In Brief: Nation & World: 4-10-16

2016 hopefuls look East, West for delegate support

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Looking both East and West for support, Republican presidential candidates angled Saturday to pick up more delegates in Colorado while bidding for favor a half-continent away in New York’s all-important April 19 primary. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders picked up another win in Wyoming — but it did nothing to help him gain ground in the delegate chase.

Republican Ted Cruz hoped to add to his edge in Colorado over front-runner Donald Trump when 13 more delegates were to be chosen at the state’s GOP convention. Cruz already had locked up the support of 21 Colorado delegates and visited the state to try to pad his numbers there.

Keeping up his tussle with Trump over values, Cruz told the Colorado crowd it’s easy to talk about making America great again — “you can even print that on a baseball cap” — but that the more important question is which candidate understands “the principles and values that made America great in the first place.”

Trump left the Colorado convention to his organizers, and spent about a half-hour on Saturday touring the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum in lower Manhattan. His campaign issued a statement describing the site as “symbolic of the strength of our country, and in particular New Yorkers, who have done such an incredible job rebuilding that devastated section of our city.”

“This is what ‘New York values’ are really all about,” it added, a not-too-veiled poke at Cruz, who has taken heat for his earlier criticism of “New York values.”

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Hong Kong emerges as hub for creating offshore companies

HONG KONG — The same year Jasmine Li, whose grandfather was the fourth-ranked politician in China at the time, donned a floral Carolina Herrera gown and debuted at a ball in Paris, a company called Harvest Sun Trading Ltd. was born in an aging building at the edge of Hong Kong’s red light district. The next year Li bought the company for $1.

The revelations come from a tremendous cache of documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Hong Kong was Mossack Fonseca’s go-to spot for financial intermediaries like P&P Secretarial Management, home to 2,212 accountants, banks and other middlemen Mossack Fonseca used to set up 37,675 offshore companies for its global clients between 1977 and 2015 — more than any other place in the world, according to ICIJ’s analysis.

Hong Kong has emerged as a major design center for offshore vehicles, a place brimming with people expert at packaging and protecting wealth. The back pages of newspapers here teem with advertisements for corporate formation companies, one-stop shops promising fast bank account opening, corporate compliance, tax and accountancy services. Offshore vehicles are used to minimize tax, mitigate political risk, and circumvent onerous regulations in China. And they are completely legal.

But Hong Kong’s offshore financial machinery works so well, and so discreetly, that it can be abused by those seeking to hide illicit assets or evade taxes. As traditional havens, like Switzerland, cave to years of grinding pressure from European and American tax authorities, unsavory money is drawn to Hong Kong, which despite reforms, retains its reputation for secrecy, non-cooperation, and a light regulatory touch, watchdog groups and lawyers say.

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Belgians find elusive ‘man in the hat’ from airport video

BRUSSELS — After nearly three weeks of frantic searching, Belgian authorities announced Saturday they had finally identified the elusive “man in the hat” spotted alongside the two suicide bombers who blew themselves up at Brussels Airport: It was Paris attacks suspect Mohamed Abrini.

Belgium’s Federal Prosecution Office said the recently detained Abrini — the last identified suspect at large from the deadly Nov. 13 Paris attacks — had also confessed to being the vest- and hat-wearing man linked to the Brussels bombers whose image had been widely circulated by authorities.

“After being confronted with the results of the different expert examinations, he confessed his presence at the crime scene,” they said in a terse statement.

The revelation that a Paris attacks suspect escorted two of the Brussels bombers to their deaths at the city’s airport is the strongest sign yet that the Islamic State attackers who brought mayhem to both European cities — killing a total of 162 people — were intimately linked.

Abrini, 31, was one of four suspects charged Saturday with “participating in terrorist acts” linked to the March 22 Brussels bombings that killed 32 people and wounded 270 others at the airport and in the city’s subway.

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Small town turns on Hastert as details of allegations emerge

YORKVILLE, Ill. — The small town that boasted of the role it played in Dennis Hastert’s ascent from high school wrestling coach to speaker of the U.S. House spoke bitterly of him on Saturday, a day after prosecutors detailed allegations that Hastert sexually abused several members of the team.

The Illinois Republican’s reputation for congeniality contrasts with the government’s portrayal of him in a presentencing filing late Friday as a manipulator who exploited his mentor role to prey on young athletes. Prosecutors say he also lied to investigators about why he agreed to pay one alleged victim $3.5 million, falsely accusing the victim of trying to extort him.

The Hastert revelations have made Yorkville seem less idyllic, Mike Piatkowski, a 65-year-old retired UPS driver, said as he watched his grandson, a freshman at Yorkville High School, at a Saturday baseball practice.

“It’s going to be hard to trust anybody, especially with the kids,” he said.

Hastert pleaded guilty last fall to violating banking laws in how he structured his cash withdrawals. Prosecutors said they would have considered abuse charges, but the statute of limitations for bringing such charges expired decades ago.

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Lives of Texas campus victim, suspect violently intersect

FORT WORTH, Texas — The lives of 18-year-old University of Texas student Haruka Weiser and the teenage suspect in her killing differed dramatically.

Weiser grew up in a tight-knit community in Oregon, where she attended an arts magnet school and danced with the Portland Ballet.

By contrast, Meechaiel Khalil Criner, the 17-year-old runaway arrested in her death, was intellectually disabled, abandoned by his mother as an infant and in Texas foster care, his uncle, Leo Criner, told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Authorities say Weiser and Criner’s lives intersected violently on UT’s Austin campus, leaving Weiser dead in a creek on school grounds Tuesday and Criner jailed two days later in Travis County on a $1 million bond.

She grew up near Beaverton, Oregon, in a four-acre co-housing community established in 1998 around the values of community, service and sustainability, where residents share tools like lawn mowers but also responsibilities like gardening, said Weiser’s neighbor, Helen Spector.

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After Wisconsin stumble, Trump moves to reshape his campaign

NEW YORK — When Donald Trump walked onstage for his final rally before Wisconsin’s presidential primary, he found an unfamiliar sight: hundreds of empty seats.

The election eve rally Monday at the grand Milwaukee Theatre, which featured the heavily promoted campaign return of the GOP front-runner’s wife, was intended as a capstone of Trump’s three-day blitz through the state. A big-enough victory could have put Trump on a path to clinch the number of delegates needed to win the nomination before the party’s convention in July.

Instead, the half-filled room was an ominous harbinger: He ended up losing to rival Ted Cruz by 13 percentage points on Tuesday.

Trump still holds a solid lead in the race, but the stinging defeat was evidence that Trump’s unorthodox campaign — run by largely inexperienced operatives and fueled by the candidate’s sheer force of personality — had hit a wall.

The ever-confident Trump canceled his plans for the rest of the week, hunkered down and confronted fears that he was being outmaneuvered.

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US water systems repeatedly exceed federal standard for lead

GALESBURG, Ill. — This railroad town promotes its ties to Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and the poet Carl Sandburg. But Galesburg’s long history also shows in a hidden way: Aging pipes have been leaking lead into the drinking water for decades.

Blood tests show cause for concern. One in 20 children under the age of 6 in Knox County had lead levels exceeding the state standard for public health intervention, a rate six times higher than the Illinois average, in 2014.

Galesburg offers just one example of how the problem of lead-tainted drinking water goes far beyond Flint, Michigan, the former auto manufacturing center where the issue exploded into a public health emergency when the city’s entire water system was declared unsafe.

An Associated Press analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data found that nearly 1,400 water systems serving 3.6 million Americans exceeded the federal lead standard at least once between Jan. 1, 2013, and Sept. 30, 2015. The affected systems are large and small, public and private, and include 278 systems that are owned and operated by schools and day care centers in 41 states.

Galesburg officials downplay the water’s potential contribution to lead poisoning, which can affect children’s mental development. But city councilor Peter Schwartzman called the AP’s findings alarming.

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Kerry presses Afghan leaders on unity; no US troop changes

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Saturday committed to pushing reforms after his picks for attorney general and interior minister won long-sought Cabinet confirmation, while U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pleaded with the government’s power-sharing leaders to bury their “factional divisions” for the good of the country.

Yet Ghani could not cite progress toward ending a bitter feud with Afghanistan’s chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, that has hobbled the Kabul government for 18 months. The unwieldy arrangement, which Kerry helped to forge, has left interim ministers in critical positions while the U.S. ally struggles to confront lawlessness, corruption and the Taliban’s resilient and perhaps expanding insurgency.

“Democracy requires credible institutions,” Kerry told reporters at the end of his brief stopover in Afghanistan on his way to Japan for a meeting of foreign ministers. “More than that, it requires people from different political, ethnic and geographic factions to be able to come together and work toward a common good.”

Ghani, at a news conference, hailed the Cabinet votes in parliament as a turning point. Progress on that front “assures us there will be fundamental, comprehensive reforms,” Ghani said through an interpreter.

Kerry backed him up and stressed the need for a unified approach between the competing Ghani and Abdullah camps, hardened still even two years after a contested presidential election.

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Poll: Improved economic outlook boosts Obama approval

WASHINGTON — As many in the United States hold their noses in the search for the next president, they’re increasingly warming to the president they already have.

Buoyed by some good economic news and a surge of goodwill from his base of supporters, President Barack Obama is seeing his approval rating rise. That puts Obama, who leaves office in January, in a position to remain a force in the political debate at a point in his final term when some others faded into the background.

For the first time since 2013, half of those questioned approve of the job Obama is doing in office, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll. The survey found the apparent uptick in approval extended across issues, including foreign affairs, immigration and, most notably the economy, where people said they felt slightly better about their own prospects and Obama’s stewardship.

Asked about their opinion of Obama more generally, those surveyed were more likely to give him a positive rating than any of the candidates for president, Republican or Democrat.

Terry Trudeau, 66, said he preferred Obama to “all of them” running for the White House.