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Tag: heads of government

  • Progressive Brandon Johnson will be elected Chicago mayor, succeeding Lori Lightfoot, CNN projects | CNN Politics

    Progressive Brandon Johnson will be elected Chicago mayor, succeeding Lori Lightfoot, CNN projects | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Chicago voters will choose Brandon Johnson, a progressive Cook County commissioner backed by the powerful teachers union, as the city’s next mayor, CNN projects.

    Johnson will win Tuesday’s runoff election over Paul Vallas, a moderate former city schools superintendent who had campaigned on a pro-police message in a race where concerns about violent crime were central.

    Johnson told supporters his victory had “ushered in a new chapter in the history of our city” and demonstrated a “bold, progressive movement” that he said should be a blueprint for the country.

    “Now, Chicago will begin to work for its people – all the people. Because tonight is a gateway to a new future for our city; a city where you can thrive no matter who you love or how much money you have in your bank account,” he said.

    Vallas said at his election night event that he had called Johnson to concede the race.

    “This campaign I ran to bring the city together would not be a campaign that fulfilled my ambitions if this election is going to divide us more. So it’s critically important that we use this opportunity to come together, and I’ve offered him my full support on his transition,” Vallas said.

    Vallas and Johnson were competing to replace Mayor Lori Lightfoot, whose bid for a second term ended when she finished third in the nine-candidate February 28 first round – failing to advance to the top-two runoff.

    Lightfoot had sparred with two of the most powerful forces in this year’s mayor’s race: the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed Vallas, and the Chicago Teachers Union, which backs Johnson – a former teacher and union organizer.

    The clash between those two unions is part of a larger battle over how the city handled the Covid-19 pandemic – a period during which violent crime increased and schools were shut down.

    Vallas campaigned on a pro-police, tough-on-crime message. He vowed to fill hundreds of vacancies in the Chicago Police Department, and said he would emphasize community policing and place officers on public transit, after a recent violent crime spike at the Chicago Transit Authority’s trains and stations alarmed many commuters.

    He also highlighted Johnson’s history of supporting calls to “defund the police” – a message that became popular with progressives in 2020 in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd but that has since receded amid violent crime increases in Chicago and other cities. Top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have long rejected the slogan.

    Johnson said during the campaign that he did not want to slash police spending. He said he would promote 200 new detectives, arguing that solving more crimes would increase Chicago residents’ trust in police and deter crime.

    In his victory speech Tuesday night, Johnson nodded to his clashes with Vallas over crime and policing. He said he envisions “a city that’s safer for everyone by investing in what actually works to prevent crime. And that means youth employment, mental health centers, ensuring that law enforcement has the resources to solve and prevent crimes.”

    Vallas and Johnson spent the weeks leading up to the runoff courting the approximately 45% of the electorate that did not vote for either candidate in February.

    They were particularly focused on Black and Latino voters outside of Johnson’s progressive base and Vallas’ support in White ethnic neighborhoods and the northwestern portion of the city.

    Vallas featured Black mainstays of Chicago politics, including former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White and former US Rep. Bobby Rush, in his closing television advertisement touting his Democratic credentials.

    Johnson had argued that Vallas was too conservative for the electorate of a city where 83% of voters backed the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020. He highlighted donations Vallas’ campaign received from business interests and Republicans, as well as digital ads paid for by a PAC with ties to former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

    “When you take dollars from Trump supporters and try to pass yourself as a part of the progressive movement – man, sit down,” Johnson said at a rally in Chicago with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders last week.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Syrian refugee elected mayor of German town, years after fleeing war | CNN

    Syrian refugee elected mayor of German town, years after fleeing war | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    A Syrian who arrived in Germany as a refugee in 2015 has won a mayoral election in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg.

    Ryyan Alshebl, who left his hometown of As Suwayda in Syria eight years ago, ran as an independent in the municipality of Ostelsheim. He won 55.41% of the votes on Sunday, beating two German candidates, Marco Strauss and Mathias Fey.

    Locals cheered the 29-year-old when he welcomed his win, a victory he described as “sensational,” German local broadcaster SWR reported Monday.

    “Today, Ostelsheim sent an example for broad-mindedness and cosmopolitanism for the whole of Germany,” he said, according to to German public broadcaster ZDF. “That’s not something that can be taken for granted in a conservative, rural area.”

    Alshebl’s first call after his victory was to his mother in Syria, who was thrilled with the news, SWR reported.

    The Association of Municipalities of Baden-Württemberg said Alshebl is the first man with Syrian roots to run for and win a mayor’s office. He will start his role in June.

    Ostelsheim residents have welcomed their incoming mayor. “The fairy tale has come true, and the right man has become our mayor,” Annette Keck, who lives in the village, told SWR.

    Strauss, one of his opponents, congratulated Alshebl. “I wish you good luck and at the same time ask for support for Mr. Alshebl, for our shared Ostelsheim,” he said on Facebook.

    The state’s Integration Minister Manne Lucha said that Alshebl’s victory showed that diversity is a natural part of Baden-Württemberg. “I would be very pleased if Ryyan Alshebl’s election encourages more people with a migration history to run for political office,” he said.

    Not everyone has been so warm to the 29-year-old. ZDF reported the Syrian received hateful comments on the campaign trail.

    The young politician went from house to house, promoting his election program, and “the experiences were predominantly positive,” but there was also a minority of far-right fringe voters in Ostelsheim that did not want to accept him due to his Syrian roots, Alshebl told ZDF.

    Born to a schoolteacher and agricultural engineer in Syria, Alshebl described his life as carefree until the age of 20, according to his campaign website.

    At the time, protests against the Syrian government that began in 2011 soon devolved into chaotic war. The fighting and later rise of ISIS forced 10.6 million people from home by late 2015 – about half of Syria’s pre-war population.

    Alshebl faced the dilemma of being drafted for military service with the Syrian army or leaving the country, according to his website.

    While many Syrians were displaced internally or fled to countries in the region, others like Alshebl made the dangerous journey to Europe. He was 21 years old at the time, and said he crossed from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos in a rubber dinghy.

    Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel had implemented a brief open-door policy in 2015 that saw the country take in about 1.2 million asylum seekers in the following years, including Alshebl.

    The move sparked a backlash in Germany and the sudden growth of the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the wake of summer 2015.

    Once in Germany, Alshebl lived close to Ostelsheim and said at the time he felt “there is only one thing you can do: get back on your feet quickly and start investing in your own future quickly.”

    For the last seven years he worked in the administration of Althengstett town hall, in a neighboring town. He drew from his experience, he said in his campaign, and made digital access to to public administration services one of priorities. Flexible childcare and climate protections are also on his agenda.

    Alshebl, who is a member of the Green Party and now has German citizenship, pledged during his campaign that once elected as mayor he would move to Ostelsheim.

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  • Popular abroad, at home Finnish PM Sanna Marin faces battle to keep her job | CNN

    Popular abroad, at home Finnish PM Sanna Marin faces battle to keep her job | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    As Finland prepares to go to the polls on Sunday, the country’s left-wing Prime Minister Sanna Marin is fighting for her political life.

    Marin broke the mold to become the world’s youngest sitting prime minister in 2019 at the age of 34.

    She leads the country’s Social Democrats party, heading Finland’s governing coalition of five parties.

    Marin worked as a cashier after graduating from high school and was the first member of her family to attend university. She entered politics at 20 and quickly moved up the ranks of the center-left Social Democratic Party.

    Since her rise to power, she has been viewed on the world stage as something of a trailblazer, setting an example for progressive leaders across the globe.

    Her youth and gender have made her stand out from her predecessors, who for the most part have been middle-aged men.

    Marin and her New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern were quick to shoot down a journalist who asked about the purpose of the first-ever visit to New Zealand by a Finnish prime minister late last year.

    “A lot of people will be wondering are you two meeting just because you’re similar in age and, you know, got a lot of common stuff there,” the journalist said during a joint news conference in Auckland. “We are meeting because we are prime ministers,” Marin said in response.

    Now, Marin and her Social Democrats party threaten to be usurped this weekend, with the final poll from Finland’s public broadcaster Yle showing that the country faces a shift to the right.

    Petteri Orpo’s right-wing National Coalition Party is the frontrunner by a slim margin, followed by Riika Purra’s nationalist Finns Party and then by Marin’s SDP party.

    “All three parties are so close that any one of them could be the leader on Sunday,” Tuomo Turja from polling firm Taloustutkimus, which conducted the poll for Yle, told the outlet.

    While Marin was praised internationally for her progressive policies, including on trans rights, she faced criticism at home for her coalition’s hefty public spending.

    Marin’s government has placed importance on funding public services such as health and education to secure economic growth. But her political rivals accuse her of failing to rein in the country’s finances.

    It comes at a time when Finland is expected to tip into recession this year. According to the Bank of Finland Bulletin, Finland faces the kind of problems seen across the world: an energy crisis exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine and a rise in the cost of living.

    Both Orpo and Purra have pledged to boost government finances, with Orpo saying his primary concern would be to tackle the country’s debt, even if it meant cutting back on welfare spending such as unemployment benefits, according to Reuters.

    Fuel prices over 2 euros per liter at a Boden fuel station in Vexala, western Finland on March 10, 2022.

    Teivo Teivainen, a professor of world politics at Helsinki University, explained that while Marin’s generous public spending was arguably necessary during the pandemic, her pledges to continue that policy has been a cause for concern.

    “For her opponents, mostly opponents of her party in general, the main problem is increased public spending,” Teivainen told CNN.

    “While this can be countered by the claim that in exceptional times of Covid and war, spending was in many ways necessary, her electoral program now promises continuation of relatively high public spending in health, education, elderly care and other welfare issues.

    “So her right-wing opponents say this is irresponsible to counter the indebtedness of the state.”

    Marin faced a domestic backlash last year when footage emerged of her dancing with friends.

    She acknowledged partying “in a boisterous way” after the release of the private videos which went viral online – but said she was angry that the footage, which prompted criticism from political opponents, was leaked to the media.

    “These videos are private and filmed in a private space. I resent that these became known to the public,” Marin told reporters in Kuopio, Finland.

    “I spent a night with my friends. We just partied, also in a boisterous way. I danced and sang,” she said.

    The footage prompted some of Marin’s opponents to criticize her behavior as unbecoming of a prime minister. Mikko Karna, an opposition MP, tweeted that Marin should undergo a drug test – which later came back negative.

    Others came out in support of the prime minister, with women across the world posting videos on social media of themselves dancing, using the hashtag #solidaritywithsanna. Her defenders argued that as a young woman she had the right to enjoy normal activities such as going clubbing with friends.

    It wasn’t the first time that Marin’s private life has become politicized in Finland. She previously apologized to the public in 2021 after a photo surfaced of her in a nightclub, following the Finnish foreign minister’s positive test for Covid-19.

    Sanna Marin addresses supporters during her elections rally in Vantaa, Finland, on March 31, 2023.

    Whoever wins this election will have to form a coalition of several parties to gain a majority in Parliament. However, negotiations could prove difficult.

    Marin has previously rejected forming a government with Purra’s Finns Party, slamming it as “openly racist” during a debate in January – an accusation Purra has vehemently denied.

    Teivainen believes one of the most likely outcomes of the election is a right-wing government, formed from the Finns Party and the National Coalition Party.

    “The more radically anti-migrant views of the Finns Party would be somewhat moderated by the National Coalition that recognized the need to attract more migrant workers to Finland for economic reasons.

    “It would in any case be a clearly more fiscally and socially conservative government compared to the current one, though not all that different from the right-wing government that preceded it.

    “It could also mean that Finland’s current pledge to be carbon neutral by 2035 could be made more flexible,” he told CNN.

    Chairperson of the Finns Party Riikka Purra and Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin during a political debate in Helsinki on March 28, 2023.

    Purra has previously promised her party would delay Finland’s carbon neutrality target, which Marin’s ruling coalition set for 2035.

    According to Teivainen, the other likely outcome is a coalition between the National Coalition Party and Sanna Marin’s Social Democrats, which he believes would “mean some, though more moderate, turn toward right-wing policies, especially in terms of fiscal discipline.”

    Whoever Finland’s new leader is, they will be tasked with leading the country into NATO after Turkey last week finally approved Helsinki’s application to join the military alliance, putting an end to months of delays.

    Yle interviewed 1,830 Finnish citizens who are eligible to vote. The survey was carried out from March 1-28, 2023. Results have a margin of error of plus or minus two points.

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  • Disney quietly took power from DeSantis’ new board before state takeover | CNN Politics

    Disney quietly took power from DeSantis’ new board before state takeover | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The battle between Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may not be over yet.

    The new board handpicked by the Republican governor to oversee Disney’s special taxing district said Wednesday it is considering legal action over a multi-decade agreement reached between the entertainment giant and the outgoing board in the days before the state’s hostile takeover last month.

    Under the agreement – quietly approved on February 8 as Florida lawmakers met in special session to hand DeSantis control of the Reedy Creek Improvement District – Disney would maintain control over much of its vast footprint in Central Florida for 30 years and, in some cases, the board can’t take significant action without first getting approval from the company.

    “This essentially makes Disney the government,” board member Ron Peri said during Wednesday’s meeting, according to video posted by an Orlando television station. “This board loses, for practical purposes, the majority of its ability to do anything beyond maintaining the roads and maintaining basic infrastructure.”

    The episode is the latest twist in a yearlong saga between Disney and DeSantis, who has battled the company as he tries to tally conservative victories ahead of a likely bid for the 2024 GOP nomination.

    The board on Wednesday retained “multiple financial and legal firms to conduct audits and investigate Disney’s past behavior,” DeSantis spokeswoman Taryn Fenske said. According to meeting documents, the board was entering into agreements with four firms to provide counsel on the matter.

    “The Executive Office of the Governor is aware of Disney’s last-ditch efforts to execute contracts just before ratifying the new law that transfers rights and authorities from the former Reedy Creek Improvement District to Disney,” Fenkse said. “An initial review suggests these agreements may have significant legal infirmities that would render the contracts void as a matter of law.”

    In a statement to CNN, Disney stood by its actions.

    “All agreements signed between Disney and the District were appropriate, and were discussed and approved in open, noticed public forums in compliance with Florida’s Government in the Sunshine law,” the company said. Documents for the February 8 meeting show it was noticed in the Orlando Sentinel as required by law.

    Multiple board members did not immediately respond to request for comment. The Sentinel first reported on Wednesday’s vote to hire legal counsel.

    According to a statement Wednesday night from the district’s acting counsel and its newly obtained legal counsel, the agreement gave Disney development rights throughout the district and “not just on Disney’s property,” requires the district to borrow and spend on projects that benefit the company, and gives Disney veto authority over any public project in the district.

    “The lack of consideration, the delegation of legislative authority to a private corporation, restriction of the Board’s ability to make legislative decisions, and giving away public rights without compensation for a private purpose, among other issues, warrant the new Board’s actions and direction to evaluate these overreaching documents and determine how best the new Board can protect the public’s interest in compliance with Florida Law,” the statement from Fishback Dominick LLP, Cooper & Kirk PLLC, Lawson Huck Gonzalez PLLC, Waugh Grant PLLC and Nardella & Nardella PLLC said.

    The spat between Disney and the governor stems from the company’s opposition to a Florida law that prohibits the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity through third grade and only in an “age appropriate” manner in older grades. In March of last year, as outrage against the legislation spread nationwide, Disney released a statement vowing to help get the law repealed or struck down by the courts.

    DeSantis and Florida GOP lawmakers retaliated by eliminating the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the special taxing authority that effectively gave Disney control of the land in and around its sprawling Orlando-area theme parks. But Republicans in control of the state legislature changed course this year and voted instead to fire the board overseeing the district and gave DeSantis power to name all five replacements. It also renamed Reedy Creek as the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District and eliminated some of its powers.

    DeSantis stacked the board with political allies, including Tampa lawyer Martin Garcia, a prominent GOP donor; Bridget Ziegler, the wife of the new chairman of the Republican Party of Florida; and Peri, a former pastor who once suggested tap water could be making people gay.

    The controversy is central to DeSantis’ political narrative of a leader who is unafraid to battle corporate giants, even one as iconic and vital to Florida as Disney. It is a saga that is featured prominently in his new book and one he often shares at events across the country as he lays the groundwork for a likely national campaign.

    At last month’s signing ceremony for the bill that gave him control of Reedy Creek’s board, DeSantis declared, “The corporate kingdom finally comes to an end.”

    “There’s a new sheriff in town,” he added.

    However, it may be a while before the new power structure has control, if Disney gets its way. One agreement signed by the outgoing board – which restricts the new board from using any of Disney’s “fanciful characters” – is valid until “21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, king of England,” according to a copy of the deal included in the February 8 meeting packet.

    The stealth move by Disney prompted allies of DeSantis’ chief political rival, former President Donald Trump, to suggest the governor had been out-maneuvered.

    “President Trump wrote ‘Art of the Deal’ and brokered Middle East peace,” said Taylor Budowich, spokesman for the Trump-aligned Make America Great Again PAC. “Ron DeSantis just got out-negotiated by Mickey Mouse.”

    DeSantis’ political operation insisted the governor’s appointees were holding Disney accountable.

    “Governor DeSantis’ new board would not, and will not, allow Disney to give THEMSELVES unprecedented power over land (some of which isn’t even theirs!) for 30+ years,” Christina Pushaw, of DeSantis’ rapid response team, wrote on Twitter.

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  • Netanyahu is backed into a corner. Here’s what he may do next | CNN

    Netanyahu is backed into a corner. Here’s what he may do next | CNN

    Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.


    Abu Dhabi, UAE
    CNN
     — 

    When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his decision to delay a controversial plan to weaken the country’s judiciary on Monday, he invoked the biblical story of the Judgement of Solomon, where the king had to rule between two women, both claiming to be the mother of a child. Solomon ordered that the child be cut in two, and the woman who protested the ruling was determined to be the real mother.

    Before Netanyahu spoke, supporters of the judicial overhaul had gathered in the streets following calls from right-wing politicians to come out, allowing the prime minister to make his address as protesters from both sides rallied simultaneously for the first time in weeks.

    “Even today, both sides in the national dispute claim love for the baby – love for our country,” said Netanyahu. “I am aware of the enormous tension that is building up between the two camps, between the two parts of the people, and I am attentive to the desire of many citizens to relieve this tension.”

    The timing of the address was likely intentional and was meant to give Netanyahu’s much-delayed speech a favorable backdrop – two competing camps demonstrating their love for the country, said Aviv Bushinsky, a former media adviser for Netanyahu who served the prime minister for nine years.

    Netanyahu’s strategy has always been based on last-minute decisions, Bushinsky said, which sometimes makes it difficult to predict his next move.

    Other analysts say the prime minister’s strategy brings uncertainty to Israel’s future.

    “He is playing the game,” said Gideon Rahat, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “You can never know what will happen, and that’s the problem … There is no certainty in Israel, in the Israeli system, and I am not sure that he’s not happy about this.”

    Bushinsky says that if it was up to Netanyahu he would have pumped the brakes on the judicial overhaul a long time ago, as it wasn’t one of the main leadership goals declared at the start of his sixth term as prime minister.

    He’s standing by it because the survival of his coalition depends on it. But now, analysts say he’s backed into a corner between appeasing protesters and keeping his government intact.

    Before Netanyahu announced the delay, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power party broke the news, noting that part of the delay agreement was to establish a National Guard. That caused alarm, with some speculating on social media that Ben Gvir, who has an extremist past, was being allowed to set up his own militia.

    Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and a former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization, told CNN’s Becky Anderson on Tuesday that putting Ben Gvir in charge of the National Guard is “the equivalent of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.”

    Ben Gvir was quick to address the concerns about the new body. “Let’s put things straight: no private army and no militias,” he said in a statement published on his Telegram page.

    Bushinsky downplayed the significance of the National Guard, saying it is “a comfort prize” for Ben Gvir – “a prize for the losers.”

    The prime minister is now faced with very few options, analysts say. If he sides with his coalition and votes on the overhaul, crippling protests and strikes would resume. If he pulls the brakes, his coalition could collapse.

    The only wiggle room the Israeli leader has, analysts say, is if negotiators reach a moderated judicial overhaul plan bill over the Knesset’s recess period, which ends April 30, and where concessions to his right-wing coalition members need not be too extreme.

    Netanyahu may also be hoping for the reform bill to be shelved for the time being.

    “I think Netanyahu will try to run away from this thing, hoping that things will gradually ease,” said Bushinsky, noting that the ministers who had threatened to resign should the bill not advance have all remained in their posts.

    Analysts say, however, that what could once again unite the fragmented country and have the public rally behind the government is a potential security threat, either from neighboring countries or through conflict with the Palestinians.

    A security crisis would reorient the government’s attention, said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, whether it arises from conflict with the Palestinians, the Iran-backed Hezbollah group in Lebanon or others.

    “Some thought that if there was a security crisis, then Netanyahu would be saved by the bell,” said Bushinsky.

    Palestinians are watching the process with unease amid fears that they will pay the price of Netanyahu’s concessions to right-wing coalition members with a history of anti-Palestinian rhetoric.

    “We are seeing that Palestinians are once again paying the price for Israel’s electoral choices,” said Buttu. “There may be calm in the streets of Tel Aviv … but for Palestinians, the reality remains the same.”

    How Netanyahu will act remains uncertain, and not everyone is optimistic that the recess period will yield any kind of consensus or moderation in his position.

    “I have not detected any indication that tells me that the prime minister is actually entering into the negotiations with a keen interest in achieving consensus … including comprises on core aspects of the judicial overhaul,” said Plesner.

    Plesner notes, however, that Netanyahu and his Likud party emerged “politically injured” from the last few months, losing not only legitimacy and support in the eyes of the Israeli people, but also in the eyes of his own Likud voters.

    “(It was) a dramatic erosion of their political power and political posture,” he said.

    Biden, Netanyahu trade barbs over plan to weaken courts; Israel rejects US ‘pressure’

    Israel’s embattled prime minister escalated a rare public dispute with US President Joe Biden on Tuesday, rejecting “pressure” from the White House after Biden criticized Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken Israel’s judiciary. Biden said on Tuesday that he won’t invite Netanyahu to the White House “in the near term,” and issued an unusually stinging rebuke of the Israeli leader’s proposed judicial overhaul. Netanyahu responded late on Tuesday, saying, “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.”

    • Background: The prime minister finally paused the legislation on Monday after a general strike and mass protests threw Israel into chaos, but he said he planned to return to the effort in the next legislative term. Critics say Netanyahu is pushing through the changes because of his own ongoing corruption trial, which he denies.
    • Why it matters: The back and forth thrust into public view a simmering diplomatic dispute that has mostly been kept private over the past several weeks. Biden and other US officials had sought to quietly dissuade Netanyahu from moving ahead with his proposed reforms without creating the appearance of a rift. But now the divide appears to be opening between the two men, who have known each other for decades.

    Riyadh joins Shanghai Cooperation Organization as ties with Beijing grow

    Saudi Arabia’s cabinet approved on Wednesday a decision to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), as Riyadh builds a long-term partnership with China despite US security concerns, Reuters reported. Saudi Arabia has approved a memorandum on granting the kingdom the status of a dialog partner in the SCO, state news agency SPA said.

    • Background: Formed in 2001 by Russia, China and former Soviet states in Central Asia, the body has been expanded to include India and Pakistan, with a view to playing a bigger role as counterweight to Western influence in the region. The SCO is a political and security union of countries spanning much of Eurasia. Iran also signed documents for full membership last year. Countries belonging to the organization plan to hold a joint “counter-terrorism exercise” in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region in August.
    • Why it matters: Riyadh’s growing ties with Beijing have raised security concerns in Washington, its traditional ally. Washington says Chinese attempts to exert influence around the world will not change US policy toward the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have voiced concern about what they see as a withdrawal from the region by the United States, its main security guarantor, and have moved to diversify partners. Washington says it will stay an active partner in the region.

    US sanctions Syrian leader Assad’s cousins, others over drug trade

    The US on Tuesday imposed new sanctions against six people, including two cousins of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, for their role in the production or export of captagon, a dangerous amphetamine, Reuters cited the Treasury Department as saying. The Treasury said trade in captagon was estimated to be a billion-dollar enterprise and the sanctions highlight the role of Lebanese drug traffickers and the Assad family dominance of captagon trafficking, which helped fund the Syrian government.

    • Background: Regional officials say the Iranian-backed Hezbollah as well as Syrian armed groups linked to the Damascus government are behind the surging trade of captagon, smuggled either through Jordan to the south or Lebanon to the west. Assad’s government denies involvement in drug-making and smuggling and says it is stepping up its campaign to curb the lucrative trade. Hezbollah denies the accusations.
    • Why it matters: There is a thriving market for captagon in the Gulf, and United Nations and Western anti-narcotics drug officials say Syria, shattered by a decade of civil war, has become the region’s main production site for a multibillion-dollar drug trade that also exports to Europe.

    Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Aramco will acquire a 10% stake in China’s Rongsheng Petrochemical in a strategic deal worth $3.6 billion that would significantly expand its presence in China.

    Amena Bakr, deputy bureau chief at Energy Intelligence, spoke to CNN’s Becky Anderson about what this means for Saudi-Chinese cooperation.

    She said Saudi interest is in the East as the kingdom does not like “policy that interferes with their internal affairs,” a mantra that China holds sacred.

    Watch the full interview here.

    A Ramadan TV show is in hot water for its offensive depiction of Iraqi women, drawing condemnation from politicians in both Kuwait and Iraq.

    The series, “London Class,” is produced by the Saudi state-backed media conglomerate MBC group and depicts Iraqi women working as maids for Kuwaiti women and being accused of theft.

    The show follows a group of Arab medicine students at a London university in the 1980s. Much of the anger from Iraqis is directed at Kuwait.

    The Kuwaiti Ministry of Information has however said the show has nothing to do with the country and was not shown on any platform there, according to Arabic media.

    One Baghdad-based Twitter user condemned what he said was a repeated “stream of hatred and malice from Kuwaiti shows towards our people.”

    The show was written by Kuwaiti writer Heba Hamada and directed by Egyptian Mohamed Bakir. Hamada responded to the criticism in an Instagram post, saying: “Iraq is the mother of civilization, and all Arabs lean on its shoulder.”

    Mustafa Jabbar Sanad, a member of parliament in Iraq, accused the show of “erasing the value of well-known Iraqi talents … to distort the image of the Iraqi people as a whole, not just women.”

    Hamada was the subject of criticism in 2019 because of a similar show she wrote called “Cairo Class,” which caused strife between Kuwaitis and Egyptians due its portrayal of Egypt. That show is being aired on Netflix.

    The question of honor, particularly that of Iraqi women, has long been a sensitive issue in Kuwaiti-Iraqi relations. Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had accused Kuwait of insulting his country’s women, citing it as a reason for his invasion of the country in 1990.

    In a 2004 court hearing in Iraq, the former president decried being held accountable for the invasion.

    “How could Saddam be tried over Kuwait that said it will reduce Iraqi women to 10-dinar prostitutes?” he asked, referring to himself. “He (Hussein) defended Iraq’s honor and revived its historical rights over those dogs,” Saddam said, referring to the Kuwaitis.

    Iraq made its final reparation payment for that invasion last year, having paid the Gulf nation a total of $52.4 billion.

    By Dalya Al Masri

    A shepherd walks with his goats as trucks move rubble at Samandag, in Turkey's Hatay province on Tuesday, after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake on February 6 killed more than 50,000 in southeastern Turkey and nearly 6,000 over the border in Syria.

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  • Idaho governor signs bill that restricts transgender students’ bathroom use in schools | CNN Politics

    Idaho governor signs bill that restricts transgender students’ bathroom use in schools | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little signed a bill this week that prohibits transgender students in the state from using public school bathrooms that do not align with their gender assigned at birth.

    Senate Bill 1100, which takes effect July 1, requires public schools to provide separate male and female bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, dressing areas and overnight accommodations for students in the state. The restrictions do not apply to single-occupancy restrooms. The bill also requires reasonable accommodations to be made for students who are unwilling or unable to use multi-occupancy restrooms or changing facilities.

    “Requiring students to share restrooms and changing facilities with members of the opposite biological sex generates potential embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury to students,” the bill states.

    Under the law, students can take legal action against the schools in instances where they encounter people of the opposite sex using gendered facilities if the schools gave those people permission to use the facilities or failed to “take reasonable steps” to prevent the person from using those facilities.

    Students who are successful in their private lawsuits will receive $5,000 from the public school systems for each time they saw “a person of the opposite sex” in those gendered facilities or sleeping quarters and can receive monetary damages from schools for psychological, emotional or physical harm.

    Advocates have for years worked to combat bathroom bills like the one passed in Idaho, blasting them as an unnecessary and harmful attack on transgender students’ humanity.

    Democratic state Sen. Rick Just told CNN on Saturday that he had voted against the bill largely because it allows people to file private lawsuits against school systems. “I don’t believe it’s helpful to encourage citizens to seek damages whenever they feel aggrieved in the slightest way,” he told CNN in an email.

    Republican state Rep. Ted Hill, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the legislation would ultimately “bring peace” among the schools, school boards and parents, and that it would help them focus on students’ education instead.

    “The most important part of this legislation was to recognize the rights of everyone,” Hill told CNN in an email. “Recognized the rights for young girls to be safe and secure in a place where they are most vulnerable, same for the boys to be safe and secure where they are most vulnerable, and the rights for everyone else to be safe, secure and comfortable in a place where they are most vulnerable.”

    Little did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the bill Saturday.

    Following the legislation’s passage, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ advocacy group in the US, slammed Little and said, “LGBTQ+ people in Idaho deserve the opportunity to live their lives with dignity and respect.”

    “Unfortunately, the bills that Gov. Little is signing into law will make life harder on LGBTQ+ folks across the state,” the group’s state legislative director and senior counsel, Cathryn Oakley, said in a statement. “These bills will not accomplish anything other than to further alienate and stigmatize those already on the margins of life in this state.”

    The Human Rights Campaign said that more “bathroom bills” have been filed across the country so far in 2023 than in any previous year.

    The Idaho legislation follows similar bills Republican governors in Arkansas and Iowa signed this past week.

    On Tuesday, Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill that prevents transgender people from using restrooms that do not match the sex they have listed on their birth certificates. And in Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill prohibiting transgender people from using school restrooms that do not correspond to their sex assigned at birth.

    Transgender Americans make up a tiny fraction of kids in the US – the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated less than 2% of high school students identify as transgender.

    Health care professionals have said the types of bills Republicans are pushing are likely to further ostracize transgender kids, a group that already struggles with higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicide.

    The political debate around which bathrooms trans people are allowed to use exploded in 2016, when North Carolina enacted a law that required people at government-run facilities to use bathrooms and locker rooms that corresponded to the gender on their birth certificates, if the rooms in question were multiple-occupancy. The measure drew intense criticism from businesses and advocates, and it was later repealed.

    Alongside the transgender legislation, Little signed House Bill 186, which allows for executions by firing squad in Idaho if the state cannot obtain the drugs needed for lethal injection. Several states have struggled to source the drugs required for lethal injection, causing them to pause executions.

    This story has been updated with further reaction.

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  • Georgia’s governor signs ban on certain gender-affirming care for minors | CNN Politics

    Georgia’s governor signs ban on certain gender-affirming care for minors | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill Thursday to ban certain gender-affirming care for minors, joining a growing number of GOP-led states looking to restrict the treatments across the country.

    Senate Bill 140 will bar licensed medical professionals in Georgia from providing patients under the age of 18 with hormone therapy or surgery related to gender transition. Violations of the legislation could lead to the revocation of a health practitioner’s license.

    Kemp announced the signing in a tweet, saying that the law would “ensure we protect the health and wellbeing of Georgia’s children.”

    “As Georgians, parents, and elected leaders, it is our highest responsibility to safeguard the bright, promising futures of our kids – and SB 140 takes an important step in fulfilling that mission,” he said.

    LGBTQ advocates, however, have expressed concern over restricting access to such treatment, which is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person from their assigned gender – the one the person was designated at birth – to their affirmed gender, the gender by which one wants to be known.

    “SB 140 will outlaw the care necessary to save children’s lives,” Rep. Nikema Williams, who chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia, said in a statement after the signing. “It is not only cruel, but it flies in the face of medical science, standards of patient care, and the lived experiences of those whom it impacts.”

    Democratic state Sen. Josh McLaurin shared similar concerns about the bill’s consequences for Georgia’s youth, after it passed in Georgia’s Senate Tuesday with a 31-21 vote.

    “Kids will commit suicide. Kids will feel like they’re not being heard, that their basic existence is being invalidated and erased,” McLaurin said.

    The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth, noted in a 2022 report that 55% of transgender and nonbinary youth in Georgia “seriously considered suicide in the past year” and 16% attempted suicide in the same timeframe.

    While the bill grants exemptions to the law “for individuals born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development” and other medical conditions, it does not count gender dysphoria – a psychological distress that may result when a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth do not align, according to the American Psychiatric Association – among them.

    Minors who started hormone replacement therapy before July 1, 2023, will be allowed to continue the treatment under the new legislation.

    Cory Isaacson, a legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, warned ahead of the signing that the legal organization would sue the state over the law, claiming that Georgia’s politicians are “interfering with the rights of Georgia parents to get life-saving medical treatment for their children and preventing physicians from properly caring for their patients.”

    “The ACLU of Georgia and our partners will now consider all available legal options in order to protect the rights of parents, young people, and medical providers in our state,” she said

    Major medical associations agree that gender-affirming care is clinically appropriate for children and adults with gender dysphoria.

    Though the care is highly individualized, some children may decide to use reversible puberty suppression therapy. This part of the process may also include hormone therapy that can lead to gender-affirming physical change. Surgical interventions, however, are not typically done on children and many health care providers do not offer them to minors.

    The Georgia bill does not explicitly prohibit puberty blockers, breaking with similar bans across the country. Instead, the bill takes aim at hormone therapy that comes with more permanent effects than puberty blockers, according to The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which notes the treatment is shown to help transgender people with depression and boost self-esteem.

    Georgia’s legislation is similar in its goal to dozens of bills seeking to restrict access to gender-affirming care across the country, according to data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union and shared with CNN.

    Some GOP-led states have already made restrictions on transgender youth’s access to health care in their states. On Wednesday, Iowa enacted its own ban on all forms of gender affirming care for minors, joining Tennessee, Mississippi, Utah and South Dakota, which passed their own bans earlier this year. Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas also enacted bans on gender-affirming care in recent years, though the laws in Alabama and Arkansas have been temporarily blocked by federal courts.

    Other potential bans are waiting in the wings, with Missouri’s Republican attorney general Monday announcing he would seek to implement an emergency regulation restricting gender-affirming care. Kentucky’s Republican-led legislature passed its own ban earlier this month while boasting a majority that could overturn the likely veto of its Democratic governor. That bill would also allow educators to refuse to refer to transgender students by their preferred pronouns and would not allow schools to discuss sexual orientation or gender identity with students of any age.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Utah governor signs bill requiring teens to get parental approval to join social media sites | CNN Business

    Utah governor signs bill requiring teens to get parental approval to join social media sites | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The governor of Utah signed a controversial bill on Thursday that will require minors to obtain the consent of a guardian before joining social media platforms, marking the most aggressive step yet by state or federal lawmakers to protect kids online.

    As part of the bill, called the Utah Social Media Regulation Act, social media platforms will have to conduct age verification for all Utah residents, ban all ads for minors and impose a curfew, making their sites off limits between the hours of 10:30 p.m. – 6:30 a.m. for anyone under the age of 18. The bill will also require social platforms to give parents access to their teens’ accounts.

    The legislation, which was introduced by Republican Sen. Michael McKell and passed by Republican Governor Spencer Cox, will go into effect on March 1, 2024.

    “When it comes down to it, [the bill] is about protecting our children,” McKell said in a statement to CNN, citing how depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation has “drastically increased” among teens in Utah and across the United states Slongside the growth of social media sites. “As a lawmaker and parent, I believe this bill is the best path forward to prevent our children from succumbing to the negative and sometimes life-threatening effects of social media.”

    The legislation comes after years of US lawmakers calling for new safeguards to protect teens online, amid concerns about social platforms leading younger users down harmful rabbit holes, enabling new forms of bullying and harassment and adding to what’s been described as a teen mental health crisis in the country. To date, however, no federal legislation has passed.

    Utah is the first of a broader list of states introducing similar proposals. In Connecticut and Ohio, for example, lawmakers are working to pass legislation that would require social media companies to get parent permission before users under age 16 can join.

    “We can assume more methods like the Utah bill could find their way into other states’ plans, especially if actions are not taken at the federal level,” said Michael Inouye, an analyst at ABI Research. “Eventually, if enough states implement similar or related legislation, we could see a more concerted effort at the federal level to codify these (likely) disparate state laws under a US-wide policy.”

    Industry experts and Big Tech companies have long urged the US government to introduce regulations that could help keep young social media users safe. But even before the bill’s passage, some had raised concerns about the impact of the legislation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said Utah’s specific set of rules are “dangerous” when it comes to user privacy and added that the bill will make user data less secure, internet access less private and infringe upon younger users’ basic rights.

    “Social media provides a lifeline for many young people, in addition to community, education, and conversation,” said Jason Kelley, director of activism at the EFF. “They use it in part because it can be private … The law, which would limit social media access and require parental consent and monitoring for minors, will incalculably harm the ability of young people to protect their privacy and deter them from exercising their rights.”

    Lucy Ivey, an 18-year-old TikTok influencer who attends Utah Valley University, agreed, saying some of her friends in the LGBTQ community may face challenges with the change.

    “My worry with this bill is that it will take away privacy from teenagers, and a lot of kids don’t have good relationships with their parents or don’t have a reliable guardian that would be needed to get access to social media,” she told CNN. “I think about my LGBTQ friends; some who have had a hard time with their parents because of their sexuality or identity, and they could be losing an important place where they can be themselves, and be seen and heard.”

    Ivey, who launched a publication called Our Era at age 15 and amplified its content on TikTok, said she’s also concerned about how the bill will impact content creators like herself. (If a legal guardian disapproves of a teens’ online activity or digital presence, those individuals may have to put their accounts on hold until they are 18 years old.)

    “With a new law like this, they may now be intimidated and discouraged by the legal hoops required to use social media out of fear of authority or their parents, or fear of losing their privacy at a time when teens are figuring out who they are,” Ivey said.

    Facebook-parent Meta told CNN it has the same goals as parents and policymakers, but the company said it also wants young people to have safe, positive experiences online and keep its platforms accessible. Antigone Davis, the global head of safety for Meta, said the company will “continue to work closely with experts, policymakers and parents on these important issues.”

    Representatives for TikTok and Snap did not respond to a request for comment.

    Given that the bill is unprecedented, it’s unclear how exactly the social media companies will adapt. For example, the legislation calls for platforms to turn off algorithms for “suggested content.” This particular guideline may help keep teens from falling down rabbit holes toward potentially harmful content, but it could present new issues, too. It might mean the company would no longer have the oversight and control over downranking problematic content that may show up in a user’s feed.

    Some of the bill’s guidelines may also be difficult to enforce. Inouye said minors could “steal” identities – such as from family members who don’t use social media – to create accounts that they can access and use without oversight. VPNs could also complicate matching IP addresses to the states of the users, he said.

    But even if legislative steps from Utah and other states prove to be flawed, Inouye says “these early efforts are at minimum bringing attention to these issues.”

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  • New Mexico governor signs bill ending juvenile life sentences without parole | CNN Politics

    New Mexico governor signs bill ending juvenile life sentences without parole | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a bill into law Friday that prohibits sentencing juvenile offenders to life in prison without eligibility for parole.

    Under SB64, the No Life Sentences for Juveniles Act, offenders who committed crimes when they were younger than 18 and received life sentences will be eligible for parole hearings 15 to 25 years into their sentences, depending on the conviction, according to the state’s legislative website.

    The legislation also applies to juveniles who were found guilty of first-degree murder even if they were tried as adults. If any juvenile offender is denied parole, they will “be entitled to a parole hearing at two-year intervals,” according to the bill.

    New Mexico joins a slew of states that have enacted similar sentencing measures following a 2021 Supreme Court ruling that made it easier for those who committed their crimes when they were younger than 18 to be sentenced to prison for life without parole.

    “When children commit serious crimes, they should be held accountable, but they should not spend their entire lives in prison without a chance for redemption,” said Democratic state Sen. Kristina Ortez, one of the bill’s sponsors, in a Facebook post.

    But Republican state lawmakers have argued that the bill will let juvenile offenders get away with serious crimes.

    State Rep. John Block, a Republican, introduced an amendment to exclude perpetrators of mass shootings that did not make it into the final text, he said in a tweet. Other amendments suggested by Republicans that were also left out, according to Block, were an increase in parole timelines and the exclusion of rapists.

    The legislation passed the state Senate in late February with bipartisan support, and passed in the House earlier this week along party lines.

    Illinois also passed a bill last month banning juvenile life sentences without parole. At least 24 other states and Washington, DC, have similar laws, according to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a nonprofit advocacy organization.

    The issue has been in the national spotlight in recent years as a result of several state laws and Supreme Court rulings.

    The high court’s April 2021 opinion overturned its 2012 ruling that such sentences violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In 2010, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution prohibits life without parole for offenders who were under 18 and committed non-homicide offenses.

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  • New Mexico governor signs bill protecting access to reproductive and gender-affirming care into law | CNN Politics

    New Mexico governor signs bill protecting access to reproductive and gender-affirming care into law | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Thursday signed into law a bill that prohibits local municipalities and other public bodies from inferring with a person’s ability to access reproductive or gender-affirming health care services.

    HB7, the Reproductive and Gender-Affirming Health Care Freedom Act, also prohibits any public body from imposing laws, ordinances, policies or regulations that prevent patients from receiving reproductive or gender-affirming care.

    The move comes in the wake of the reversal of federal abortion rights last year and as several states have enacted measures to prevent minors from accessing gender-affirming care.

    Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender – the one the person was designated at birth – to their affirmed gender – the gender by which one wants to be known.

    “New Mexicans in every corner of our state deserve protections for their bodily autonomy and right to health care,” Lujan Grisham said in a media release. “I’m grateful for the hard work of the Legislature and community partners in getting this critical legislation across the finish line.”

    Each violation of the law can result in a fine of $5,000 or damages, if the amount is greater, according to the bill.

    The law follows ordinances that several municipalities in the state had previously passed related to abortion care access after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer.

    While abortion is legal in New Mexico, several GOP-led states have introduced or enacted measures restricting abortion, including Texas and Oklahoma, which have banned the procedure at all stages of pregnancy with limited exceptions. In response, New Mexico, which neighbors both states, allocated $10 million to build a new abortion clinic near the Texas border.

    Several other Democratic-controlled states have moved to reaffirm reproductive care in response to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.

    Minnesota’s Democratic governor signed a bill into law earlier this year that enshrined the “fundamental right” to access abortion in the state. Last year, California passed several bills expanding abortion access, including protections for abortion providers and patients seeking abortion care in the state from civil action started in another state.

    As states move to enact measures, new legal challenges could further complicate abortion access in a post-Roe America.

    A federal court in Texas heard arguments this week to block the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion, which made up more than half of US abortions in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Though the Trump-appointed judge has not issued a ruling, he suggested during arguments that he is seriously considering undoing the FDA’s approval.

    Also at risk is access to gender-affirming care for trans youth, which LGBTQ advocates have long stressed is life-saving health care.

    So far this year, lawmakers in Tennessee, Mississippi, Utah and South Dakota have enacted legislation to restrict minors’ access to such care.

    Additionally, more than 80 bills seeking to restrict access to gender-affirming care have been introduced around the country through early last month, according to data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union and shared with CNN.

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  • Nigerians to vote in governorship polls as ruling party scrambles to regain lost ground in key states | CNN

    Nigerians to vote in governorship polls as ruling party scrambles to regain lost ground in key states | CNN


    Lagos, Nigeria
    CNN
     — 

    Nigerians will on Saturday vote in delayed governorship polls, weeks after a controversial and disputed presidential election.

    The gubernatorial race will be decided in 28 of Nigeria’s 36 states as the ruling party scrambles to regain lost ground in key states.

    But all eyes will be on the tense contest for control of the country’s wealthy Lagos State, which analysts say will be the “most competitive” in the state’s history.

    “This may be the most competitive governorship election in Lagos State,” political analyst Sam Amadi tells CNN.

    “Many have tried to upturn Lagos in the past and failed because of the entrenched power of Bola Tinubu. As President-elect, his influence may have grown in Lagos but the Obidients are strong,” Amadi says, speaking of supporters of Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi.

    Obi caused shockwaves when it emerged he beat President-Elect Bola Tinubu in his Lagos home turf but placed third in the presidential poll.

    Obi has rejected Tinubu’s victory and is contesting the results in the courts.

    The presidential elections on February 25 were widely criticized for widespread delays, outbreaks of violence and attempts at voter suppression.

    Several observers including the European Union also said the election fell short of expectations and “lacked transparency.”

    The battle for Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub and one of Africa’s largest cities has typically been a two-party race that has never been won by the opposition.

    This is partly credited to political godfather and kingmaker, Bola Tinubu, who is said to have handpicked every Lagos governor since leaving office in 2007.

    Tinubu’s firm grip on Lagos politics now faces an unprecedented threat in Obi’s third-force Labor Party, after losing on home turf.

    Obi is the first presidential candidate from the opposition to win in Lagos.

    Amadi says his popularity with young people might be the game changer in the Lagos gubernatorial poll.

    “They (Obidients) won Lagos in the last (presidential) poll but feel cheated and suppressed. So we might see a more vehement fight. It depends on how motivated and aggrieved the Obidients feel now,” he said.

    Fifteen candidates are seeking to unseat incumbent Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the ruling All Progressives Congress party, who is seeking a second term. But only two are viewed as real threats to his reelection.

    Considered a long shot only a few weeks ago, Labor Party’s Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour is now riding on Obi’s wave and has gained momentum following his party’s surprise win in Tinubu’s stronghold,

    The People’s Democratic Party’s Azeez Olajide Adediran, also known as Jandor, is another strong contender aiming to clinch the Lagos seat for his party for the first time.

    Adediran’s party has polled second in every governorship vote in Lagos since the return to civilian rule in 1999.

    Both men tell CNN they are confident of victory. “For the first time, PDP is going to take Lagos, and I’m going to be the governor,” says Adediran. “People are really tired … the streets of Lagos are yearning for a breath of fresh air and that is what we represent,” he adds.

    A wall is decorated with campaign posters of Lagos gubernatorial candidate of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Abdul-Azeez Olajide Adediran (Jandor) and running mate Funke Akindele in Lagos, on March 7, 2023.

    Rhodes-Vivour told CNN the time to liberate Lagos from “state capture” has come, and he’s next in line to govern the state.

    “I’m next governor of Lagos state,” he declared. “You cannot stop an idea whose time has come. The idea of a new Lagos … that is powered by the people and works for the people as opposed to state capture; that idea, its time has come and no matter what they do, they can’t stop it. That’s where the confidence comes from.”

    Governor Sanwo-Olu has asked voters to re-elect him because of his achievements, which he touts have brought “significant progress” to Lagos, including his commendable handling of the COVID pandemic.

    Lagos gubernatorial candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) Babajide Sanwo-Olu is seen in Lagos on January 24, 2023.

    But the governor has failed to pacify angry young people who accuse him of playing a role in the shooting of peaceful protesters railing against police brutality in 2020 by Nigerian soldiers.

    Sanwo-Olu admitted to CNN at the time that footage showed uniformed soldiers firing on peaceful protesters but recently denied ordering the shooting.

    Analyst Amadi tells CNN the gubernatorial poll in Lagos will be a contest between retaining or evicting the old guard.

    “Lagos is a fight between status quo and change,” Amadi said.

    “The incumbent Sanwo-Olu has a good chance of holding his job. But he faces a serious challenge from Gbadebo (Rhodes-Vivour) who has the momentum (of the Obi wave). Jandor (Adediran) is left behind because PDP had been dismantled in southern Nigeria and has no enthusiasm factor in Lagos,” Amadi said.

    “Sanwo-Olu has not been spectacular but is believed to have performed well in some aspects of keeping Lagos going. He may survive the popular revolt on Saturday … but watch out for an upset if the scaremongering of APC and the loss of trust in INEC’s integrity do not demotivate the young voters,” he added.

    Besides attempts at voter suppression, a widespread loss of confidence in the electoral body’s ability to conduct credible elections has eroded the electorate’s trust in the democratic process.

    Only 26% of Nigeria’s more than 93 million registered voters turned up to vote in the last election. This was much lower than the 2019 poll when a third of registered voters ended up voting.

    David Ayodele of civic group EiE Nigeria, tells CNN the February 25 election “deepened the trust deficit between the (electoral) commission and the electorates.”

    Ayodele urged the electoral body to redeem itself in the weekend poll by “naming and prosecuting INEC officials who were caught tampering with the electoral process.”

    Last month, Lagos police authorities said they were investigating an audio clip, in which two men were heard threatening residents of a local community to vote for candidates of the ruling APC or risk being evicted from the area.

    Polls will open from 8:30 a.m. local time (3:30 a.m. ET) Saturday and are expected to close at 2:30 p.m. (9:30 a.m. ET).

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  • Chicago mayoral candidates Johnson and Vallas clash over policing in debate | CNN Politics

    Chicago mayoral candidates Johnson and Vallas clash over policing in debate | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Chicago mayoral candidates sparred over public safety in a televised debate Thursday night ahead of the April 4 runoff, which has become the latest big-city mayoral race to test voters’ views on crime and policing.

    Paul Vallas accused progressive rival Brandon Johnson of backing the “defund the police” movement, while Johnson charged that Vallas’ plans to ramp up hiring of police officers would be slow and unrealistic.

    Vallas and Johnson, both of whom say they are Democrats and are competing in a nonpartisan contest, advanced to the runoff after the February 28 primary, when incumbent Lori Lightfoot finished third, dashing her reelection hopes.

    Chicago is an overwhelmingly Democratic city: 83% of its voters backed President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. But Vallas and Johnson are on opposite sides of the party’s divide over police policies.

    Vallas, a more conservative former public schools chief backed by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, has focused his campaign on a pro-police, tough-on-crime message. He has vowed to stem an exodus of city police officers and put more cops on Chicago Transit Authority buses and trains.

    Johnson, a progressive Cook County commissioner who is endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, has at times backed the “defund the police” movement. He now says he would not cut police spending but would seek to invest more in impoverished areas.

    In Thursday night’s debate, broadcast on ABC 7, Vallas repeatedly highlighted Johnson’s previous comments in which he had broadly backed shifting public dollars away from policing and toward community-based programs.

    “I’m not going to defund the police, and you know that. You know that. I have passed multi-billion dollar budgets, over and over again,” Johnson said.

    Johnson has said he would promote 200 new detectives to solve more violent crimes. He also said he would seek to crack down on gun violence by more vigorously enforcing “red flag” laws, which allow courts to temporarily seize firearms from anyone believed to be a danger to themselves or others.

    “The best way to engender confidence in public safety, you’ve got to catch people,” Johnson said.

    Vallas said he would rapidly fill thousands of police vacancies, and put those officers on public transit and in communities.

    “There is no substitute for returning to community-based policing,” Vallas said. “You can’t have confidence in the safety of public transportation when there are not police officers at the platforms and police officers at the stations.”

    The race has focused largely on crime. Violence in the city spiked in 2020 and 2021. And though shootings and murders have decreased since then, other crimes – including theft, car-jacking, robberies and burglaries – increased last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s 2022 year-end report.

    In their previous debate, Vallas had largely sought to remain above the fray while Johnson went on the attack. But on Thursday night – in a move that portended a more contentious turn in a race with at least three more debates and three candidate forums remaining – Vallas went on the attack in the debate’s opening minutes.

    Vallas criticized Johnson’s proposals to increase several taxes, including hotel and jet fuel taxes, a $4-per-head business tax and a higher sales tax on high-end properties.

    Johnson responded that Vallas is proposing spending increases on public safety without detailing how he would pay for them.

    “You can’t run a multi-billion dollar budget off of bake sales,” Johnson said.

    The two also butted heads over school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic and the role schools play in combating crime.

    Vallas said he would seek to open public schools to students during periods they would typically be closed – including weekends, summers and holidays – to “give kids a safe place to go.”

    He also lambasted Johnson, who is a teacher and is backed by a union that publicly fought with Lightfoot over when to return to in-person learning, for school shutdowns.

    Fifteen months of closures, Vallas said, is “not investing in people.”

    Johnson said that Vallas was using a “Republican talking point” in criticizing school closures during the pandemic.

    “That’s a part of your party,” Johnson said, showing how he has tried to cast Vallas as too conservative for the overwhelmingly blue city.

    Biden and other top Democratic officials, including Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth and Gov. J.B. Pritzker, have stayed out of the runoff.

    Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn are among the rare national voices to wade into the mayoral race, all endorsing Johnson. In a statement this week, Sanders said Johnson “has been a champion for working families in Chicago.”

    Vallas has influential local endorsements, including several city aldermen and former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, who four times was the top Democratic statewide vote-getter. Meanwhile, Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County board president, endorsed Johnson.

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  • The two biggest 2024 Republican names would mean bad news for Ukraine | CNN Politics

    The two biggest 2024 Republican names would mean bad news for Ukraine | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Russia might be bogged down in its vicious onslaught on Ukraine, but President Vladimir Putin is winning big elsewhere – in the Republican presidential primary.

    The two highest-polling potential GOP nominees – former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – are making clear that if they make it to the White House, Ukraine’s lifeline of US weapons and ammunition would be in danger and the war could end on Putin’s terms. Their stands underscore rising antipathy among grassroots conservatives to the war and President Joe Biden’s marshaling of the West to bankroll Kyiv’s resistance to Putin’s unprovoked invasion.

    “The death and destruction must end now!” Trump wrote in replies to a questionnaire from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson about the war and US involvement. DeSantis, answering the same questions, countered with his most unequivocal signal yet that he’d downgrade US help for Ukraine if he wins the presidency. “We cannot prioritize intervention in an escalating foreign war over the defense of our own homeland,” he wrote.

    Trump’s warnings that only he can stop World War III and DeSantis’ main argument that saving Ukraine is not a core US national security interest will likely gain even more traction following one of the most alarming moments yet in the war on Tuesday. The apparent downing of a US drone by a Russian fighter jet over the Black Sea was a step closer to the scenario that everyone has dreaded since the war erupted a year ago – a direct clash between US and Russian forces.

    “This incident should serve as a wake-up call to isolationists in the United States that it is in our national interest to treat Putin as the threat he truly is,” Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said in a Tuesday statement that read as an implicit rebuke of his party’s leading presidential hopefuls. Others, like Texas Sen. John Cornyn, said DeSantis’ position “raises questions.”

    But the reproach from some senior Senate Republicans may not matter much in today’s GOP. As they fight to outdo one another’s skepticism of Western help for Ukraine, Trump and DeSantis are showing how “America First” Republicans have transformed a party that was led by President Ronald Reagan to victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Their influence is sure to deepen the split in the US House between traditional GOP hawks and followers of the ex-president that is already threatening future aid to Ukraine – even before the 2024 presidential election.

    That divide is playing out in the early exchanges of the GOP primary race as other candidates, including ex-UN ambassador Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, warn that failing to stop Putin now could lead to disastrous confrontations later. Haley staked out a far more hawkish position on Ukraine in a statement on Tuesday. The former South Carolina governor warned that Russia’s goal was to wipe Ukraine off the map, and that if Kyiv “stopped fighting, Ukraine would no longer exist, and other countries would legitimately fear they would be next.”

    But her position might help explain why she’s trailing in early polls of the race. A new CNN/SSRS poll on Tuesday, for instance, found that 80% of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents thought it was important that the GOP nominee for president believe the US “should not be involved in the war between Russia and Ukraine.”

    GOP political calculations will have a profound geopolitical impact.

    Rising Republican skepticism of US aid to Ukraine presents President Volodymyr Zelensky with the most critical test yet of his international campaign for the weapons and ammunition Ukraine needs to survive. It will also bolster Putin’s apparent belief that he can outlast Western resolve and eventually crush Ukrainian resistance. The possibility that a Republican successor in the White House could abandon Ukraine will also become a bigger issue for Biden, increasing the pressure on him to shore up support among Americans for his policy in Ukraine, which polls show has ebbed a bit in recent months.

    If the war is still going on next year, the 2024 election could become a forum for a wide-ranging debate that will ask the American people to decide between twin impulses that have often divided the nation throughout its history – does the US have a duty to stand up for freedom and democracy anywhere, or should it indulge its more isolationist tendencies?

    Unless Trump or DeSantis fade in the coming months, Ukraine’s fate could effectively be on the ballot in primary races next year and in the November general election. And Biden’s vow to stick with Zelensky “for as long as it takes” could have an expiration date of January 20, 2025 – the next presidential inauguration.

    The rhetoric on Russia coming from the biggest 2024 names caused alarm on Capitol Hill, where many top Republican House committee chairman and senior senators are pressing Biden to do more to support Ukraine – including with the dispatch of F-16 fighter jets.

    Speaking on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program, Sen. Marco Rubio seemed to rebuke his state’s governor – arguing the US does have a national security interest in Ukraine and wondering whether DeSantis’ inexperience was a factor. “I don’t know what he’s trying to do or what the goal is. Obviously, he doesn’t deal with foreign policy every day as governor, so I’m not sure,” Rubio said.

    South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who’s already backed Trump’s 2024 White House bid, warned that those who said Ukraine didn’t matter were also effectively saying the same of war crimes.

    “We’re not invading Russia, we’re trying to expel the Russians from Ukraine, and no Americans are dying, and it is in our national interest to get this right,” Graham told CNN’s Manu Raju.

    Still, while Rubio and Graham represent traditional GOP foreign policy orthodoxy, their comments may only help DeSantis and Trump make their points since many pro-Trump voters often see them as part of a neo-conservative bloc in the party that led the US into years of war in the Middle East.

    South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, also said he disagreed with DeSantis, but he acknowledged that his own stance may not reflect where his party is now. “There are probably going to be other candidates in ’24 on our side who may share that view, and certainly it’s held by Republicans around the country,” Thune said of DeSantis’ perspective.

    The most noteworthy replies to Carlson’s questionnaire came from DeSantis, who has not yet officially launched a campaign, but was revealed by Tuesday’s CNN/SSRS poll to be Trump’s most threatening potential rival. The governor is encroaching on the ex-president’s ideological turf, and after speaking out more generally against current US policy in recent weeks, has now adopted a position apparently designed to hedge against the ex-president’s attacks on the issue.

    “While the U.S. has many vital national interests – securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party – becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis said.

    In response to a question about whether the US should support “regime change” in Russia, the Florida governor appeared to suggest the US is engaged in such a policy, warning that any replacement for Putin might prove “even more ruthless.” There is no indication that the US government is engaged in any attempt to topple Putin. DeSantis did not specifically say he would halt US military aid to Ukraine, leaving himself some political leeway if he were elected president. There remains some doubt about his true beliefs since CNN’s KFile has reported that as a member of Congress he called for the US to send lethal aid to Ukraine.

    But his most recent comments were remarkable in echoing Putin’s talking points. By referring to a “territorial dispute,” the governor minimized Russia’s unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation that Putin insists has no right to exist. His answer on regime change also bolsters a yearslong claim by the Russian leader that Washington is trying to drive him from power, and may be highlighted by the propagandists in Moscow’s official media.

    DeSantis’ responses to Carlson on the war also underscore how the normal relationship between political leaders and media commentators has been inverted by Fox and its star anchor. Carlson warmly approved of DeSantis’ answers, which appeared calculated to win his approval. This put Carlson in the amazing position of potentially curating what could end up being US foreign policy on one of the most critical questions since the end of the Cold War.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recently performed a similar genuflection, providing Carlson with exclusive access to US Capitol surveillance tapes from the January 6, 2021, insurrection, which the Fox anchor used to undermine the truth about the most serious attack on US democracy of the modern era.

    In his responses to Carlson, Trump repeated his unprovable claim that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he were president. He demanded an end to the fighting and peace talks that would effectively vindicate the invasion by Putin, to whom he often fawned when he was in the Oval Office. “The President must meet with each side, then both sides together, and quickly work out a deal. This can be easily done if conducted by the right President,” Trump said. “Both sides are weary and ready to make a deal,” he added, in a comment that does not reflect the reality of the war.

    Given that her views contradict Carlson’s, Haley publicly released her answers on Ukraine – and also accused DeSantis of copying Trump’s positions.

    “The Russian government is a powerful dictatorship that makes no secret of its hatred of America. Unlike other anti-American regimes, it is attempting to brutally expand by force into a neighboring pro-American country,” she wrote. “It also regularly threatens other American allies. America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory.”

    Haley’s statement epitomized the divisions on the war that will animate Republican primary debates that begin later this year – and that will be closely watched in both Kyiv and Moscow. She wouldn’t be Putin’s preferred candidate.

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  • DeSantis moves his presidential ambitions into the open with Iowa visit | CNN Politics

    DeSantis moves his presidential ambitions into the open with Iowa visit | CNN Politics


    Davenport, Iowa
    CNN
     — 

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made his first appearance in Iowa on Friday, an unmistakable flirtation for a top-tier Republican presidential contender that brings his expected bid for the White House a step closer to reality.

    Though DeSantis doesn’t plan to make a formal announcement on his political future until May or June, the Iowa visit, followed by a stop in Nevada on Saturday, highlighted the increasing priority of his presidential ambitions and a desire to send a clear signal to GOP donors, activists and potential campaign staff in early voting states about his intentions.

    At a stop at a casino in the eastern Iowa town of Davenport, DeSantis acknowledged it was his first time in the state, which typically lures political aspirants much sooner. He told the audience that his record in Florida compared favorably with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who is popular among Republicans here and has championed similar education policies.

    “I always tell my legislators, you watch Iowa – do not let them get ahead of us on any of this stuff,” DeSantis told a standing-room-only crowd.

    Reynolds introduced DeSantis at the event Friday and later joined him onstage to lead a conversation. She also traveled to Des Moines to appear with DeSantis at the State Fairgrounds later in the day.

    DeSantis did not speak to the buzz around his 2024 decision, though Reynolds hinted at it in her remarks.

    “He is just getting warmed up. This guy is a man on a mission,” she said in Davenport.

    DeSantis’ visit to Iowa came amid high anticipation from state Republicans, who have watched him closely from afar and were eager to take his measure up close.

    “Our grandkids live in Florida, so we’ve had a chance to see and hear what he’s done down there,” Kim Schmett, a longtime Iowa GOP activist, told CNN before the visit. “But everyone in Florida tells us, we don’t want him to run for president because we want to keep him here. That’s a good thing to hear about somebody holding public office.”

    DeSantis’ carefully crafted travel schedule brought him to many of Iowa’s neighbors during last year’s midterm cycle and to friendly audiences from Staten Island to Southern California in recent weeks. But he had avoided public events in the GOP’s first nominating state and in New Hampshire, home of the party’s first primary.

    He broke the seal Friday, becoming the latest potential 2024 hopeful to begin courting Iowa’s Republican caucus voters in person. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who declared her candidacy last month, is wrapping up her own three-day tour of the state, and potential candidates such as South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu held events in Iowa as early as last year.

    At the outset of the year, sources close to the Florida governor were unsure if DeSantis would visit Iowa before he officially became a candidate. Reynolds, who attended his donor retreat in Palm Beach last month, personally urged DeSantis to visit the state sooner than later, her aides said. The release of his second book, “The Courage to Be Free,” and the ensuing national tour provided DeSantis the opportunity to touch down in Iowa on his terms.

    In Davenport, people lined up as early as 6 a.m. to enter the event room. DeSantis signed books after he concluded his remarks, which saw him recount many of his political battles of the past two years, from his management of the Covid-19 pandemic in Florida to fighting Disney over legislation that banned certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom.

    Besides the events in Davenport and Des Moines, DeSantis’ Friday itinerary was also filled with several private meetings with key Republican leaders.

    He met with a group of state legislators at the Capitol, where a robust debate has been underway all week on legislation similar to many of his signature proposals in Florida. Those involved in forming his political action committee had made calls to several influential Iowa Republicans, aides familiar with the conversations said, inviting them to meet with DeSantis on Friday.

    Top advisers to the Florida governor have spoken to several key Iowa GOP operatives about the possibility of joining his team in the state. No firm hiring decisions have been made, people familiar with the matter say, but veterans of Reynolds’ and former Gov. Terry Branstad’s campaigns are among those in discussions with Team DeSantis.

    At the same time, former President Donald Trump has been making his own calls into Iowa over the past two weeks – targeting some of the same legislators and longtime supporters and urging them to endorse his candidacy again.

    “President Trump is twisting arms and looking for endorsements, but many of us are keeping our powder dry for now,” a top Republican elected official told CNN, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid alienating the former president or the DeSantis team.

    Trump will hold his first Iowa event of the 2024 cycle in Davenport on Monday just days after DeSantis leaves town. Jeanita McNulty, chairwoman of the Scott County GOP, said many local Republicans are uncommitted and she expects to see familiar faces attend both the DeSantis and Trump events.

    “Republicans here are not closing a chapter or opening a new chapter,” she said. “They want to hear from both candidates, see what they have to say.”

    DeSantis did not mention Trump in his remarks in Davenport, but he contrasted his administration against the chaos and leaks that at times engulfed the Trump White House.

    “There’s no drama in our administration,” DeSantis said. “There’s no palace intrigue. (My staffers) basically just sit back and say, ‘OK, what’s the governor going to do next?’ And we roll out and we execute.”

    Nevertheless, in the state where the first votes of the Republican contest are expected to be cast early next year, caution signs abound for DeSantis.

    “He’s riding high for a lot of good reasons. He’s done a great job leading the state of Florida,” Bob Vander Plaats, president of influential Christian group The Family Leader, told CNN before the governor’s visit.

    “But in 2008, [Rudy] Giuliani was the nominee. In 2012, Rick Perry was the nominee. In 2016, Scott Walker was the nominee,” he said, referring to past candidates who failed to live up to lofty early expectations and fizzled before voting began. “For Gov. DeSantis, he has to not just take in all of the poll numbers right now but show he’s really willing to work.”

    Vander Plaats met privately with DeSantis near Naples, Florida, last month.

    In conversations with more than two dozen Republican voters and party activists this week in Iowa, DeSantis’ name came up again and again. To many, his decision to add Iowa to his national book tour highlights his intention to run, though he’s in no hurry to make it official.

    “Pushing a book in Iowa is a fishing expedition,” said Kelley Koch, chairwoman of the Dallas County Republican Party. “I think he will be pleasantly surprised to see how many people come out to the Fairgrounds to see him. People are very curious.”

    It remains unclear the extent to which DeSantis will prioritize Iowa and other early nominating states as he lays the groundwork for a campaign focused on outlasting Trump in the GOP primary. Two people with knowledge of the planning, who asked not to be named, said DeSantis’ political operation is plotting an ambitious, nationwide strategy that will focus as much on competing in Trump strongholds and large, winner-take-all contests as it will in the initial battlegrounds. His travel in recent days to Alabama, Texas and California is an early indication that DeSantis will not be singularly focused on winning over Iowa or New Hampshire, county by county.

    “I think you’ll see some things that are unconventional unfold in short order,” one source said.

    DeSantis has consistently flouted traditional political protocols amid his rise to become Trump’s top GOP rival, and there’s no playbook for challenging a former president in a primary. He has also built a fundraising juggernaut that is carrying over more than $70 million from his 2022 reelection and has raised another $10 million this year through his Florida political committee before even jumping into the mix. CNN previously reported that the governor’s political team expects to shift that money to a DeSantis-aligned federal committee should he run.

    Still, for a first-time presidential candidate who was unknown to most of the country two years ago, forging a national campaign out of the gate would be a precarious and expensive endeavor. It carries the added risk of turning off voters in early states such as Iowa.

    “They expect to meet the candidates, shake their hands and look them in the eye,” said McNulty, the Scott County GOP chairwoman. “That’s the beauty of the first-in-the-nation caucus. It would be unwise to overlook the power of retail politics here.”

    The most recent Republican winners of the Iowa caucuses – Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (2016), Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (2012) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (2008) – all spent considerable time in the state to secure victory. Though, none of them ultimately secured the Republican nomination.

    A source close to DeSantis’ political team said there is a sense among his operation that the political landscape has changed since 2016 to allow for a less conventional campaign.

    “Ron DeSantis has never been successful because he’s the best campaigner. He’s been successful because he’s been the best governor,” the source said. “Primary voters are less concerned if you’re having coffee with them than if you are authentic and doing what you say you’re going to do. I get it that Iowa and New Hampshire voters are used to a certain campaign style, and he’ll have to consider those factors. But Republican primary voters are so concerned with the direction of the country, and those things will be less important.”

    Routine favorable coverage from Fox News and other conservative outlets has allowed DeSantis to introduce himself to many prospective GOP voters already. He will spend much of the coming weeks promoting his book and creating reasons to speak to out-of-state voters, as he did when he rallied with law enforcement unions in New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois last month, sources said. Back home, a fully aligned GOP-led state legislature is expected to send to his desk a slate of ideological bills that will generate more headlines and could become a platform for his campaign.

    “Gov. DeSantis in some ways has an unfair advantage,” Vander Plaats said, “and that’s he’s governor of Florida. That is a large state, and he gets a lot of coverage.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Blast kills Taliban governor in his office in Afghanistan | CNN

    Blast kills Taliban governor in his office in Afghanistan | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    A Taliban governor in northern Afghanistan has been killed by an explosion in his office, police officials have told CNN.

    Mohammad Dawood Muzammil, the governor of Balkh province, died along with two others in the blast on Thursday, said the provincial police force’s spokesman Asif Waziri.

    The cause of the explosion remains unclear, but Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said the men had been killed “by the enemies of Islam.”

    However, he did not identify the suspects and no group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

    “An investigation into the incident is underway,” Mujahid said.

    The governor is one of the most senior officials to have been killed since the radical Islamist group retook control of the country in August 2021 following the withdrawal of US forces.

    Since then, the Islamic State militant group and its affiliates have claimed a series of deadly attacks in Afghanistan both on civilians and members of the Taliban.

    These have included an attack at a Sikh temple that killed at least two people, a string of incidents in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, and a suicide bomb blast at Kabul airport.

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  • DeSantis agenda — and potential campaign platform — in the spotlight as Florida lawmakers return to work | CNN Politics

    DeSantis agenda — and potential campaign platform — in the spotlight as Florida lawmakers return to work | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    In the coming weeks, Gov. Ron DeSantis is poised to show Floridians – and the country – just how much further he is willing to go than any other Republican leader to turn his state into a conservative vision where abortion is nearly outlawed, guns can be carried in public without training, private schools are subsidized with taxpayer dollars and “wokeness” is excised.

    DeSantis’ agenda is expected to dominate the debate in Tallahassee when state lawmakers return to action on Tuesday for what is perhaps the most anticipated legislative session in recent memory. With a decision on his presidential ambitions waiting on the other side of the 60-day session, DeSantis has hyped the humdrum of parliamentary proceedings and legislative sausage-making into a spectacle worth following.

    “People look at Florida like, ‘Man, the governor has gotten a lot done,’” DeSantis told “Fox & Friends” last month. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

    With DeSantis’ backing or urging, Republican lawmakers have filed a slate of bills that will keep Florida at the forefront of the culture wars that are raging in statehouses across the country. There are legislative proposals targeting drag shows, treatments for transgender children, diversity and equity programs at public universities, gender studies majors, professor tenure, teachers unions, libel protections for the media, so-called “woke” banking and in-state college tuition for undocumented residents. Other proposals would extend DeSantis’ powers as governor, including to control the hiring of professors on every public campus through his political appointees and put him in charge of picking the board that oversees scholastic athletics in the state. Another would amend a longstanding “resign to run” law so DeSantis could launch a bid for president without stepping down as Florida governor.

    Though no governor in Florida’s modern history has wielded executive power or the bully pulpit quite like DeSantis, it’s the closely aligned, Republican-held legislature that has handed the governor many of the policy wins that have fueled his political rise. Already this year, the legislature has met in special session to shore up several of DeSantis’ priorities, including the freedom to transport migrants from anywhere in the country to Democratic jurisdictions and fewer hurdles for his new election crime office to charge people for voting errors and violations.

    Lawmakers in the special session also approved DeSantis’ plans for a takeover of Disney’s special government powers – punishment for the entertainment giant’s objection last year to the Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which prohibited the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity until after third grade. Under the new law, DeSantis chooses the board members that oversee the taxing district around Disney’s Orlando-area theme parks. Last week, he appointed to the board a political donor, the wife of the state GOP chairman and a former pastor who once suggested tap water could turn people gay.

    Now, lawmakers have proposed taking up the legislation at the heart of that feud once again, by extending the prohibited topics in the Parental Rights in Education law to eighth grade. The bill also declares “it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex” and it prohibits school districts from requiring teachers or other employees to use a student’s preferred name or pronouns.

    For his part, DeSantis will deliver the state of the state address on Tuesday and then spend much of the following weeks on the road to promote his new book, “The Courage to be Free,” a memoir transfixed on the political battles from his first term. It will be up to Republican lawmakers to give DeSantis fresh material from which he can build a narrative for a presidential campaign, should he choose to run. DeSantis has said he intends to decide after the session if he will jump into the 2024 contest.

    Privately, DeSantis’ political team believes that as a sitting governor, DeSantis’ ability to stack policy wins is critical to mounting a campaign against former President Donald Trump. Like Trump and former Gov. Nikki Haley, the only other major declared candidate, many potential contenders for the nomination are out of office and unable to dictate an agenda for other Republicans to match. And, unlike DeSantis, their records may not reflect what animates GOP primary voters at the moment.

    In a speech behind closed doors last week to the conservative Club for Growth, DeSantis also suggested he is a singular force among elected Republicans in pushing the party to engage in ideological battles.

    “I’m going on offense,” DeSantis said, according to audio of his speech obtained by CNN. “Some of these Republicans, they just sit back like potted plants, and they let the media define the terms of the debate. They let the left define the terms of debate. They take all this incoming, because they’re not making anything happen. And I said, ‘That’s not what we’re doing.’”

    Democrats, a perennial minority in Tallahassee with even fewer members after the last election, have little recourse to stop DeSantis and Republican lawmakers. Democrats have asserted that the Republican agenda is failing to address the problems many Floridians are facing, including skyrocketing rents, a housing shortage and fast-rising property insurance rates.

    “Just a reminder, eggs are still $5 for a dozen,” Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book said Monday. “It’s $3.50 for a gallon of gas. If you live in the state of Florida in a high rise, you still have to buy flood insurance. But the Republicans want to fight about drag and which bathroom people use.”

    Still, there are signs of dissent among Republicans in how hard to push on several fronts. Some Republicans have raised concern at the price tag for a DeSantis-backed expansion of a school voucher program that currently allows low-income parents to offset the cost of sending their children to private and religious school. Under the latest proposal, the program would be open to virtually all parents regardless of income, including those who choose to home school their kids.

    At a committee meeting last week, state Sen. Erin Grall, a Republican, warned that the “potential for abuse rises significantly with the dollar amount and keeping a child at home.”

    Republicans also have not settled on a new legislative framework for the future of abortion access in the state. Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, DeSantis signed a bill to ban abortion at 15 weeks without exception. He recently signaled he would support legislation that banned abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected; however, he has not publicly advocated for it with the same fervor as his other priorities. Meanwhile, the state’s Senate President Kathleen Passidomo previously said she wanted a 12-week ban that included exemptions for rape and incest.

    John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, an influential conservative group, said he expects a compromise heartbeat bill will pass that includes some exceptions. Other anti-abortion groups want to see DeSantis sign a complete ban on abortion.

    “While exceptions are important and represent real human beings, the bottom line is they are small in number, so it’s a huge victory even with exceptions and I think the governor and his staff are thinking the same way,” Stemberger said. “He’s certainly committed to signing a heartbeat bill.”

    It remains to be seen, too, how Republicans respond to DeSantis’ immigration agenda. DeSantis has proposed repealing a measure that granted in-state tuition for undocumented students who were brought to the US by their parents. The law, championed by his own lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nuñez, when she was a state representative, was a top priority of his predecessor, then-Gov. Rick Scott, and passed the GOP-controlled legislature with help from many of the party’s Latino members. Additionally, DeSantis wants lawmakers to mandate that employers check the immigration status of all workers against a federal database called E-Verify, a proposal opposed for years by the state’s influential hospitality and agriculture industries that bankroll many Republican campaigns.

    Republicans have also faced pressure from the right on another DeSantis priority: eliminating the state permit to carry a concealed weapon in Florida. Under the proposal, eligible Floridians could carry a concealed gun in Florida without seeking approval from the state, which currently requires proof of training and a background check to obtain.

    While Democrats and gun-control advocates have criticized DeSantis for removing one of the few checks on firearms in the state, gun-rights activists have said the measure doesn’t go far enough. They want Florida to allow people to carry a gun in public in the open and for the state to eliminate gun-free zones. In Florida, it’s currently illegal to carry a firearm at a school or on a college campus.

    “The title of ‘constitutional carry’ for this bill is a lie,” Luis Valdes, the Florida director of Gun Owners of America, said during a recent committee hearing on the bill. “Why are Republicans defending (former Democratic attorney general) Janet Reno’s gun control policies?”

    DeSantis has suggested, at times, that it is up to the legislature to put these bills on his desk. But for some conservatives, DeSantis has set the expectation that he can bully Republican lawmakers into supporting any measure he gets behind.

    DeSantis himself has said his political philosophy is guided by taking political risks that others won’t.

    “Boldness is something that voters reward,” DeSantis said Sunday in California. “The lesson is swing for the fences. You will be rewarded.”

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  • Trump and DeSantis stake out sharpest preview yet of possible 2024 showdown | CNN Politics

    Trump and DeSantis stake out sharpest preview yet of possible 2024 showdown | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Ex-President Donald Trump and his most serious potential rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, laid out with unprecedented clarity this weekend how their sharply contrasting personalities and approaches would define the 2024 race for the Republican nomination.

    Trump served up his familiar brew of fury, falsehoods and dishonest braggadocio at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, billing himself as the only man who could save the planet from World War III, girding his adoring supporters for their “final battle” against communists, globalists and the “Deep State,” and declaring: “I am your retribution.”

    “We will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will expose and appropriately deal with the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). We will evict Joe Biden from the White House and we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” Trump told the crowd at a Maryland convention center outside Washington on Saturday.

    DeSantis, who is yet to declare a campaign, used an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California on Sunday to channel the same conservative anger at what he claims is a left-wing “woke” elite takeover of politics, education, Covid-19 public health policy and big business, tapping into the modern Republican Party’s driving ideological force. Yet he offered a far more specific blueprint than Trump for a disruption of government as Americans know it, strongly implying that after implementing hardline conservatism in the Sunshine State, he could deliver the policy goals that often eluded Trump in his chaotic White House term.

    “I can tell you in four years, you didn’t see our administration leaking like a sieve, you didn’t see a lot of drama or palace intrigue,” said DeSantis, whose punch-by-punch speaking style is far more ordered and methodical than Trump’s wild flights of rhetoric. “What you saw was surgical, precision execution. Day after day after day. And because we did that, we beat the left day after day after day.”

    The back-to-back speeches, which highlighted two Republicans who would be the early favorites if DeSantis gets into the GOP nominating race, came with a slice of irony. The split screen captured their party’s unresolved ideological split that Trump engineered in 2016 when he crushed establishment candidates. CPAC, where Trump spoke, for decades kept alive the flame of the two-term president Reagan, who redefined the conservative movement when he won the 1980 election and left a legacy that dominated the GOP until Trump arrived. Once a rite of passage for potential GOP presidential candidates, CPAC has since become a platform for Trump’s personality cult. DeSantis did not speak there, instead appearing last week at a dueling Club for Growth donor conference to which Trump was not invited.

    Speaking in the shadow of Reagan’s former Air Force One on Sunday, DeSantis appeared to be staking a claim to both the reforming zeal of the 40th president and offering an updated, more targeted – yet still searing – version of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” populism, although stripped of the uproarious distractions typical of the most recent Republican president. He seemed to be trying to build a conservative coalition that would appeal to Republicans who have soured on Trump after his record of two impeachments, a US Capitol insurrection and a disastrous intervention in the 2022 midterm elections, but that might also peel away some Trump supporters who still love their champion but doubt that he has the discipline and appeal needed to win a national election again.

    Still, if DeSantis were to win the Republican nomination, there would likely be questions over whether his own radicalism would hurt him in the same swing state districts where Trump lost the 2020 election – even notwithstanding a public persona that is more disciplined than Trump’s. There’s not much subtlety in his rhetoric about a “woke mind virus”: Much of the Florida governor’s phrasing comes with the implication that anyone who does not share his views is, by definition, a left-wing extremist. And he would essentially be promising Americans one of the most right-wing presidencies of modern history.

    DeSantis was not the only possible alternative to Trump who laid out his case in recent days. Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who has already launched a campaign, and ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who may do so, both braved the lions’ den at CPAC, and both launched veiled attacks on their former boss.

    “If you’re tired of losing, put your trust in a new generation,” Haley said, playing into criticisms that both Trump, 76, and Biden, 80, should yield to younger leaders.

    Pompeo, who, like his former Cabinet colleague got a fairly tepid reception on the ex-president’s turf, stacked his speech with plausible deniability to avoid taking on Trump directly. But one remark could be read as as much of a criticism of the ex-president as the Democrats he specifically targeted when he said: “We can’t become the left, following celebrity leaders with their own brand of identity politics, those with fragile egos who refuse to acknowledge reality.”

    Another potential Republican candidate, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, was on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday and attacked Trump’s fearsome culture war talk.

    “If you want to heal our land and unite our country together, you don’t do it by appealing to the angry mob,” Hutchinson told Dana Bash.

    “Wherever you’re looking at the leader of our country, you don’t want him to be engaged in a personal vendetta. And when he talks about vengeance, he’s talking about his personal vendettas, and that’s not healthy for America. It’s certainly not healthy for our party.’

    One other potential anti-Trump GOP candidate, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, however, announced on Sunday that he would pass on the 2024 race to avoid splintering the opposition to the ex-president.

    “Right now, you have Trump and DeSantis at the top of the field soaking up all the oxygen, getting all the attention, and then a whole lot of the rest of us in single digits. And the more of them you have, the less chance you have for somebody rising up,” Hogan told CBS News.

    If Hogan’s reluctant decision to bow out foreshadows similar decisions by other long-shot candidates, it could point to a Republican nominating race that does not replicate the fracturing of the anti-Trump vote that helped his remarkable rise to power in 2016. But that would also fuel the possibility of a long and bitter nominating race between Trump and DeSantis through a swathe of winner-take-all primaries – if the Florida governor decides to get into the race.

    Given his strong hold on the Republican base, Trump is likely to be seen as the favorite for the nomination, but he appears to recognize the potential threat he faces from DeSantis, and has already accused him of disloyalty after endorsing him in his first race for the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee.

    But DeSantis, in his new book published last week, puts his success in that first gubernatorial campaign down to a “massive swing” powered by a strong Republican primary debate performance that took place after he won Trump’s endorsement. And he is seeking to distinguish himself as a winner compared to Trump by citing his thumping reelection victory last fall, which stands in implicit contrast to the ex-president’s national reelection loss.

    “We went from winning by 32,000 votes in 2018 to winning by over 1.5 million votes in 2022. We earned the largest percentage of the vote that any Republican governor candidate received in Florida history,” DeSantis said on Sunday.

    Yet the events of the weekend also pointed to some of the potential liabilities for DeSantis in any attempt to take down Trump. While his speech at the Reagan Library demonstrated a talent for explaining policy and a conversational style, he lacked the showmanship skills that Trump has long used to dominate Republican politics. Trumpism has always been more of a visceral and emotional backlash than an exercise in actually implementing ideological conservatism.

    Perhaps GOP voters are so keen to win back the presidency that they will look for a change. But in his speech at CPAC, which echoed the “American Carnage” themes of his inaugural address, Trump gave notice to DeSantis and the rest of the country that he will fight with everything he has to win the White House again. He told reporters that even if he is indicted in federal or state investigations against him, he will still not drop out of the race.

    “At the end of the day, anyone else will be intimidated, bought off, blackmailed or ripped to shreds. I alone will never retreat,” Trump said.

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  • Ex-Arkansas governor says ‘more voices’ in 2024 GOP race are ‘good for our party’ | CNN Politics

    Ex-Arkansas governor says ‘more voices’ in 2024 GOP race are ‘good for our party’ | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who’s weighing a run for the Republican presidential nomination, said Sunday that “more voices” in the 2024 race are “good for our party.”

    Hutchinson made his remarks on CNN’s “State of the Union” after a fellow former GOP governor, Maryland’s Larry Hogan, announced that he would not run for president because he didn’t want his candidacy to help Donald Trump nab the Republican nomination.

    “Larry Hogan is a star. He’s governed well in Maryland, elected in a blue state. I think the fact that he indicates that he’s going to continue to fight in the Republican Party for alternatives to Donald Trump and a new direction is a good sign,” Hutchinson told CNN’s Dana Bash.

    “I actually think more voices right now in opposition or providing an alternative to Donald Trump is the best thing in the right direction. So, hats off to Larry for what he’s done, what he’s contributed. And I’m glad that he will continue to do so,” he added.

    Hogan said in a statement Sunday that he wanted to avoid a “pileup” in the GOP primary that could result in Trump clearing the field and securing the nomination.

    Hutchinson disagreed with that stance, telling CNN that “this is not 2016” and that 2024 will be “different” because Trump is a “known quantity” He also said that evangelical Christian voters “are convinced that we need to have a different type of leadership in the future.”

    “In the early stages, multiple candidates that have an alternative vision to what the president has is good for our party, good for the debate, good for the upcoming debate that will be in August,” Hutchinson said.

    “So, sure, that will narrow, and it will probably narrow fairly quickly. We need to have a lot of self-evaluation as you go along, but I think more voices now that provide alternative messages and problem-solving and ideas is good for our party,” he added.

    Hutchinson told Bash he was troubled by Trump’s comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday that he can deliver conservatives “retribution” against Democrats and establishment Republicans.

    “It’s troubling. First of all, if you want to heal our land, unite our country together, you don’t do it by appealing to the angry mob. And that’s true whether you’re talking about an angry mob from the left or the right,” Hutchinson said. “And when he talks about vengeance, he’s talking about his personal vendettas, and that’s not healthy for America; it’s certainly not healthy for our party.”

    Hutchinson was also asked about the Republican National Committee’s proposal for 2024 contenders to sign a pledge to back the party’s ultimate nominee in order to participate in primary debates. The former governor said the pledge should instead be a promise not to run as a third-party candidate if the candidate doesn’t win the nomination. He did not directly say whether he’d sign the loyalty pledge but said he anticipates participating in the RNC debates if he’s a candidate.

    Hutchinson, who has traveled to the early-voting states of Iowa and South Carolina, said April is when he’ll make his decision about whether he’d run for president.

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  • Larry Hogan says he’s not running for president in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Larry Hogan says he’s not running for president in 2024 | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said Sunday that he will not seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024.

    “I have long said that I care more about ensuring a future for the Republican Party than securing my own future in the Republican Party. That is why I will not be seeking the Republican nomination for president,” he said in a statement.

    After leaving office in January, Hogan said that he was seriously considering running for president.

    But on Sunday, the longtime critic of former President Donald Trump said that “the stakes are too high for me to risk being part of another multicar pileup that could potentially help Mr. Trump recapture the nomination.”

    Trump is making his third bid for the Republican nomination in a race that has been slow to take shape. Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy entered the primary last month. Other potential contenders for the GOP nomination include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President MIke Pence and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.

    In his statement Sunday, Hogan, who served two terms as Maryland governor, argued that his party needs to “move on” from Trump. A relatively moderate Republican, Hogan has long been critical of Trump’s influence on the party and was even seen as a potential challenger to him in the 2020 GOP primary. He has said that had he been in the US Senate, he would have voted to convict the former president at his 2021 impeachment trial.

    “Our nation faces great challenges; we can’t afford to be consumed by the pettiest grievances. We can push back and defeat the excesses of elitist policies on the left without resorting to angry, divisive and performative politics,” he said in his statement Sunday.

    Hogan was first elected governor in 2014 and comfortably won reelection in 2018. In recent decades, the state has been dominated by the Democratic Party at the state and federal levels. George H.W. Bush was the last Republican presidential nominee to win the Old Line State, in 1988.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Colombia plans to send 70 ‘cocaine hippos’ to India and Mexico, governor says | CNN

    Colombia plans to send 70 ‘cocaine hippos’ to India and Mexico, governor says | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Colombia plans to fly dozens of its “cocaine hippos” – the descendents of drug trafficker Pablo Escobar’s private menagerie – to new homes in India and Mexico in a bid to control their booming population, according to the local governor.

    There are now between 130 and 160 of the hippos, according to the Colombian government, and they have spread out far beyond Escobar’s former ranch of Hacienda Napoles, where they began as a population of just one male and three females.

    The original hippos were part of a collection of exotic animals Escobar had amassed in the 1980s at his ranch about 250 kilometers (155 miles) from Medellín. After his death in 1993, authorities relocated most of the other animals, but not the hippos – because they were too difficult to transport.

    But they have since begun to reproduce rapidly, extending their reach along the Magdalena River basin, and they now pose an environmental challenge and are concerning nearby residents, authorities say.

    A study in the journal Nature warned their numbers could balloon to 1,500 within two decades.

    Previously, authorities have tried to control their population using castrations and “shots” of contraceptive darts. But the contraceptive drives have had limited success.

    Now there’s a plan to transfer 70 of the hippos to natural sanctuaries in India and Mexico, the governor of Antioquia province, where Hacienda Napoles is located, said in a Tweet.

    A total of 70 hippos, a mix of males and females, are expected to be moved – with 60 going to India and 10 to Mexico.

    The technical term for this operation is “translocating,” governor Aníbal Gaviria explained in an interview with the Colombian outlet Blu Radio, as it would involve moving the hippos from one country that was not their native habitat to another that was also not their natural habitat.

    The goal was “to take them to countries where these institutions have the capacity to receive them, and to (home) them properly and to control their reproduction,” Gaviria said.

    Sending the hippos back to their native land of Africa was “not allowed,” Gaviria said.

    Sending the hippos back to Africa risked doing more harm than good, for both the hippos themselves and the local ecosystem, María Ángela Echeverry, professor of Biology at the Javeriana University, previously explained to CNN.

    “Every time we move animals or plants from one place to the other, we also move their pathogens, their bacteria and their viruses. And we could be bringing new diseases to Africa, not just for the hippos that are out there in the wild, but new diseases for the entire African ecosystem that hasn’t evolved with that type of disease,” Echeverry said.

    Aside from reducing the number of hippos in Colombia, authorities are hoping to learn how to manage the remaining population, which are recognized as a potential tourist attraction.

    The hippos will be flown in purpose-built boxes, Gaviria said in the radio interview, and will not be sedated at first.

    But “emergency sedation” is possible if one of the animals is overcome by nerves during the flight, he added.

    The translocation could be completed by the first half of this year if necessary permits are expedited, especially from the Colombian Agricultural Institute, Gaviria said.

    Hippos are seen by some as an invasive species that can pose a danger to local ecosystems and sometimes even to humans.

    Research has highlighted the negative effects hippo waste can have on oxygen levels in bodies of water, which can affect fish and ultimately humans.

    Nature magazine cited a 2019 paper that found lakes where hippos were present had more cyanobacteria, which are associated with toxic algae. These blooms can reduce water quality and cause mass fish deaths, affecting local fishing communities.

    Hippos can also pose a threat to agriculture and to people’s safety, according to a Biological Conservation study published in 2021. Hippos can eat or damage crops and engage in aggressive interactions with humans.

    “Hippos live in herds, they are quite aggressive. They are very territorial and are plant eaters in general,” said Professor Echeverry.

    While the “cocaine hippos” are not native to Colombia, the local terrain is thought to be favorable for their reproduction, since it has shallow water sources and a large concentration of food.

    Until now, Colombia has not been able to solve a problem that – in the words of Gaviria to Blu Radio – “got out of control.”

    Whether the latest efforts will succeed where birth control efforts failed remains to be seen.

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