significant move that the CDC took in response to increasing public attention on overdoses due to opioids – which included largely illicit opioids such as heroin and illicit fentanyl – was to issue guidelines for general practitioners on prescribing opioids to people with chronic pain.
But many pain specialists and public health experts say those guidelines, while well-intentioned, made sweeping dose recommendations that remain debatable among medical professionals and have since been used to deny pain patients the doses they need. The guidelines also unleashed a wave of policies and laws around the country restricting doses and in some cases discouraging the prescribing of opioids, even to patients who long have relied on them and use them responsibly.
Meanwhile, painkiller prescription rates have declined, and many doctors are either forcing patients to taper off – against the recommendation of the CDC guidelines – or abandoning those pain patients altogether.
A Fox News series in December reported that while many pain patients in the United States have been left undertreated, creating a new public health crisis, overdose deaths due to illicit fentanyl continued to climb.
In June, Robert Mansfield, age 61, of Ladson, S.C., was sentenced to 20 years in prison for distribution of fentanyl resulting in the death of a man in December 2016, federal prosecutors said (Charleston County Sheriff's Office)
Political leaders and police from areas hard hit by fentanyl overdoses told The Post that when the Obama administration did address the overdose crisis, it focused on prescription painkillers and heroin, not the greater threat of fentanyl.
“Fentanyl was killing people like we’d never seen before,” said Derek Maltz, the former agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Operations Division in Washington. “A red light was going off, ding, ding, ding. ... We needed a serious sense of urgency.”
But with no loud alarm coming from President Barack Obama or his senior officials, Congress did not move to provide the funding needed, U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not have the manpower or the equipment to detect fentanyl shipments entering from Mexico and China, and the U.S. Postal Service did not use electronic tools that would allow for detecting packages containing fentanyl that had been ordered through the Internet, The Post said.
Manchester [New Hampshire] Fire Chief Dan Goonan said he got tired of going to the numerous roundtable discussions that first responders, politicians and policymakers were having about fentanyl because nothing ever got done.
In 2014, the DEA started to alert local law enforcement agencies around the country about fentanyl, but it got little to no attention at the national level, the Post said.
President Barack Obama meets with Attorney General Eric Holder (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
After actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose, attracting broad media attention to the problem, Holder appeared in a video calling heroin an “urgent and growing public health crisis.” But, just like others in the administration who saw the overdose crisis only in terms of heroin and prescription pills, Holder did not mention the bigger threat – fentanyl.
Holder’s former spokesman, Matthew Miller, defended him in an interview with The Post. “It says something that the people pointing fingers at the attorney general can’t point to a single action they recommended that he declined to take,” Miller said. “Eric Holder made fighting the opioid crisis a major focus, he strongly supported the DEA’s work in this area, and if the officials trying to now lay the blame at someone else’s feet had asked for more assistance, he would have given it.”
By the time Holder left his job, federal drug prosecutions had dropped, while fentanyl overdoses were spreading around the country.
Later, Congress asked for the creation of a National Heroin Task Force to look at the overdose epidemic. But again, the focus was heroin and prescription painkillers, which account for a minority of overdoses.
The Post noted that the task force produced a 23-page report on the OD crisis for Congress – within those pages, though, a mere five sentences mentioned fentanyl.
Michael Botticelli, the White House drug czar in the Obama administration, said, “In retrospect, it should have been a focus of the report.”
Tom Frieden, who was the CDC head during the Obama administration, said he tried to impress upon officials the dangers of fentanyl and how it was becoming a major killer in many communities.
“I felt like I was a bit of a voice in the wilderness,” Frieden said. “I didn’t have the sense that people got this as a really serious problem.”
In an interview with CNN after the new report was published, one of the Post reporters, Sari Horwitz, said: “The Trump administration has done some things. They've talked about it more than the Obama administration. They've ramped up prosecutions. The Justice Department is going after fentanyl and drug trafficking.”
“But," she added, "people are telling us you cannot arrest your way out of this problem. There needs to be a three-pronged approach that involves prevention which is, as I said, a public service campaign to let people know how incredibly dangerous fentanyl is.”
FILE PHOTO: British and EU flags flutter outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Britain January 17, 2019. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne
March 20, 2019
LONDON (Reuters) – Assets worth around a trillion pounds $1.32 trillion) are moving from London to hubs in the European Union ahead of Brexit, with the parallel shift in jobs likely to top 7,000, consultants EY said on Wednesday.
Banks, asset managers and insurers in London are opening or expanding hubs in the EU to avoid disruption from Britain’s departure from the European Union.
Britain is legally due to leave next week, but the British government is asking Brussels for a delay.
In its latest Brexit Tracker, EY said that 23 companies have announced the transfer of about a trillion pounds in assets, up from 800 billion pounds in the last quarter.
Dublin remains the most popular destination for relocations, with 28 companies saying they have plans to set up shop there, but Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Paris are catching up, with between 21 and 18 firms.
“As 29 March draws nearer, companies are reconfirming or revising the statements they have made about the extent of staff and operational changes they are making, but we are not seeing many last-minute surprises – firms are executing their plans as expected,” EY said in a statement.
(Reporting by Huw Jones; editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
In this file picture taken on Monday, Feb. 19, 2018, Slovak President Andrej Kiska addresses the media at the Hofburg palace in Vienna, Austria. On Wednesday, April 3, 2019, Slovakia's outgoing President Andrej Kiska announced he's planning to create a new political party once his term in office expires in June. Kiska, a successful businessman-turned-philanthropist, was not standing for a second five-year term in the largely ceremonial post (AP Photo/Ronald Zak/File)
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – Slovakia's outgoing president, Andrej Kiska, says he's planning to create a new political party once his term in office expires in June.
Kiska, a successful businessman-turned-philanthropist, did not stand for a second five-year term in the largely ceremonial post. Liberal environment activist Zuzana Caputova was elected Saturday to the post as the country's first female president.
In Wednesday's announcement, Kiska didn't immediately offer details.
His term in office was marked by clashes with populist former prime minister Robert Fico and his leftist party, a dominant political force that was tarnished by corruption scandals.
Kiska supported huge street protests that led to the fall of Fico's coalition government amid a political crisis triggered by the slaying last year of an investigative reporter who was investigating possible widespread government corruption.
FILE PHOTO: A Pinterest banner hangs on the facade of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., September 22, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
March 22, 2019
By Liana B. Baker and Joshua Franklin
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Uber Technologies Inc and Pinterest, two of the highest profile internet companies planning to go public this year, have picked the New York Stock Exchange as the venue for their stock listings, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The companies and the NYSE declined to comment.
NYSE has become the exchange of choice over NASDAQ for big technology companies in the past few years after NASDAQ famously bumbled the Facebook IPO with massive technology errors. The exchanges compete fiercely for listing fees, and much like investment banks, often begin courting large companies long before they are ready to list.
NASDAQ did score the IPO of ride hailing firm Lyft Inc, which could reach or exceed a $23 billion valuation when it prices its shares March 28. Lyft will be the first internet player to kick off a string of hotly anticipated public debuts that will energize the IPO market after a quiet start to the year.
In a sign that investors crave newly issued stock, shares of Levi Strauss & Co surged 31 percent in their debut on Thursday, giving the jeans maker a market value of $8.7 billion.
Bloomberg first reported the Uber news on Thursday while the Wall Street Journal first reported the Pinterest news.
Uber, a global logistics and transportation company most recently valued at $76 billion in the private market, is seeking a valuation as high as $120 billion, although some analysts have pegged its value closer to $100 billion based on selected financial figures it has disclosed.
Pinterest, which owns the image search website known for food and fashion photos, was valued at $12 billion in its last fundraising round in 2017. The San Francisco-based company has grown rapidly since its founding in 2008, boasting 250 million monthly active users last September.
Pinterest monetizes its website through advertisements, which it places among the “pins” that users put on the site.
Reuters previously reported Pinterest could raise around $1.5 billion in the IPO, which is likely to come in the first six months of 2019. The Wall Street Journal said on Thursday that the company could reveal its IPO filing as early as Friday and list its shares by mid-April.
(Reporting by Liana B. Baker in New York and Joshua Franklin in New York; additional reporting by Carl O’Donnell; editing by Leslie Adler)
FILE PHOTO - Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, gestures as he speaks during the presentation of the Renault's new Alpine sports concept car "Vision" in Monaco February 16, 2016. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard
March 12, 2019
TOKYO (Reuters) – When the three leaders of the world’s top car-making alliance gather in Japan on Tuesday, they will be looking to secure a partnership that was built by former Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn and then possibly imperiled by his ouster.
A Tokyo court on Monday rejected Ghosn’s request to attend Nissan’s board meeting, denying him a seat at the table even as the carmaker looks set to bolster the alliance with Renault and Mitsubishi Motors that Ghosn drove for over two decades.
Released on $9 million bail last week after spending more than 100 days in a Tokyo detention center, Ghosn faces charges of under-reporting his salary at Nissan by about $82 million over nearly a decade – charges he has called “meritless”.
In the wake of the scandal, Renault has started its own review of payments to Ghosn. French prosecutors have opened a preliminary inquiry into how he financed his 2016 wedding, French media reported on Monday.
His dramatic arrest in November and the long detention that followed exposed tensions between Nissan Motor Co and its top shareholder, France’s Renault SA, causing concern about the future of the alliance – the world’s largest maker of automobiles, excluding heavy trucks.
Some at Nissan had been unhappy with Ghosn’s push for a deeper tie-up, which was seen as possibly including a full merger. Smaller Renault owns 43 percent of Nissan after rescuing the Japanese company from near-bankruptcy in 1999. Nissan holds a 15 percent, non-voting stake in Renault, whose top shareholder is the French government.
While Ghosn himself has cast the charges against him as a boardroom coup, there are clear signs emerging that the alliance looks set to continue.
Renault on Monday confirmed it was in talks with Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors Corp about setting up a new alliance body to improve their collaboration.
“The proposed arrangement will have no impact on the existence of the (alliance agreement) and the cross-shareholding structure, which will both remain in place,” Renault said.
Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi plan to set up a joint board meeting structure under which Renault’s new chairman, Jean-Dominique Senard, is likely to take the chair, people with direct knowledge of the matter have told Reuters.
That would replace Dutch-based companies currently linking Nissan and Renault and, separately, Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors, the people said.
The heads of the partners will hold a news briefing at Nissan’s Yokohama headquarters on Tuesday, Nissan said. That is scheduled 4:30 p.m. (0730 GMT).
(Reporting by David Dolan; Editing by Stephen Coates)
FILE PHOTO: The Huawei logo is pictured outside its Huawei’s factory campus in Dongguan, Guangdong province, China, March 25, 2019. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
April 26, 2019
By Ben Blanchard
BEIJING (Reuters) – Britain must get to the bottom of the leak of confidential discussions during a top-level security meeting about the role of China’s Huawei Technologies in 5G network supply chains, British finance minister Philip Hammond said on Friday.
News that Britain’s National Security Council, attended by senior ministers and spy chiefs, had agreed on Tuesday to bar Huawei from all core parts of the country’s 5G network and restrict its access to non-core elements was leaked to a national newspaper.
The leak of secret discussions has sparked anger in parliament and amongst Britain’s intelligence community. Britain’s most senior civil servant Mark Sedwill has launched an inquiry and written to ministers who were at the meeting.
“My understanding from London (is) that an investigation has been announced into apparent leaks from the NSC meeting earlier this week,” said Hammond, speaking on the sidelines of a summit on China’s Belt and Road initiative in Beijing.
“To my knowledge there has never been a leak from a National Security Council meeting before and therefore I think it is very important that we get to the bottom of what happened here,” he told Reuters in a pooled interview.
British culture minister Jeremy Wright said on Thursday he could not rule out a criminal investigation. The majority of the ministers at the NSC meeting have said they were not involved, according to media reports.
Hammond said he was unaware of any previous leak from a meeting of the NSC.
“It’s not about the substance of what was apparently leaked. It’s not earth-shattering information. But it is important that we protect the principle that nothing that goes on in national security council meetings must ever be repeated outside the room.”
Allowing Huawei a reduced role in building its 5G network puts Britain at odds with the United States which has told allies not to use its technology at all because of fears it could be a vehicle for Chinese spying. Huawei has categorically denied this.
There have been concerns that the NSC’s conclusion, which sources confirmed to Reuters, could upset other allies in the world’s leading intelligence-sharing network – the Five Eyes alliance of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
However, British ministers and intelligence officials have said any final decision on 5G would not put critical national infrastructure at risk. Ciaran Martin, head of the cyber center of Britain’s main eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, played down any threat of a rift in the Five Eyes alliance.
(Writing by Michael Holden; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
President Trump on Friday said “no money” was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, after reports that the U.S. received a $2 million hospital bill from Pyongyang for the late American prisoner’s care.
“No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, not two Million Dollars, not anything else. This is not the Obama Administration that paid 1.8 Billion Dollars for four hostages, or gave five terroist[sic] hostages plus, who soon went back to battle, for traitor Sgt. Bergdahl!” Trump tweeted Friday.
The Washington Post first reported that North Korean authorities insisted the U.S. envoy sent to retrieve Warmbier, 21, who was a student of the University of Virginia, sign a pledge to pay the bill before allowing Warmbier’s comatose body to return to the United States. Sources confirmed the bill and the amount to Fox News on Thursday.
Sources told the post that the envoy signed an agreement to pay the medical bill on instructions from the president, but a source told Fox News that the U.S. did not ever pay money to North Korea.
The White House declined to comment when asked on the bill, with Press Secretary Sarah Sanders saying in a statement that: “We do not comment on hostage negotiations, which is why they have been so successful during this administration.”
Meanwhile, the president added: “’President[sic] Donald J. Trump is the greatest hostage negotiator that I know of in the history of the United States. 20 hostages, many in impossible circumstances, have been released in last two years. No money was paid.’ Cheif[sic] Hostage Negotiator, USA!”
Warmbier was on tour in North Korea when he allegedly stole a propaganda sign from a hotel. He was arrested in January 2016 and sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor in March 2016. Warmbier, for unknown reasons, fell into a coma while in custody and was held in that condition for an additional 17 months.
North Korean officials did not tell American officials until June 2017 that Warmbier had been unconscious the entire time. He died less than a week after he returned to the U.S. North Korean officials, though, have repeatedly denied accusations that Warmbier was tortured, instead claiming that he had suffered from botulism and then slipped into a coma after taking a sleeping pill.
Fred and Cindy Warmbier sued North Korea over their son’s death and in December were awarded $501 million in damages – money that the Hermit Kingdom will probably never pay.
While the Warmbiers blamed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump has said he believes Kim’s claims that he did not know about the student’s treatment.
Trump and Kim have met in two separate summits. The most recent, held in February, ended without an agreement on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, told Fox News: “Otto Warmbier was mistreated by North Korea in so many ways, including his wrongful conviction and harsh sentence, and the fact that for 16 months they refused to tell his family or our country about his dire condition they caused. No, the United States owes them nothing. They owe the Warmbier family everything.”
Last year, the Trump administration was also able to save three American prisoners held by North Korea. Kim Dong Chul, Tony Kim, and Kim Hak Song were all detained in North Korea. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the three Americans home last May, and said they were all in “good health.”
Fox News’ John Roberts, Rich Edson, Nicholas Kalman, and Mike Emanuel contributed to this report.
Park Yoo-chun, a K-pop idol singer, arrives at the Suwon district court in Suwon, South Korea, April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji
April 26, 2019
SEOUL (Reuters) – K-pop and drama star Park Yu-chun was arrested on Friday on charges of buying and using illegal drugs, a court said, the latest in a series of scandals to hit the South Korean entertainment business.
Suwon District Court approved the arrest warrant for Park, 32, due to concerns over possible destruction of evidence and flight risk, a court spokesman told Reuters.
Park is suspected of having bought about 1.5 grams of methamphetamine with his former girlfriend earlier this year and using the drug around five times, an official at the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency said.
Park has denied wrongdoing, saying he had never taken drugs, and he again denied the charges in court, Yonhap news agency said.
Park’s contract with his management agency had been canceled and he would leave the entertainment industry, Park’s management agency, C-JeS Entertainment, said on Wednesday.
Park was a member of boyband TVXQ between 2003 and 2009 before leaving the group with two other members, forming the group JYJ.
A scandal involving sex tapes, prostitutes and secret chat about rape led at least four other K-pop stars to quit the industry earlier this year.
The cases sparked a nationwide drugs bust and investigations into tax evasion and police collusion at night clubs and other nightlife spots.
(Reporting by Joyce Lee; Additional reporting by Heekyong Yang; Editing by Nick Macfie)
FILE PHOTO: An American Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 flight from Los Angeles taxis after landing at Reagan National Airport shortly after an announcement was made by the FAA that the planes were being grounded by the United States over safety issues in Washington, U.S. March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File Photo
April 26, 2019
(Reuters) – American Airlines Group Inc cut its 2019 profit forecast on Friday, saying it expected to take a $350 million hit from the grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX planes after cancelling 1,200 flights in the first quarter.
The company said it now expects its 2019 adjusted profit to be between $4.00 per share and $6.00 per share.
Analysts on average had expected 2019 earnings of $5.63 per share, according to Refinitiv data.
The No. 1 U.S. airline by passenger traffic said net income rose to $185 million, or 41 cents per share, in the first quarter ended March 31, from $159 million, or 34 cents per share, a year earlier.
Total operating revenue rose 2 percent to $10.58 billion.
2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa, U.S., April 16, 2019. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage
April 26, 2019
By James Oliphant
MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa (Reuters) – Four years ago, Donald Trump campaigned in small towns like Marshalltown, Iowa, vowing to restore economic prosperity to the U.S. heartland.
In his bid to replace Trump in the White House, Pete Buttigieg is taking a similar tack. The difference, he says, is that he can point to a model of success: South Bend, Indiana, the revitalized city where he has been mayor since 2012.
The Democratic presidential contender has vaulted to the congested field’s top tier in recent weeks, drawing media and donor attention for his youth, history-making status as the first openly gay major presidential candidate and a resume that includes military service in Afghanistan.
But Buttigieg’s main argument for his candidacy is that he is a turnaround artist in the mold of Trump, although the Democrat does not expressly invoke the comparison with the Republican president.
“I’m not going around saying we’ve fixed every problem we’ve got,” Buttigieg, 37, said after a house party with voters in Marshalltown. “But I’m proud of what we have done together, and I think it’s a very powerful story.”
Critics argue improving the fortunes of a Midwestern city of 100,000 people does not qualify Buttigieg, who has never held national office, for the presidency of a country of 330 million. Others say South Bend still has pockets of despair and that minorities, in particular, have failed to benefit from its growth.
Buttigieg has told crowds in Iowa and elsewhere that his experience in reviving a struggling Rust Belt community allows him to make a case to voters that other Democratic candidates cannot. That may give him the means to win back some of the disaffected Democratic voters who turned their backs on Hillary Clinton in 2016 to vote for Trump.
Watching Buttigieg at a union hall in Des Moines last week, Rick Ryan, 45, a member of the United Steelworkers, lamented how many of his fellow union workers voted for Trump. The president turned in the best performance by a Republican among union households since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Ryan said he hoped someone like Buttigieg could return them to the Democratic fold.
“He’s aware of the decline in the labor force in America, not just in Indiana or Des Moines or anywhere else,” Ryan said. “Jobs are going overseas. We need a find to way to bring that back.”
Randy Tucker, 56, of Pleasant Hill, Iowa, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said Trump appealed to union members “desperate for somebody to reach out to them, to help them, to listen to their voice.”
Buttigieg could do the same, he said. “In my heart right now, he’s No. 1.”
PAST VS. FUTURE
Buttigieg stresses a key difference in his and Trump’s approaches.
Trump, he tells crowds, is mired in the past, promising to rebuild the 20th century industrial economy. Buttigieg argues the pledge is misleading and unrealistic.
Buttigieg says his focus is on the future, and he often talks about what the country might look like decades from now.
“The only way that we can cultivate what makes America great is to look to the future and not be afraid of it,” Buttigieg said in Marshalltown.
Buttigieg knows his sexual preference may be a barrier to winning some blue-collar voters. But he notes that after he came out as gay in 2015, he won a second term as mayor with 80 percent of the vote in conservative Indiana.
Earlier this month, he announced his presidential bid at the hulking plant in South Bend that stopped making Studebaker autos more than 50 years ago. After lying dormant for decades, the building is being transformed into a high-tech hub after Buttigieg and other city leaders realized it would never again attract a large-scale industrial company.
“That building sat as a powerful reminder. We hoped we would get back that major employer that would fix our economy,” said Jeff Rea, president of the regional Chamber of Commerce.
Buttigieg is praised locally for spurring more than $100 million in downtown investment. During his two terms, unemployment has fallen to 4.1 percent from 11.8 percent.
But a study released in 2017 by the nonprofit group Prosperity Now said not all of the city’s residents had shared in its rebound. The median income for African-Americans remained half that of whites, while the unemployment rate for blacks was double.
Regina Williams-Preston, a city councilor running to replace Buttigieg as mayor, credits him for the revitalized downtown. But she said he had a “blind spot” when it came to focusing on troubled neighborhoods like the one she represents and only grew more engaged after community pressure.
“He understands it now,” she said. “The next step is figuring out how to open the doors of opportunity for everyone.”
‘ONE OF US’
Trump touts the fact that the United States added almost 300,000 manufacturing jobs last year as evidence he made good on his promise to restore the industrial sector. But that growth still left the country with fewer manufacturing jobs than in 2008.
The robust U.S. economy is likely the president’s greatest asset in his re-election bid, particularly in states he carried in 2016 such as Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He won Buttigieg’s home state by 19 points over Clinton in 2016.
Sean Bagniewski, chairman of the Democratic Party in Polk County, Iowa, said Buttigieg would be well positioned to compete with Trump in the Midwest.
“People love the fact that he’s a mayor,” said Bagniewski, who has not endorsed a candidate in the nominating contest. “If you can talk about a positive future, and if you actually have experience that can do it, that’s a compelling vision in Iowa.”
Nan Whaley, the mayor of Dayton, Ohio, which faces many of the same challenges as South Bend, agreed.
“He’s one of us,” Whaley said. “That helps.”
(Reporting by James Oliphant; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Peter Cooney)
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