Month: April 2019

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, reportedly paid a tech expert to rig opinion polls in favour of his boss and create a Twitter account which praised Mr Cohen as a “sex symbol”. 

Mr Cohen got the expert to boost Mr Trump’s standing in two online polls, one on America’s top business leaders and another on potential 2016 presidential candidates, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

He also, bizarrely, asked for a Twitter account called “Women For Cohen” to be set up which posted positive comments about himself, including his looks, according to the article. 

Mr Cohen allegedly agreed to pay $50,000 for the work but in the end only handed over between $12,000 and $13,000 and a boxing glove worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter. 

Responding on Twitter, Mr Cohen did not dispute the report, writing: “What I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of Donald Trump. I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t deserve it.”

One of Mr Trump’s current lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, disputed that claim, telling The Wall Street Journal: “This is not true. The president did not know about this if it happened.”

It is a new strange twist in the story of Mr Cohen, who once pledged to “take a bullet” for Mr Trump but has flipped on the US president after pleading guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and fraud. 

The man said to have been employed for the work was John Gauger, the owner of RedFinch Solutions LLC and chief information officer at Liberty University in Virginia. 

The pair met shortly after Mr Trump gave a speech at the university which Mr Cohen also attended, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

The two online polls Mr Cohen allegedly asked to be influenced were online and involved trying to repeatedly vote to ensure he finished highly. 

One was hosted by CNBC in January 2014 and was about America’s top business leaders. Mr Trump failed to come in the top 100. 

The other was on the Drudge Report, a right-leaning news website, in February 2015 and listed potential Republican presidential candidates. Mr Trump got 24,000 of votes, some 5 per cent of the total cast. 

The Twitter account Mr Cohen is said to have created was designed, it appears, to lavish praise on himself.

Its biography reads: “Women who love and support Michael Cohen. Strong, pit bull, sex symbol, no nonsense, business oriented, and ready to make a difference!”

The nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AfD) has backed away from plans to call for a German withdrawal from the European Union.

The AfD had planned to put a call for “Dexit” at the heart of its manifesto for May’s European parliament elections, with a pledge to leave the EU by 2024 unless the bloc is radically reformed.

But the pledge was watered down to a vague threat to leave if reforms are not made “in a timely manner” at the weekend, following the intervention of the party leader, Alexander Gauland.

The move comes as Marine Le Pen also turned her back on her past campaign for France to leave the EU, instead pledging to reform the bloc from within as she launched her National Rally party’s European election campaign.

The AfD shocked the German establishment when it included a timetable for withdrawal from the EU in the initial draft of its manifesto for the European elections.

The AfD has called for the EU to be recast as a “Europe of fatherlands”, and the original draft of its manifesto called for Germany to leave the bloc if the party’s demands for reforms were not met by 2024.

But delegates at a special party conference voted to drop the ulitmatum after an appeal from Mr Gauland.

“I do not think it is wise to go into an election with such a major demand,” Mr Gauland told them. “Whoever plays with the idea of Dexit has to ask: isn’t that a Utopia, and shouldn’t we be realistic?”

Originally founded to oppose the single currency, the AfD has previously shied away from calling for Dexit in a country where 75 per cent of people believe EU membership is beneficial, according to a poll last year.

“We don’t need to abolish the EU, but to bring it back to its sensible core,” Mr Gauland said. The AfD wants the EU to become a economic and trade union stripped of legislative powrs, and its manifesto calls for the European parliament to be abolished and replaced with a much smaller assemby of delegates sent by national parliaments.

The dispute was part of a wider struggle for control of the party between the current leadership and a hardline faction led by Björn Höcke, who has publicly called for a “180-degree turn” in German attitudes towards the Second World War.

Mr Gauland’s calls to reform the EU from within were echoed at the weekend by Ms Le Pen, who has dropped her former campaign for a Frexit.

“What we propose is a quiet transition from the European Union to the European alliance of nations,” Ms Le Pen told a rally in Paris to launch her party’s European election campaign.

She said this would allow France “to reconquer our border control, our legislative, budget and monetary sovereignty”.

Ms Le Pen is hoping the recent Yellow Vests protests against the government of Emmanuel Macron will help her National Rally party in the European elections.

US President Donald Trump landed in Hanoi on Tuesday for two days of talks to try to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to give up his nuclear arsenal.

Trump arrived on Air Force One after flying half way around the world from Washington, while Kim arrived earlier, following a two-and-a-half-day train journey from Pyongyang. They were due to have dinner Wednesday and continue talks on Thursday.

The normally chaotic streets of central Hanoi ground to a halt as Kim’s convoy arrived in the Vietnamese capital. 

Curious onlookers gathered next to televisions crews outside the luxurious Melia hotel in Hanoi’s diplomatic district, waiting for hours under chilly, gloomy skies for a glimpse of the…

When the "yellow vests" first took to the streets, they basked in the approval of the overwhelming majority of French people, but after three months of violent protests, the tide appears to be turning.

A poll suggested for the first time this week that most people — some 58 per cent — now want an end to the weekend protests. They are fed up with avoiding city centres on Saturdays for fear of getting caught in clashes between protesters and police, and they want to be able to shop or meet friends in cafés.

The French supported the initial roundabout occupations because they saw them as justified protests over fuel prices and the cost of living, said Bernard Sananès, head of the Elabe polling institute. “But there’s a gulf between the roundabout demands and the Saturday protests.”

The leaderless grassroots movement has widened into a more general revolt against a political class seen as out of touch with common people.

The government has made concessions, while people have grown weary of watching TV footage of violence every Saturday, which has caused €30 million euros (more than £26 million) worth of damage in French cities.

The French were horrified by the release on Friday of a recording of a “yellow vest’ figurehead, Christophe Chalençon, by an Italian TV show.

“We’ve got paramilitaries ready to intervene because they also want to topple the government,” Mr Chalençon, whose face is not shown, is heard saying.

Questioned about the recording, which French media pronounced authentic, Mr Chalençon, a blacksmith, denied being in “formal” contact with paramilitaries but told Le Parisien newspaper: “I only receive messages from armed people who say they’re ready.”

More moderate “yellow vests” disowned his statement in a further sign of growing splits in the movement. Rival far-Right and ultra-Leftist factions fought with fists, rocks and sticks in a Lyon street last weekend.

The image of the “yellow vests” has also been tarnished by accusations of anti-semitism, with offensive slogans appearing in Paris around the time of the protests last weekend and the government reporting a 74 per cent surge in offences against Jews. Benjamin Cauchy, a prominent “yellow vest” held talks with Jewish leaders in Toulouse this week and denounced anti-semitism.

Several “yellow vests” appeared in court this week. Prosecutors called for Eric Drouet, a lorry driver, to be sentenced to a suspended prison term of one month for holding unauthorised demonstrations. He is to return to court in June on the more serious charge of carrying a weapon, a truncheon, punishable by a maximum jail sentence of 10 years.

A former boxer, Christope Dettinger, was sentenced to a year in prison for punching and kicking a policeman, but will be allowed out during the day so he can keep his job as a municipal maintenance worker. A man who admitted driving a fork-lift truck into the door of a ministry during a protest was remanded in custody until his trial next month.

Mr Cauchy suggested returning to the roundabouts and holding protests in cities on Sunday instead of Saturday. 

"Staging arches on Sunday will allow families to take their babies in prams out on the streets. I doubt Interior Minister Castaner will send cops out with water cannons and rubber bullets if we do,” he wrote in a Facebook post. Mr Droutet also called for Sunday protests. 

The US has called on countries like Britain to bring home and prosecute citizens suspected of fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) as pressure grows to deal with captured foreign fighters before American troops leave Syria.

Around 2,000 jihadists are being held in prisons across northern Syria by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led fighting group which has pushed Isil back with the help of Western airpower. 

Among them are two British members of “The Beatles” squad, who murdered several Western hostages on camera, as well as at least other four other British men and seven women. Around 12 British children are also being held.  

In a statement released on Monday, the US State Department said countries had a responsibility to take their citizens out of SDF custody and bring them home to stand trial.  

“The United States calls upon other nations to repatriate and prosecute their citizens detained by the SDF and commends the continued efforts of the SDF to return these foreign terrorist fighters to their countries of origin,” the statement said. 

The UK and other nations are reluctant to bring suspects home out of fear that they cannot be successfully prosecuted in domestic courts. In some cases, evidence against the suspects is based on intelligence gathered by spies which cannot be used in a criminal proceedings. 

In the case of El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, the two surviving “Beatles”, the Crown Prosecution Service has warned that prosecutions against them would likely “collapse due to process reasons”.

Both men have been stripped of their British citizenship and the Home Office is hoping that the US will take them and prosecute them in America. British officials even dropped their objection to the death penalty in the hopes it would smooth efforts to extradite them to the US.

In other cases, prosecutors believe that the best they can hope for is convicting the men of membership of a terrorist organisation, a lesser charge that could see them released after only a few years in prison. 

Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US forces from Syria has brought a fresh urgency to the question of foreign fighters in SDF prisons. 

The SDF have warned that they may not be able to keep holding the prisoners after US forces withdraw, especially if they are forced to divert troops to help fight a Turkish offensive against Kurdish areas in northern Syria. 

The US is trying to convince Turkey not to attack the SDF. But it is also putting pressure on the UK and other countries to do something about their foreign fighters before American forces withdraw.

The French government said last month it would consider bringing home suspected French jihadists in light of the US withdrawal. French media reported that could mean repatriating around 130 people, including Isil suspects as well as their wives and children.

One possibility is that the SDF might have the suspects over to the Assad regime as it reasserts control over most of Syria. The regime has an atrocious record of torturing prisoners but has also released jihadists in the past to undermine its more moderate rebel opponents.