Cohen on Trump Hush Money, Moscow Plans and Wikileaks

Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen testified Wednesday before Congress about hush payments to alleged former lovers of the president and a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and said Trump knew in advance about a WikiLeaks document dump that damaged his opponent Hillary Clinton.

Here is where Cohen and his former boss stand on the three key issues:

In April 2018, reporters asked Trump on board Air Force One if he knew about $130,000 in payments made before the 2016 election to former porn actress Stormy Daniels, to keep her quiet about an alleged affair.

Trump denied any knowledge of the payments, and suggested reporters ask Cohen — then still his lawyer — about it. Trump later changed his account, admitting he reimbursed Cohen for the payments but that they were a “private transaction” unrelated to his campaign.

Cohen was sentenced in December to three years in jail for crimes that included violating campaign finance laws via the hush payments made to Daniels and a former Playboy model. Testifying to the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, Cohen submitted a copy of a check issued from Trump’s personal account — after he took office  — “to reimburse me for the hush money payments I made to cover up his affair with an adult film star and prevent damage to his campaign.”

“The President of the United States thus wrote a personal check for the payment of hush money as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws,” Cohen stated. Cohen said the reimbursements were deliberately spread out over 12 months to make them “look like a retainer.”

Cohen has also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress when he previously claimed negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow had ended in January of 2016. He later admitted they continued into June 2016, after Trump had become the Republican White House nominee.  “To be clear: Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it,” Cohen told Wednesday’s hearing. Cohen asserted that personal lawyers for Trump reviewed his testimony to Congress in which he lied about the deal.

Trump has repeatedly argued Russia had no sway over him because he had no business dealings there, as he seeks to deflect suggestions his campaign colluded with Russian meddling in the 2016 election.  After Cohen changed his story, Trump acknowledged his right-hand man had pursued a deal with the Russians well into 2016, but insisted there was nothing wrong with seeking business opportunities while running for office.

Court filings have since revealed that negotiations continued even longer than Cohen had admitted, through October or even November 2016.

Cohen testified Wednesday that Trump knew in advance — and welcomed the news — that WikiLeaks planned to release a trove of sensitive emails hacked from Democratic Party computers by Russian agents.

Cohen said that in July 2016 he heard a phone conversation in which Roger Stone, another long-term associate of the president charged with lying to Congress and witness tampering, had told Trump that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had promised the document dump. According to Cohen, Trump answered “to the effect of ‘wouldn’t that be great.'”

Cohen also said he believed Trump had prior knowledge of a June 2016 meeting between his son Donald Jr, campaign officials and a Russian lawyer peddling “dirt” on Clinton. This was based on him seeing Donald Jr inform his father, at around that time, “The meeting is all set.”

“Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world,” Cohen said — adding that “Don Jr. would never set up any meeting of any significance alone and certainly not without checking with his father.” Trump has denied any knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting, or that he discussed the WikiLeaks release with Stone.

source: usa.inquirer.net

Second suspicious package sent to Biden

WASHINGTON —  A law enforcement official says a second package addressed to former Vice President Joe Biden has been intercepted at a mail facility in Wilmington, Delaware.

The official says it has similar markings and characteristics as the packages containing bombs sent to other prominent Democrats.

The official said another package addressed to Biden was also found Thursday morning, that one at a postal center in New Castle, Delaware.

The official wasn’t authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Several packages containing pipe bombs packed with shards of glass have been intercepted in the last few days. They targeted Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, CNN and others.

A New York City police bomb squad has recovered a suspicious package addressed to Robert De Niro.  /ee

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Trump says Putin favored Clinton for president

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump says he gets along “very, very well” with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But he says the Russian leader would have preferred to have his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Trump tells Christian broadcast station CBN in an interview taped Wednesday that Clinton would have weakened the U.S. military and driven up energy prices — two things Putin would have welcomed.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election to bolster Trump, and to hurt Clinton.

Trump also says in his first interview following a lengthy face-to-face meeting with Putin that he thinks the two “get along very, very well.” But he says Putin will always want “what’s good for Russia, and I want what’s good for the United States.”

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Clinton says FBI chief and Putin cost her election

NEW YORK—Hillary Clinton on Tuesday laid the blame for her defeat in last year’s White House race squarely at the feet of FBI director James Comey and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, saying they had “scared off” voters.

The Democrat, speaking at a charity luncheon in New York, said she took “absolute personal responsibility” for a series of campaign blunders that contributed to her loss against Donald Trump.

But she pointed a finger at Russian hacking and interference and at the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, who revealed just before the November 8 election he was re-opening a probe into Clinton’s use of a personal email server while secretary of state.

“I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28th and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me, but got scared off,” Clinton said.

“If the election had been on October 27, I’d be your president.”

In January the US intelligence community announced it had concluded Russia interfered in the election — and that Putin himself ordered a campaign to undermine the US democratic process and harm Clinton’s electability in order to help Trump win.

Clinton described the Russian president as someone who was “not a member of my fan club.”

“He certainly interfered in our election and it was clear he hurt me and helped my opponent,” she said.

Clinton pointed to the release of an old video tape on October 7 on which Trump is heard crudely discussing groping women, and how “within an hour or two” of the tapes’ release, the Russian theft of Clinton staffers’ emails were made public on WikiLeaks.

“What a coincidence. You just can’t make this stuff up,” she said.

Clinton’s remarks — which echoed CIA comments branding WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service” abetted by the likes of Russia — were the most extensive and direct about her loss since the shock result last year.

“The reason why I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last 10 days,” she said.

‘Everybody but herself’

Political analysts widely consider that Clinton fell short in part because she failed to mobilize the coalition of non-whites, young voters, single women and college-educated whites who propelled Barack Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012.

She was also faulted for not spending enough campaign time in traditionally Democratic strongholds Michigan and Wisconsin, states which fell to Trump on election day.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Democrats have focused on Russian hacking — and alleged cooperation between Moscow and Trump associates — to mask their bitter defeat.

“The Democrats had to come up with a story as to why they lost the election, and so badly… so they made up a story — RUSSIA. Fake news!” Trump tweeted in February.

Clinton blamed “everybody but herself,” Republican congressman Jeff Duncan said on Twitter.

The 69-year-old former first lady, US senator and secretary of state has spent decades in the public spotlight.

“I’m now back to being an active citizen and part of the resistance,” she said, referring to the informal movement opposed to the Republican president.

Clinton is writing a book about her experiences, to be released later this year, and said it has been a “painful process” to relive the campaign and the mistakes she made.

“You’ll read my confession and my request for absolution,” she said.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Trump denounces Streep as ‘overrated Clinton flunky’

NEW YORK, United States — Donald Trump took on one of the Hollywood greats Monday, accusing Meryl Streep of being an overrated actress and a Hillary Clinton “flunky” after the multiple Oscar winner tore into him at an awards ceremony.

In what has become an early morning custom for the notoriously thin-skinned Republican president-elect, Trump took to Twitter to settle scores with the three-time Oscar winner just hours after her public broadside.

“Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes,” Trump wrote. “She is a Hillary flunky who lost big.”

Streep berated Trump for his divisive rhetoric as she received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes on Sunday in Los Angeles.

The 67-year-old fought to control her emotions as she received a standing ovation during her acceptance speech for the Cecil B DeMille Award, handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

“You and all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it. Hollywood, foreigners and the press,” she said to her peers with a laugh, referencing Trump’s campaign that frequently disparaged immigrants and what he called biased media.

The US entertainment industry broadly supported Trump’s Democratic opponent Clinton, with many stars publicly endorsing her White House run and pumping millions of dollars into her campaign war chest.

Streep trashed the incoming president and singled out an infamous campaign speech during which he did a decidedly unflattering impression of disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski.

“The person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter — someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart,” she said.

‘Disrespect, violence’

“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.”

“Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence,” she said.

“When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”

Trump has denied mocking Kovaleski and again defended himself on Monday against Streep’s accusation.

“For the 100th time, I never ‘mocked’ a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him ‘groveling’ when he totally changed a 16-year-old story that he had written in order to make me look bad,” Trump said in a series of tweets.

“Just more very dishonest media!” he added.

Trump told The New York Times in a brief telephone interview that he was “not surprised” to be criticized by “liberal movie people.”

His senior aide, Kellyanne Conway, dismissed Streep’s remarks as sour grapes, accused the actress of “inciting people’s worst instincts” and backed her boss as “absolutely right.”

“The election is over. She lost,” Conway told Fox News.

‘Self-pity’

“Everybody in that audience with very few exceptions was of a single myopic mind about how they wanted the election to go,” she said, criticizing what she called the “self-pity” of multi-billion-dollar industry Hollywood.

“Talking about how vilified poor Hollywood is, in their gazillion dollar gowns? Can I borrow a couple of those for the inaugural please?” she said.

“Somebody with a platform like Meryl Streep is also I think inciting people’s worst instincts, when she won’t get up there and say, ‘I didn’t like it, but let’s try to support him and see where we can find some common ground’.”

Streep spoke with less than two weeks to go until Trump’s inauguration.

“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts,” she said, holding back tears.

She urged the “principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage,” to cheers from the floor.

Streep, considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation, was presented with the DeMille award to mark a career which has seen her win eight Golden Globes and collect 29 nominations.

Star Trek actor George Takei was among those who leapt to her defense.

“A better president would take criticism without name calling,” he wrote in a flurry of his own tweets. “Just admit you’re a bully — and a liar,” he later added, along with: “What a small, small man. SAD!” CBB

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

Electoral College meets amid effort to deny Trump presidency

WASHINGTON — And you thought Election Day was in November.

Electors are set to gather in every state on Monday to formally elect Donald Trump president even as anti-Trump forces try one last time to deny him the White House.

Protests are planned for state capitals, but they are unlikely to persuade the Electoral College to dump Trump. An Associated Press survey of electors found very little appetite to vote for alternative candidates.

Republican electors say they have been deluged with emails, phone calls and letters urging them not to support Trump. Many of the emails are part of coordinated campaigns.

“The letters are actually quite sad,” said Lee Green, a Republican elector from North Carolina. “They are generally freaked out. They honestly believe the propaganda. They believe our nation is being taken over by a dark and malevolent force.”

Wirt A. Yerger Jr., a Republican elector in Mississippi, said, “I have gotten several thousand emails asking me not to vote for Trump. I threw them all away.”

A joint session of Congress is scheduled for Jan. 6 to certify the results of the Electoral College vote, with Vice President Joe Biden presiding as president of the Senate. Once the result is certified, the winner — likely Trump — will be sworn in on Jan. 20.

The Electoral College was devised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was a compromise between those who wanted popular elections for president and those who wanted no public input.

The Electoral College has 538 members, with the number allocated to each state based on how many representatives it has in the House plus one for each senator. The District of Columbia gets three, despite the fact that the home to Congress has no vote in Congress.

To be elected president, the winner must get at least half plus one — or 270 electoral votes. Most states give all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins that state’s popular vote. Maine and Nebraska award them by congressional district.

The AP tried to reach all of the electors and interviewed more than 330 of them, finding widespread aggravation among Democrats with the electoral process, but little expectation Trump would be derailed.

Some Democrats have argued that the Electoral College is undemocratic because it gives more weight to less populated states. That is how Hillary Clinton, who got more than 2.6 million more votes nationwide, lost the election to Trump. Some have also tried to dissuade Trump voters by arguing that he is unsuited to the job. Others cite the CIA’s assessment that Russia engaged in computer hacking to sway the election in favor of the Republican.

But despite the national group therapy session being conducted by some Democrats, only one Republican elector told the AP that he will not vote for Trump.

There is no constitutional provision or federal law that requires electors to vote for the candidate who won their state. Some states require their electors to vote for the winning candidate, either by law or through signed pledges. But no elector has ever been prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged, according to the National Archives.

Those laws are rarely tested. More than 99 percent of electors through U.S. history have voted for the candidate who won their state.

Electors are selected by state parties, and so are often insiders who can be trusted to vote for the party’s candidate. Many Republican electors said they feel duty-bound to honor their pledge to vote for the candidate who won their state, regardless of how they feel about Trump.

Still, some anti-Trump activists have been getting creative in trying to persuade electors to dump Trump.

In addition to thousands of emails, Republican elector Charlie Buckels of Louisiana said he received a FedEx package with a 50-page document that the sender said “had absolute proof that the Russians hacked the elections.”

“From the tenor of these emails, you would think these people are curled up in a corner in a fetal position with a thumb in their mouth,” Buckels said.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Clinton says US owes Trump ‘a chance to lead’

WASHINGTON — A day after Donald Trump, against all odds, won election as America’s 45th president, Hillary Clinton on Wednesday (Thursday Philippine time) lamented that the nation proved to be “more divided than we thought” but urged supporters: “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.”

Standing before a crowd of crestfallen campaign aides and backers, Clinton said, “This is painful and it will be for a long time.”

Trump’s triumph, declared only after midnight, will end eight years of Democratic dominance of the White House.

He’ll govern with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and lead a country deeply divided by his rancorous campaign against Clinton.

He faces fractures within his own party, too, given the numerous Republicans who refused to back him or only tepidly supported his nomination.

As he claimed victory early Wednesday, Trump urged Americans to “come together as one united people.”

That sentiment was echoed by the GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had been a reluctant Trump supporter. “This needs to be a time of redemption, not a time of recrimination,” Ryan said in a news conference, saying Trump had earned a “mandate” to enact his agenda.

Clinton, hoping to become the first woman to be elected president, conceded defeat in a telephone call to Trump.

With several million votes still to be counted, she held a narrow lead in the nationwide popular vote. Most of the outstanding votes appeared to be in Democratic-leaning states, with the biggest chunk in California, a state Clinton overwhelmingly won. With almost 125 million votes counted, The Associated Press tally had Clinton with 47.7 percent and Trump with 47.5 percent.

Summoning her most magnanimous tone after a bitter race, Clinton said of the man whose victory she declared would be a danger to America and the world: “I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.”

As her supporters waited for her in a New York ballroom, the scene of despair played out for all on live television. Cameras zoomed in on the exhausted and miserable faces of several of her closest aides, some dressed in hoodies or other casual clothing. The familiar campaign music of Bruce Springsteen in the background added to the sense of disappointment.

“We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought,” Clinton said in a speech she never hoped to deliver. “But I still believe in America and I always will.”

Global stock markets and US stock futures plunged early Wednesday, but later recovered. The Dow Jones industrial average was up almost 1 percent in midday trading in New York.

President Barack Obama congratulated Trump in a phone call and invited him to a meeting at the White House Thursday to discuss transition.

Obama said at the White House Wednesday that he had significant differences with Trump but added that the same had been true when he took office after George W. Bush. He said Clinton had accomplished much as the first woman nominated for president by a major political party.

He noted that despite the painful loss for the Democrats, “the sun came up” as usual Wednesday morning.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said Obama and Trump had “a very nice talk” when the president called him.

Trump, who spent much of the campaign urging supporters on as they chanted “lock her up,” said the nation owed Clinton “a major debt of gratitude” for her years of public service.

A New York real estate developer who lives in a sparkling Manhattan high-rise, Trump forged a connection with white, working class Americans who feel left behind in a changing economy and diversifying country.

He cast immigration, both from Latin America and the Middle East, as the root of problems plaguing many Americans and tapped into fears of terrorism emanating at home and abroad.

GOP Senate candidates fended off Democratic challengers in key states, including North Carolina, Indiana and Wisconsin. Republicans also maintained their grip on the House.

Senate control means Trump will have great leeway in appointing Supreme Court justices, which could shift the bench to the right for decades.

Trump has pledged to usher in sweeping changes to US foreign policy, including building a wall along the US-Mexico border and suspending immigration from countries with terrorism ties. He has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and spoken of building a better relationship with Moscow, worrying some in his own party who fear he’ll go easy on Putin’s provocations.

Putin sent him a telegram of congratulations.

Upending years of political convention on his way to the White House, Trump leveled personal insults against his rivals, declared Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers, and vowed to suspend Muslim immigration to the US

He never released his tax returns, breaking with decades of campaign tradition, and eschewed the kind of robust data and field efforts that helped Obama win two White House terms, relying instead on large, free-wheeling rallies to energize supporters. His campaign was often in chaos.

Clinton faced persistent questions about her honesty and trustworthiness. And her troubles flared anew late in the race, when the FBI Director reviewed new emails from her tenure at the State Department. Just two days before Election Day, Comey said there was nothing in the material to warrant criminal charges against Clinton.

Trump will inherit a nation deeply divided by economic and educational opportunities, race and culture.

Women nationwide supported Clinton by a double-digit margin, while men significantly backed Trump. More than half of white voters went for the Republican, while nearly 9 in 10 blacks and two-thirds of Hispanics voted for the Democrat.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Trump wins Indiana and Kentucky, Clinton takes Vermont: networks

WASHINGTON, United States — Republican Donald Trump won Indiana, the home state of his running mate Mike Pence, while Hillary Clinton took the northeastern state of Vermont, in the first results of Tuesday’s US presidential election, television networks projected.

It was still too early to determine a winner in three of the first six states to close their polls — Republican-leaning South Carolina and Georgia, and the key battleground of Virginia, the networks said.

Those first results give the 70-year-old Republican billionaire an early lead in the count of Electoral College votes — 19 to three for Clinton.

The lead in the running tally toward the magic number of 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House — a majority of the 538 up for grabs — was expected to change hands as the evening wore on in the closely contested election. CBB

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Clinton, Trump fight to the finish in bitter US presidential vote

LEESBURG, Virginia—White House rivals Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were still flailing for a knockout blow on Monday as a presidential race that has cast a pall over US democracy neared its end.

With one day of campaigning left, both sides had packed schedules in the swing states that will decide whether the Democratic Party candidate can convert her slim opinion poll lead into final victory.

The 70-year-old Trump, a populist tycoon who coopted the Republican Party and created a raucous, nativist grassroots movement in his own image, was still campaigning on Sunday midnight.



Branding 69-year-old Clinton the “most corrupt candidate ever to seek the office of the presidency,” he urged supporters to “deliver justice at the ballot box on Nov. 8.”

Clinton, a former US secretary of state running to become America’s first female president, had events planned through Monday midnight to take her into polling day itself.

The Democrat spent the last eight days of campaigning under a renewed FBI inquiry into whether she had exposed US secrets by using a private e-mail server at the state department.

Note of optimism

That burden was finally lifted on Sunday, when the FBI confirmed it would not seek criminal charges, but at the cost of another cycle of headlines about an issue that has hurt her.

She tried to end Sunday’s round of rallies on a note of optimism about the United States, albeit couched as a warning that her supporters need to rise to counter the Trump threat.

“I really want each and every one of us to think for a moment about how we would feel on Nov. 9, if we were not successful,” she said in Manchester, New Hampshire.

“When your kids and grandkids ask you what you did in 2016, when everything was on the line, I hope you’ll be able to say you voted for a better, stronger, fairer America,” she added.

World markets were rocked last month when the renewed FBI probe threatened to sink Clinton’s chances, but Asian, European and US exchanges opened higher after that threat was lifted.

But Trump came back fighting, and experts said the renewed scandal had already damaged the former first lady’s chance of succeeding President Barack Obama.

Clinton’s lead dropped from 5.7 to 2.9 percentage points in the week since the scandal resurfaced, according to influential data journalist Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com.

Trump is predicting a ballot upset on a par with Britain’s shock vote this year to quit the European Union, or what on Sunday he called: “Brexit plus, plus, plus.”

All-out
Clinton has booked a star-studded roster of supporters—headlined by President Obama and rock star Bruce Springsteen—for her final events on Monday.

But Trump is also touring key swing states and was determined not to let Clinton off the hook over her e-mails, a symbol for his supporters of the corruption of the Washington elite.

“The rank-and-file special agents of the FBI won’t let her get away with her terrible crimes,” Trump told a rally in Michigan, a state that was won comfortably by Obama in 2012.

“Right now she’s being protected by a rigged system. It’s a totally rigged system. I’ve been saying it for a long time,” he declared, as his supporters chanted “Lock her up!”

Opinion polls tightened

Late last month, with Clinton seemingly on a glide path to victory, a renewed FBI investigation in Clinton’s e-mail use sent shock waves through both campaigns.

Trump seized on the opening, condemning Clinton’s “criminal scheme” and arguing that she is unfit to be president.

He has previously threatened to reject the result of Tuesday’s vote if he loses, alleging that the race has been “rigged” by the media and the establishment elite.

Opinion polls tightened as Trump began to recover ground he had lost after several women accused him of sexual assault, and the race looked headed for a photo finish.

Clinton made no direct reference to her reprieve during her Sunday campaign stops.

Russian interference

Instead, she hammered her opponent over his sometimes ugly rhetoric and, implicitly, the alleged covert Russian interference that have poisoned the race.

“There are powerful forces inside and outside of America that do threaten to pull us apart,” she said. “We’ve arrived at a moment of reckoning in this election. Our core values as Americans are being tested.”

If Clinton wins, she will seek to build on Obama’s cautious but progressive legacy, including his controversial health insurance reforms.

Trump has vowed to tear up the healthcare reform, along with free trade agreements, to rebuild a “depleted” US military and review US alliances. —AFP

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Michelle Obama stumps with Hillary; Pence in plane scare

WINSTON-SALEM, United States—First Lady Michelle Obama implored voters to troop to the polls as she stumped Thursday for Democrat Hillary Clinton, while the race suffered a scare when Donald Trump’s running mate’s plane skidded off the runway.

No one was reported hurt in the incident, in which the plane carrying Indiana Governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence came to rest in grass next to the runway after landing at New York’s rain-soaked LaGuardia airport.

But with the mishap coming in the final throes of a combative campaign that will be decided November 8, several Twitter users described it as a metaphor for the 2016 race.

Trump, speaking in Ohio, said he was grateful that those on the plane avoided “grave, grave danger.”

“I just spoke to Mike Pence. He’s fine,” Trump said.

Clinton also expressed relief that no one was hurt.

The former first lady and secretary of state enlisted the current first lady, who enjoys sky-high support, in hammering Trump and making the case for a third straight Democratic term in the White House.

Obama earned thunderous roars of approval from a crowd of 11,000 as she took the stage with Clinton in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, one of the swing states in play, where they accused Trump of seeking to depress turnout.

Obama has emerged as a compelling force in the hard-fought campaign, delivering powerful arguments against the Republican billionaire and in support of Clinton’s bid to become the first female US president.



“She is ready to be commander-in-chief on Day 1, and yes, she happens to be a woman,” Obama said of Clinton, whom she called “my girl.”

The 52-year-old wife of President Barack Obama has energized Democrats by criticizing Trump for his strident rhetoric and for what she brands his “frightening” attitude towards women.

Trump’s strategy was “to make this election so dirty and ugly that we don’t want any part of it,” she said.

“When you hear folks talking about a global conspiracy and saying that this election is ‘rigged,’ understand that they are trying to get you to stay home.”

Clinton has basked in the results of new polls showing her with an impressive lead with just 12 days to go.

North Carolina voted for Obama in 2008, then for Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.

But Clinton has expanded her narrow lead to 2.4 points in the southeastern state, where Republican leaders worry that Trump’s slow collapse will hurt them in congressional races.

Clinton, whose campaign announced a large fundraising haul on Thursday, struck a tone of unity and optimism.

“As Michelle reminds us, this election is about our kids and, in my case, our grandkids,” Clinton said. “Starting right now, let’s come together. Let’s work together and be hopeful and optimistic and unified.”

Combative Trump

The latest rolling poll average compiled by tracker RealClearPolitics showed Clinton, who turned 69 on Wednesday, with a 5.4 point lead in a national race against Trump and two outsiders — pointing to a likely electoral college victory for the Democrat.

In Toledo, Ohio, Trump quipped that the election should be scrapped.

“I am just thinking to myself right now we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump,” he told the crowd.


Trump’s standing has been hit hard, particularly among female voters, since the release this month of a 2005 video in which he boasts that his celebrity allows him to grope women with impunity.

But the 70-year-old Manhattan real estate mogul turned serious in an interview with Fox News, saying that NBC — the company that owns the “Access Hollywood” show that recorded Trump’s 2005 comments — broke the law and could be sued.

“It was an illegal act,” he said.

Trump meanwhile took heart from a new survey that shows him with a two-point lead in Florida, a state where presidential races are often won and lost — and a must-win state for him.

“We don’t want to give this away,” the combative candidate promised supporters in Ohio.

‘Fast and loose’

The RealClearPolitics poll average still puts Clinton ahead in Florida by 1.6 percentage points, but she wants to lock it in.

The president, who narrowly won Florida in 2008 and 2012, campaigns for her there Friday, while Clinton is scheduled to join pop star Jennifer Lopez on stage Saturday in Miami.

As Clinton called on voters to rise above the nastiness of the race, new WikiLeaks disclosures threatened her campaign, notably an email in which aide Douglas Band detailed his own money-making efforts both on behalf of Bill Clinton personally and the foundation.

Band wrote of helping the former president “secure and engage in for-profit activities — including speeches, books, and advisory service engagements.”

Trump pounced, calling the activity outright corruption.

“If the Clintons were willing to play this fast and loose with their enterprise when they weren’t in the White House, just imagine what they’d do given the chance to once again control the Oval Office,” he said./rga

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Hillary, in Miami, gets Adele on her team

MIAMI—Hillary Clinton took time off from storming the campaign trail in the key state of Florida Tuesday to take in a pre-birthday concert by pop icon Adele.

Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said the award-winning British singer, who can’t vote in the United States, is “100 percent for Hillary Clinton,” adding: “I love her. She’s amazing.”


Merrill says Adele told the audience that while she is British, “what happens in America affects me too.”

Clinton turns 69 on Wednesday.

Reporters were not allowed to join Clinton for her concert treat — so we don’t yet know whether the White House hopeful belted out a few of her Adele favorites in the dark.

On a possibly wackier note, the former top US diplomat and ex-senator hours earlier appeared on a Spanish-language entertainment show, where she shared her favorite recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

Hosts of the Univision show “El gordo y la flaca,” gave Clinton a bottle of tequila to celebrate the last year of her sixties.

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

Clinton looks to consolidate lead over Trump

CHARLOTTE, United States—With just over two weeks to go before Americans vote for a new president, Hillary Clinton—who has widened her lead over Donald Trump—is stepping up her efforts in key battleground states to consolidate her lead.

The Democratic former secretary of state, who is vying to be America’s first female president, leads the Republican real estate mogul among likely voters by 50 percent to 38 percent, according to a national ABC News poll.

That is her highest score since the start of the race to succeed Barack Obama in the White House.

“We are behind,” Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway admitted Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” nevertheless insisting that the race was not over.

At an evening rally in Naples, Florida, the 70-year-old Trump called on his supporters to turn out en masse to “get rid of Crooked Hillary once and for all,” using one of his favorite nicknames for his 68-year-old rival.

“Numbers are looking phenomenal in Florida. Don’t believe the media,” he insisted.

The Sunshine State is a key prize in the presidential race, one of several battleground states that are key for both candidates if they want to win on November 8. Most polls put Trump a few points behind Clinton there.

‘Systemic racism’

Conscious that winning the minority vote will help lead her to victory, the 68-year-old Clinton started her day Sunday at a mainly black church in Durham, North Carolina—another of the swing states up for grabs.

Obama won the southern state by a razor-thin margin in 2008, but lost it to Mitt Romney four years later. Team Clinton is pulling out all the stops to put it back in the Democratic win column.

Before a congregation that included Sybrina Fulton—the mother of slain unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin, whose death shocked America in 2012—Clinton called for awareness of the “systemic racism” seen across the country.

“If we are honest with each other, we know we face the continuing discrimination against African-Americans and in particular young African-Americans,” she said.

“These conversations can be painful for everybody, but we have got to have them.”

She accused her Republican opponent of painting “a bleak picture of our inner cities” and ignoring the successes of black leaders “in every field and every walk of life.”

Hillary and Michelle

Clinton will return to North Carolina on Thursday with the woman who has emerged as one of her best campaign weapons—Michelle Obama. It will be their first joint rally for the former and current first ladies.

“Part of the great joy of being an American is to know that you can contribute to making things better for yourselves and for young people and for people who have been left out and left behind,” Clinton told a rally in Charlotte.

“Everybody has a role to play and the choice in this election really is about what you want, what you believe for yourself and your future,” she added, notably mentioning the need to respect women—an allusion to Trump’s woes over allegations of sexual misconduct.

The new ABC News poll said 69 percent of likely voters disapprove of Trump’s response to questions about his treatment of women, after a series of women alleged he either groped or forcibly kissed them in years past.

Trump has strongly denied those allegations, and on Saturday threatened to sue the “liars” who came forward with claims about his past behavior.

Clinton is leading nationally in both two-way and four-way contests by an average of about six points, according to RealClearPolitics. She is also ahead in most of the crucial battleground states.

The 70-year-old Trump is clinging to an edge—but only a slight one—in traditionally Republican strongholds like Texas, where he has a three-point lead.

‘Not over yet’

Team Clinton is gunning for a landslide win, using its momentum to push ahead in the battle for control of Congress. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives are now in Republican hands, and the Democrats would like to change that.

Clinton unleashed a pair of powerful surrogates on the campaign trail Sunday—her husband, former president Bill, in Florida, and the current president in Nevada.

“We’re not taking anything for granted at all,” campaign manager Robby Mook told Fox News Sunday. “You know, this is not over yet.”

While Clinton has received several major newspaper endorsements, Trump got his first major thumbs-up, from The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“Mr Trump represents neither the danger his critics claim nor the magic elixir many of his supporters crave,” the paper wrote, adding he would instead shake up the US capital’s “political elites.”/rga

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Victory in sight, Clinton still grapples with negative views

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton bested Donald Trump in three debates. She leads in many preference polls of the most competitive states. Barring a significant shift in the next two weeks, she is in a strong position to become the first woman elected U.S. president.

But Clinton will end the campaign still struggling to change the minds of millions of voters who don’t think well of her, a glaring liability should the Democratic nominee move on to the White House.

While many see her as better prepared to be commander in chief than Trump, she is consistently viewed unfavorably by more than half of the country. Most voters also consider her dishonest.

Clinton’s advisers have spent months trying to erase that perception. They’ve set up small events where she had more intimate conversations with voters. They’ve tested a seemingly endless stream of messages aimed at assuring the public that the former secretary of state was in the race to do more than fulfill her own political ambitions.

As Clinton starts making her closing argument to voters, her team appears to have come to terms that the mission remains unfulfilled.

“Honest and trustworthy has become our most talked about metric because it’s not great,” said Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director. “But we’ve never thought it’s the metric people make a decision on.”

If Clinton wins, that theory may be proven true.

Just 36 percent of voters believe Clinton is honest and trustworthy, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. That’s compared with about 60 percent who believe she has the qualifications and temperament to be commander in chief.

The public’s perception of Clinton has bounced up and down throughout her time in public life. Her favorability rating fell below 50 percent at times during her years as first lady, but rose to its high water mark then and while she was as secretary of state under President Barack Obama.

Democrats blame some of the current negative personal perceptions of Clinton on the hard-charging tactics she’s used to try to discredit Trump, though they believe her sustained assault on Trump’s character and temperament has been crucial.

Party operatives also say Trump’s personal attacks on Clinton have made it all but impossible for more positive messages to break through. He’s called her a “liar,” a “nasty woman” and pledged to put her in jail.

“When you’re under relentless assault from a reality TV star, it’s hard to come out of that with anybody feeling good about anyone,” said Bill Burton, a former Obama aide.

Still, Clinton’s advisers acknowledge that some of her troubles have been of her own making, including her penchant for privacy.

She’s spent nearly the entire campaign struggling to explain why she used a private email server in the basement of her home while she led the State Department. She hid a pneumonia diagnosis this fall from nearly all of her senior staff, then left the public unaware of her condition and whereabouts for 90 minutes after the illness caused her to rush out of a public event in New York.

“She is a politician that does not seek to be the center of attention and is inherently more private than most politicians, certainly presidential candidates,” Palmieri said. “That doesn’t always serve you great in a campaign for president.”

Clinton frequently shoots down questions about the public’s negative perceptions by saying she’s viewed more positively when she’s doing a job rather than running for one. There’s some evidence to back that up.

When she ran for re-election to the Senate from New York in 2006, she won with 67 percent of the vote, a big jump from the 55 percent share from her first race in 2000. Her approval rating when she left the State Department, where her job kept her out of day-to-day politics, sat at an enviable 65 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

But if Clinton is elected president, she won’t have the luxury she had as secretary of state to stay away from the political fray — with Republicans in Washington in the opposition, and possibly Trump, too.

The businessman keeps flirting with the idea he could contest the election results if he loses. There are also persistent rumors that, if he is loses, he might try to harness the enthusiasm of his millions of supporters into some type of media venture.

“The notion that Trump is going to go quietly into the night and wish her Godspeed is highly unlikely,” said David Axelrod, another former Obama adviser. “She’s going to have to contend with that and whatever it is he chooses to make his vehicle.”

Clinton has begun acknowledging the challenge that could await her in the White House, if she wins, centering her closing argument to voters on a call for unity after a bitter campaign.

“My name may be on the ballot, but the question really is who are we as a country, what are our values, what kind of a future do we want to create together,” she said Friday at a rally in Ohio.

Some Democrats see the transition — the two month-plus stretch between the Nov. 8 election and the Jan. 20 inauguration — as a crucial opportunity for her to signal, if she wins, that a Clinton White House would be different from a Clinton campaign.

In a nod to bipartisanship, she could nominate a Republican for her Cabinet. Clinton could start moving on some of her more broadly popular policy proposals as a way of boosting her appeal, assuming no crisis demands immediate action.

Still, Axelrod said changing the public’s view of Clinton will be a “long-term project.”

“There’s no silver bullet to turn around years of wear and tear on her image,” he said./rga

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Why embattled Trump may keep hammering Bill Clinton misdeeds

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s efforts to drag Hillary Clinton down by focusing on her husband’s misconduct may be a relatively new strategy for him, but it’s not for the advisers whispering in his ear.

If it seems odd for a Republican presidential nominee who is facing a wave of accusations about sexual misdeeds to be picking a fight about sexual misdeeds, the Clinton fixation of four of his top advisers offers one possible explanation.

Some of them have been waiting a quarter-century to more deeply explore accusations that the former president has assaulted women.

Trump is “surrounded by people who have been obsessed with bringing down the Clintons based on pseudo-scandals for years,” said David Brock, an ally of Hillary Clinton who as a former Republican operative spent much of the 1990s hunting down dirt on the Clintons. “For people with longstanding Clinton animus, they’re probably gleeful that even though this is a losing strategy, this is what he’s decided to do to close out his campaign.”

It was the Clinton campaign itself, back in the 1992 presidential race, that coined the phrase “bimbo eruptions” to deal with multiple allegations of extramarital affairs by Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton helped the campaign keep a lid on the controversy, going on television to stand by her husband and working behind the scenes to discredit his accusers.

Flash forward to Monica Lewinsky. Clinton was impeached by the House in 1998 for lying about his relationship with the White House intern, but the Senate voted not to convict him and he has managed to repair his image with his post-presidential philanthropic work.

The right has long harbored a grudge that the Clintons have managed to build a political dynasty in spite of the allegations.

Keith Appell, a longtime conservative consultant, said many people feel Bill Clinton’s misconduct has never gotten a full airing. He called the current discussion fair game because there’s “very legitimate proof that Hillary enables her husband for sheer political ambition.”

Now, Republican operatives are seizing the moment, using Trump as their megaphone.

Chief among those pushing Trump’s new approach is his longtime friend and sounding board Roger Stone, who co-authored a book published in October 2015 called “The Clintons’ War on Women.”

In a moment that seemed ripped from that tome, Trump displayed three Bill Clinton accusers at a brief press conference before Sunday’s debate in St. Louis and then seated them in the audience. Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey say Clinton forced himself on them decades ago. Paula Jones filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him in 1994, which he paid $850,000 to settle without apologizing or acknowledging culpability.

Before and during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the issue of sexual abuse allegations “never got the news coverage it deserved at the time because the media was much more narrow and more controlled,” Stone said in an interview Thursday. “It’s a new day.”

And, yes, he said, having a publicity-savvy major party political nominee showcasing the women’s claims certainly helps.

Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, also has a tie to the issue: Back in the 1990s, her future husband, George Conway, wrote the Supreme Court brief that cleared the way for Jones’ civil suit against the president. Clinton’s denial of his affair with Lewinsky during a deposition in the Jones case led to his impeachment trial.

Another key Trump adviser, deputy campaign manager David Bossie, cut his teeth in politics by going after the Clintons. He was executive director of a group that in 1992 sought to charge callers $4.99 to listen to tapes of alleged conversations between then-candidate Clinton and Gennifer Flowers, a model and actress Clinton admitted having a sexual encounter with. She said she’d been his mistress for 12 years. Bossie went on to investigate the Clintons’ Whitewater land deal.

During Hillary Clinton’s first run for president in 2008, Bossie’s group, Citizens United, produced a movie about her, including riffs on her “vindictiveness” in covering up her husband’s affairs.

A gleeful Bossie told AP in an interview in late May, when he was leading an outside group attacking Clinton, that his history of Clinton research gave him “an enormous vault of material to work with.”

“Nowhere in their campaign plan of two years ago did they see they were going to have to defend Hillary Clinton’s support of women as a general election matter,” Bossie said. He joined the Trump campaign three months later, bringing along his decades of Clinton immersion.

Steve Bannon has picked up the Clinton haranguing in more recent years, using the media company Breitbart News as a repository for every scrap of information and gossip about Bill Clinton. The former chairman of Breitbart, he’s now the chief executive officer of Trump’s campaign.

The Bill Clinton-heavy approach began in earnest after recent revelations of a 2005 tape in which Trump is heard bragging about kissing women without consent and grabbing their genitals.

Appell said Trump is “responding in kind” by pointing the finger at Bill Clinton

Still, he says, the strategy might not pay off on Election Day.

“As fascinating as some of this might be, it is not what closes the deal with voters,” Appell said. “Over the next three weeks, what will close the deal is telling people what you’ll do for them.”/rga

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

As woes mount for Trump, Clinton seizes offensive

WASHINGTON—Donald Trump’s presidential hopes suffered a punishing new setback Monday as authorities clamped down on his charitable foundation, while Hillary Clinton seized the offensive to brand the Republican an unscrupulous businessman.

With just five weeks to go before the November 8 election, the billionaire Trump is struggling to regain his footing against a surging Clinton and climb out of one of the darkest periods of his White House campaign.

Already weakened by damaging revelations about his taxes, Trump was hit with an order by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that the Donald J. Trump foundation must “cease and desist from soliciting contributions” in New York.

The notice informed the charity that it had engaged in fundraising activities that were not permitted under the law because it had not been registered with state authorities.

With Team Trump on the defensive after leaked documents suggested he may have paid no income tax for two decades, Democrat Clinton rounded on him as a real estate bully who cares little for his fellow countrymen.

“While millions of American families, including mine and yours, were working hard paying our fair share, it seems he was contributing nothing to our nation. Imagine that,” a fired up Clinton said in Toledo, Ohio.

“He has been ‘dissing’ America in this whole campaign,” she charged, riding high on a surge in polling carried out after the bruising first presidential debate.

The pair face off in their second showdown on Sunday.

Vice presidential nominees Mike Pence, the Republican governor of Indiana, and Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia take the stage Tuesday for their only debate of the campaign cycle.

Personal attacks
Trump used an appearance before military veterans in Virginia to pound the former secretary of state once more for handling classified information via a “basement” private email server.

But he appeared to stumble when he addressed the mental problems facing military personnel and suggested some were returning from battle ill-equipped to cope with debilitating conditions.

“When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over, and you’re strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can’t handle it,” Trump said.

Retired lieutenant-general Michael Flynn, a Trump advisor, said the candidate was merely “highlighting the challenges veterans face when returning home after serving their country.”

In recent days, Trump’s strongest line of attack has been personal, and of a rare brutality even for this bare-knuckles campaign: he mocked Clinton over the weekend for coming down with pneumonia and even questioned her fidelity to her husband.

“Hillary Clinton’s only loyalty is to her financial contributors and to herself,” he said.

“I don’t even think she’s loyal to Bill, if you want to know the truth. And really, folks, really, why should she be, right?” said the Manhattan billionaire, who revived talk of Bill Clinton’s past infidelities following his lackluster debate performance.

‘Poster boy’ for bullying

A defiant Trump meanwhile dodged swirling questions about his tax record.

Trump’s top allies praised their candidate’s business acumen following the bombshell revelation by The New York Times that he declared a loss of $916 million on his 1995 tax return, enabling him to legally avoid paying taxes for up to 18 years.

If true, the report based on documents leaked to the Times is proof of the tycoon’s “absolute genius,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump surrogate.

Trump reportedly took massive, though legal, tax breaks on failing businesses, earning millions while shareholders and investors swallowed the losses and contractors went unpaid.

Clinton seized on the Times report to blast her rival — not just for refusing to pay his share, but as a business failure.

“How anybody can lose a dollar, let alone a billion dollars, in the casino industry is kind of beyond me,” she said. “Here’s my question: What kind of ‘genius’ loses a billion dollars in a single year?”

Trump parried the accusations during a rally in Pueblo, Colorado saying he has long railed against “unfairness” of US tax laws.

“Honestly, I have brilliantly used those laws,” he said.

“As a businessman and real estate developer, I have legally used the tax laws to my benefit, and to the benefit of my company, my investors and my employees,” he said.

Polls released by Politico/Morning Consult and CNN/ORC showed Clinton with a six-point and five-point lead, respectively.

A fresh Quinnipiac battlegrounds poll showed Clinton leading in Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, but trailing Trump in Ohio.

Clinton, visiting the crucial swing state, trumpeted her endorsement by one of Ohio’s favorite sons, basketball superstar LeBron James.

“I could not be prouder to have LeBron joining our team as we head into the home stretch,” she said.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Clinton to press India to stop buying oil from Iran

KOLKATA — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in India on Sunday with hopes of reinvigorating a relationship seen as losing steam despite efforts to bring the world’s two largest democracies closer.

Clinton was greeted by streets lined with waving well-wishers as she started her visit in Kolkata, where she will tour monuments and meet ordinary citizens in her latest bid to use her star appeal as a diplomatic tool.

She heads on Monday to New Delhi for talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with whom she is expected to raise U.S. calls for India to stop buying oil from Iran, one of the most open disagreements in years between the countries.

Clinton said she saw ample progress in relations with India, pointing to rising trade and cooperation in areas from education to clean energy.

“I think it’s like any relationship—there is progress in some areas that we are very heartened by, and there is more work to be done,” Clinton told reporters before her arrival.

“But that’s the commitment that we make when we say to another country, we want to be your partner,” she said.

After more than a decade of warming relations, India has bristled at a U.S. law that would impose sanctions on banks from countries that buy oil from Iran due to concerns over Tehran’s contested nuclear program.

A senior U.S. official traveling with Clinton acknowledged that India had quietly been cutting back on Iranian oil and that New Delhi—fiercely protective of its sovereignty—could not be seen as buckling under U.S. pressure.

“Our assessment is that India is making good progress but we really need to receive assurances that they’re going to continue to make good progress,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

The official said that Carlos Pascual, the U.S. point man on the issue, would visit New Delhi later this month to determine the next step. Only EU nations and Japan have so far been given exemptions to the sanctions which go into effect on June 28.

India is highly dependent on foreign energy and has historically enjoyed friendly relations with Tehran.

But the U.S. official said that Indian businesses had made “a major strategic bet” on continuing good relations with the United States and did not want to jeopardize them over Iran.

Clinton will meet Monday morning in Kolkata with West Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who took power last year by sweeping out nearly 35 years of communist rule in the eastern state.

Clinton will seek to show solidarity with a fellow female leader but also press Banerjee to back the opening up of India’s fast-growing retail sector to major foreign companies such as Walmart, the U.S. official said.

Banerjee, a fractious ally of Singh’s government, was instrumental in scuttling planned retail reforms. Critics charge that liberalizing the sector would devastate India’s ubiquitous small stores, but foreign retailers contend that they can improve efficiency and consumer choice.

US businesses, once at the vanguard of building ties with India, have voiced disappointment over the deadlock on retail reform along with parliament’s refusal to give US nuclear firms greater protection from liabilities.

Nuclear energy had been a symbolic milestone in the relationship, with former President George W Bush championing a deal that ended India’s decades of isolation over its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

President Barack Obama has backed another of India’s longtime ambitions by supporting its bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. But few expect U.N. reform anytime soon and some Indians have accused the Obama administration of a lack of attention.

T.P. Sreenivasan, a former Indian ambassador to the United Nations, said that the initial expectations for the U.S.-India relationship had not been met but that Clinton had the advantage of being considered a friend of New Delhi.

The visit “comes at a useful time as there is a certain amount of strain in relations that needs to be rectified,” he said.

“The relationship has lost momentum partly because… both are preoccupied with their own internal problems,” he said.

source: japantoday.com

Clinton calls for holding Syrian leaders to account

ISTANBUL — Calling for tighter sanctions and for ways to hold Syrian leaders to account for abuses, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prepared for international talks in Turkey on Sunday aimed at turning up the heat on Syria to end a deadly crackdown on protests.

The chief U.S. diplomat arrived in Istanbul late Saturday from Riyadh where she had warned that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad risked backing out of his commitment to a six-point peace plan from UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.

Clinton will join representatives from 70 European, Arab and other countries to look at ways of supporting the opposition, who will also be present here, and applying further international pressure on the Assad regime.

During a press conference in Riyadh, Clinton reaffirmed that Washington is looking at sending non-lethal support like communications gear and medical aid to an increasingly armed opposition.

However, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are calling for arming the anti-Assad movement.

Clinton said the U.S. focus in Istanbul will be to “intensify” the array of U.S., European, Canadian, Arab and Turkish sanctions on Syria, and to look at sending more humanitarian aid to the needy, despite Syrian efforts to block it.

She also called for strengthening the unity of the opposition—including the leading Syrian National Council—and promoting their “democratic vision” so that it can “represent an alternative” to the Assad regime.

She has vowed to press the opposition “very hard” to properly represent Arabs, Kurds, Sunni Muslims, Alawites, Christians, Druze and other ethnic and religious groups.

A fourth point she aimed to make is to hold the Syrian leadership and security forces accountable for the abuses that have taken place amid allegations of murder, torture and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas.

“We want to discuss how to help the Syrian people prepare to hold those responsible who have been committing these terrible acts of violence,” Clinton told a press conference with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal.

More than 9,000 people, U.N. officials estimate, have died since Assad in March last year began crushing pro-democracy protests inspired by revolutions that have swept the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen from power.

It was not clear whether the Syrian opposition would, if they eventually overthrew Assad, hope to put the political and military leaders on trial or have them sent to an international criminal court like the one at The Hague.

In Riyadh, wary Assad could be playing for time, the United States and Gulf Arab monarchies urged Annan to produce a “timeline for next steps” if Assad fails to stop the bloodshed despite his acceptance of the peace plan.

“The Syrian government is staying true to form, unfortunately, making a deal and then refusing to implement it,” Clinton said.

“And as of today, regime forces continue to shell civilians, lay siege to neighborhoods, and even target places of worship,” she said.

Annan’s plan calls for a commitment to stop all armed violence, a daily two-hour humanitarian ceasefire, media access to all areas affected by the fighting, an inclusive Syrian-led political process, a right to demonstrate, and release of arbitrarily detained people.

Annan was due to brief the U.N. Security Council on Monday about his efforts to have his peace plan implemented.

source: japantoday.com

Chelsea Clinton as Correspondent for NBC

NBC just announced that Chelsea Clinton has been hired as a the full time Special Correspondent for NBC Nightly News series "Making a Difference" that will focus on human interest stories from around the country and Rock Center with Brian Williams. Chelsea Clinton, is the 31-year-old daughter of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Chelsea Clinton is an intelligent woman so she's perfect for this job and i'm pretty sure she'll do her best. Hooray for Ms. Clinton!