Obama urges Trump to soften tone
Republican frontrunner falls on prediction website
WASHINGTON, April 2, (RTRS): Donald Trump is facing bipartisan pressure to adopt a more presidential tone in his White House run including from Democratic President Barack Obama and Republicans who worry his missteps may do irreparable harm to the party and his campaign.
The Republican front-runner came under fire from Obama on Friday over Trump’s recent comments that he would not rule out using nuclear weapons in Europe and that Japan and South Korea might need nuclear weapons to ease the US financial commitment to their security.
“The person who made the statements doesn’t know much about foreign policy or nuclear policy or the Korean peninsula, or the world generally,” Obama told a news conference at the conclusion of a nuclear security summit in Washington.
“I’ve said before that people pay attention to American elections. What we do is really important to the rest of the world,” he said.
Trump lost ground on the online prediction market after drawing fire for his suggestion earlier in the week, which he later dialed back, that women be punished for getting abortions if the procedure is banned.
Those who marveled at Trump’s rise are now warning the New York billionaire that his shootfrom-the-lip approach to campaigning could jeopardize his chance to win the Republican nomination for the Nov 8 election.
Tuesday could be a turning point when Wisconsin hosts its nominating contest. Trump, 69, trails his leading rival, US Senator Ted Cruz, 45, of Texas in the Upper Midwestern state.
A Cruz win would make it harder for Trump to reach the magic number of 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination before the Republican
weeks after the theme park company announced that it would no longer breed orcas in captivity and would soon stop making them perform. (AP)
Strong quake shakes Alaska:
A strong 6.2 magnitude earthquake shook a lightly populated remote region of southwestern Alaska late Friday, the US Geological Survey that monitors quakes worldwide reported.
The quake struck at 0550 GMT Satur- national convention in July. The winner will get to claim all of Wisconsin’s 42 delegates.
“If he continues to fumble the ball, he risks everything,” said David Bossie, who as president of the conservative group Citizens United has helped to introduce Trump to grassroots activists. “These types of ham-handed mistakes give his opponents even greater opportunity.”
But losing the Republican nomination may not keep Trump out of the November election.
In excerpts of an interview on “Fox News Sunday” to be aired this Sunday, Trump said he wanted to run as a Republican but declined to rule out a third-party candidacy.
Nomination
Asked what he would do if he didn’t get the Republican nomination, Trump replied: “We’re going to have to see how I was treated.”
A businessman and former reality TV show host, Trump has never held public office but hails his mastery of negotiating business deals as the sort of experience a US president needs to be successful at home and abroad.
He sent ripples through the Republican Party, which promotes a muscular foreign policy, by declaring NATO obsolete and for asserting that as president he might loosen the ties with longstanding US allies.
Trump made a surprise visit on Thursday to the Republican National Committee in Washington where he said he and Chairman Reince Priebus discussed how to unify the party going into the July convention.
Priebus also addressed any confusion Trump may have had about delegate allocation rules that will govern the proceedings, a source familiar
day (9:50 pm Friday) on the Aleutian arc some 654 kilometers (406 miles) southwest of Anchorage, and 100 kilometers (62 miles) northeast of Chignik Lake, Alaska.
The National Tsunami Warning Center said that no watch, warning or advisory would be issued for the quake.
“A tsunami is not expected to be generated by this earthquake,” the Center said.
The earthquake epicenter was 58 miles with the meeting told Reuters.
Should Trump fail to win enough delegates to secure the nomination outright in the state-bystate contests ending in June, party delegates will select a nominee at the convention in a complex process of sequential votes.
Online predictions market PredictIt said on Friday that the probability Trump will win his party’s nomination has dropped sharply in the past week while the likelihood of a contested convention to choose another candidate has risen.
Those Republicans who see in Trump a chance to generate voter turnout beyond party regulars to bluecollar Democrats and win the White House say his detail-free style of campaigning has come back to haunt him and he needs to gear up for a new phase.
Trump needs to be less sensitive about attacks from opponents and let some go by without responding, said retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a former Republican presidential candidate who dropped out of the race earlier this year and has since endorsed Trump.
“If he can just get beyond that and learn how to bite his tongue and redirect people to something that is important, it will show a level of statesmanship,” Carson said.
During the Wisconsin campaign, Trump has relentlessly attacked the state’s governor, Scott Walker, another Republican who dropped out of the presidential race last year and who has endorsed Cruz.
Former US House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has offered Trump informal advice, said Trump should replicate the type of performance he gave at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on March 21, when he spoke from a teleprompter and offered a well-thoughtout case for strong US-Israeli relations.
below the surface, the Alaska Earthquake Center reported.
The Aleutian arc, part of the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire, extends some 3,000 kilometers from the Gulf of Alaska to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
The arc “marks the region where the Pacific plate subducts into the mantle beneath the North America plate,” the USGS said on its website.
Since 1900 there have been 12 earth-
quakes of magnitude 7.5 and above in the Aleutian arc, the USGS said.
The most powerful quake was the 9.2 magnitude Prince William Sound earthquake — the second most powerful quake ever recorded — on March 28, 1964. (AFP)
Gift from the sky?:
An American woman got the surprise of her life when an emergency escape slide fell off a Boeing 767 and into her yard.
“We just heard a loud bang and the house shook and so I went to see what was going on,” Andrea Self, who lives in the Phoenix, Arizona suburb of Mesa, told AFP.
“When I opened my front door, I saw what looked like a silver tarp lying there, but it had like a sulfur smell so I called the police,” she said.
The slide, which fell some 2,800 feet (853 meters), landed on an awning and damaged a tree in her yard, the 31-yearold said.
“I was just kind of in shock when it happened,” Self said.
The US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) confirmed Friday that the plane, which belonged to Atlas Air, lost its over-the-wing escape slide on Wednesday afternoon.
The slides are used to evacuate an aircraft quickly in the event of an emergency.
“Only the slide had deployed. The door remained attached to the aircraft,” FAA spokesman Ian Gregor told AFP.
He added that the plane “landed without incident” and that only the flight crew was on board.
The FAA is investigating why the slide deployed, he said. (AFP)