A teacher in Utah accidentally shot herself in the leg Thursday inside an elementary school building.Just before 9 a.m., Michelle Ferguson-Montgomery accidentally discharged her gun while using a faculty restroom at Westbrook Elementary School in Taylorsville, the principal said in a letter to students' parents. The incident occurred before school hours, and no children nor staff were present. The teacher was in legal possession of her gun on school property.
Michael Piemonte was attending a concealed-carry class with his wife Alison in central Ohio's Fairfield County over the weekend. Such classes are required for anyone wanting carry a concealed weapon in the state.There were 29 students in the lecture-type class, Piemonte said. He was sitting in the front row.While the instructor was demonstrating a self-defense techniques, the gun went off.
Colleagues and parents on Thursday remembered Philando Castile as an ambitious man who served as a role model for hundreds of children before he was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in Minnesota.
An Idaho State University instructor was wounded in the foot after a concealed handgun in the person's pocket discharged during a chemistry lab session with students in the room, school officials said.
WEST BEND - This community 40 miles northwest of Milwaukee has voted three times for Scott Walker by colossal margins.But in a special election for state Assembly last month, it did something almost unheard of.West Bend voted Democratic.Was it a suburban alarm bell for the GOP? Or a mere blip?The battle for the suburbs is central to the 2018 election, thanks largely to President Donald Trump's weakness among college-educated voters. But roughly eight months out, the political signposts often seem in conflict with other.Republicans can take hope from a growing economy and improving perceptions of the party's end-of-the-year federal tax cut.But Democrats are buoyed by their strong performance in special elections around the country -- including in two Republican-leaning legislative districts in Wisconsin last month."There are real forces that are quite discernible, but they are pointing in different directions," said Charles Franklin, professor and pollster for the Marquette Law School.Signs abound that Trump is a political drag on his party among suburbanites, especially those with college degrees.But in Wisconsin, many of the same suburbs where Trump ran poorly in 2016 have a robust history of support for Gov. Scott Walker, who heads the GOP ticket this fall.If you used Trump's performance as a guide, you would expect Republicans to struggle in these communities. If you used Walker's performance (and he's the one on the ballot), you'd expect them to flourish.Nowhere is that dichotomy sharper than in the state's biggest concentration of suburban votes, the conservative "WOW" counties north and west of Milwaukee (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington). This is some of the most Republican turf in America.
Previous FAA administrators were four-star admirals, ran aircraft manufacturers, airports, pilots union, etc. https://t.co/roUFYregFS
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) February 25, 2018
In CNN's new poll, Trump's approval is just 22% among all respondents under 35, and 27% among all respondents under 45, and 29% among women. https://t.co/xJiOMNMbq2
— Taniel (@Taniel) February 25, 2018
Charen's outpouring of dissent accentuated how quickly and completely CPAC has become a pro-Trump gathering, just two years removed from him skipping the event because of a planned walk-out among conservatives who opposed his candidacy. Late Friday morning, with a standing-room-only ballroom full of conservative activists thundering down applause, Trump told of the "horrendous" immigrants taking advantage of our visa lottery system. He warned of dangerous and unproductive people arriving via "chain migration." And then, underscoring these threats, the president dusted off "The Snake," a ballad he often recited on the campaign trail, which likens immigrants welcomed by America to a venomous serpent that bites and kills the woman who took it in.It seemed to set a tone. Gaffney, invited back to CPAC after being banished from the event for years, warned that most of the Chinese nationals in the United States are here to spy on Americans. A short while later, Rick Ungar, a left-wing radio host whom Schlapp invited for a panel discussion, was booed when he described a naturalization ceremony--and again when he said that Mexican immigrants have "more in common" with conservatives than liberals. That night, Schlapp's communications director, Ian Walters, stunned attendees of the event's trademark Ronald Reagan Dinner by saying the Republican National Committee elected Michael Steele as chairman in 2009 "because he's a black guy."All of this in one day--and less than 24 hours after the Trump administration changed the mission statement of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency to remove the phrase, "a nation of immigrants.""None of this happens in a vacuum," Steele told me Saturday morning, still visibly upset by Walters' remark. Steele said that Schlapp had apologized to him but then pointed to Steele's criticisms of Trump and the Republican Party. "And I'm like, 'Yeah? What the hell does that have to do with what your guy said from the podium last night?' He was twisting it back on me," Steele said. "There are people who have an attitude regarding race in this party that needs to be cleansed out. Otherwise this party will die from it."
False rumors that the Little Rock Nine were paid protesters even forced the NAACP to issue a statement condemning the stories as "pure propaganda." The students were not, in fact, "imported" from the North, said the NAACP's Clarence A. Laws, but rather the children of local residents, including veterans.When Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse pointed out the parallel between Parkland and Little Rock earlier this week, his tweet went viral."It's funny," Kruse told The Washington Post on Thursday. "I'm teaching a class right now that does deep dives into three historical moments as a way to teach students how to use documents, and the first one we're doing is on Little Rock. ... So when the 'these students must be paid' thing came up in the news, it took me a day and then I was like, wait a minute, I just read about this."But the practice of dismissing witnesses to major historical events as mere paid actors goes back much further than the Little Rock Nine."It's a theme that crops up throughout civil rights history," said Kruse. "Back then, it was an assumption that African Americans in the South couldn't possibly be upset. They must have been stirred up from the outside, either paid to do this or inspired to do this by propaganda. They couldn't have come up with this on their own."I think this is what we see in the Parkland case today," he added. "There's a belief that somehow these 17- or 18-year-olds who witnessed a school shooting ... who saw their friends die, somehow could not have been motivated to respond to that on their own, that they would need some sort of outside direction for that protest to take shape."The crisis actor slur dates back to shortly after the Civil War, when former slaves who testified before Congress were slandered by Southern politicians as stooges paid to lie about their experiences, according to Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson.
Nearly 18 months into Russia's intervention to prevent Assad's defeat at the hands of rebel groups that were advancing on his heartland areas of Latakia and Tartous, it is increasingly unclear just how Moscow will recoup its investment in the world's most complex and intractable conflict.While it no longer appears Assad is in danger of falling, what remains of Syria looks nothing like the prewar country he used to rule. Central authority in the once-rigid police state has been subsumed several times over - first by opposition groups, and then by regional players also increasingly invested in shaping postwar outcomes in their own interests, which only partly align with what Putin wants. Protagonists on both sides are drowning in a swamp they did not see ahead.Putin, in particular, is learning that Syria in its present form is ungovernable. His December claim of "victory" at a Russian airbase near Idlib has been followed by a dizzying series of events which, on the contrary, have drawn Russia further into the war. At the same time they have exposed the Assad regime's near-total dependence on proxy support to hold its positions, let alone secure more gains. [...]"The only winner so far is Iran," said Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat who defected from the regime in mid-2013. "It achieves what it wants without too much noise. Iran enjoys Russian-American conflict because it makes Russia more dependent on Iran to survive."The clash between the US and Russian mercenaries sent to Syria was kept quiet by Moscow, which - in different circumstances - would have complained bitterly if 200 of its citizens had been killed by a rival power. For Putin to admit even that the men were there would have belied his claim of victory and withdrawal from a war that no longer needed him. Acknowledging they were advancing on an oil refinery held by US Kurdish proxies would have been an equally tough sell, at a time when securing Syria from the threat of terrorism and US hegemony remains the official narrative.US intelligence officials believe the company that recruited the Russians - the Wagner Group - is controlled by a Putin confidant, Yevgeniy Prigozhin.Also staking its claim in Deir ez-Zor is Iran, with which Russia has partnered to ensure that what remains of the anti-Assad opposition can no longer win the war. Russian officials have complained to counterparts in Turkey that Iranian aims are increasingly at odds with their own.A senior Turkish diplomat told the Observer Moscow feels especially threatened by what it sees as Iran's determination to build a state security structure in Damascus modelled on its Revolutionary Guard Corps - the most powerful institution in Tehran 40 years after the Islamic Revolution. "But how can they stop them?", the diplomat said. "Putin won't have it his own way from here. And we can see [the Russians] getting irritated by it."
3) The biggest effect of school resource officers: Students get criminally charged for "disorderly conduct"It's easy to assume that a school that has a police officer on the grounds every day must have such big issues with crime that the officer is necessary. But that isn't always the case.A 2009 study by Matthew Theriot of the University of Tennessee compared student arrest and court records from one group of schools that had a school resource officer stationed on school grounds with those of schools that didn't. Controlling for socioeconomic status, the researcher found that there wasn't much difference in serious crime between the schools that had SROs and the schools that didn't. Students at policed schools were much more likely to get arrested than students at unpoliced schools, but they weren't any more likely to actually be charged in court for weapons, drugs, alcohol, or assault. (In other words, students at policed schools were much more likely to get arrested in cases where there wasn't enough evidence to actually charge them with a crime.)The exception: Students at policed schools were almost five times as likely to face criminal charges for "disorderly conduct" (which apparently didn't rise to the level of an assault). In other words, when there was a police officer roaming the halls, students were much more likely to be arrested and brought into court for behavior that was disruptive, but not violent.This is exactly the problem that's led some juvenile judges to speak out against putting police in schools. The chief judge of the juvenile court in Clayton County, Georgia, who's become an outspoken opponent of police in schools, saw that when police were placed on school grounds in his county, 11 times as many students ended up in juvenile court. He told Congress at a 2012 hearing that "the prosecutor's attention was taken from the more difficult evidentiary and 'scary' cases -- burglary, robberies, car thefts, aggravated assaults with weapons -- to prosecuting kids that are not 'scary,' but made an adult mad."
Before the United States Marine Corps allowed me to carry a live M-16 assault rifle, I went through hundreds of hours of firearms training. Classroom sessions devoted to nomenclature, maintenance and basic operation accounted for more than two weeks of study before I even set eyes on ammunition. For weeks, I carried an M-16 without a magazine -- a dummy weapon, basically. I secured it with a padlock overnight while I slept in the barracks, and unlocked it each morning before chow.Only at the shooting range was I allowed to check out magazines and ammo from the armory. The first day at the range I spent 12 hours disassembling, cleaning and reassembling the weapon. I had to do this blindfolded. I had to do this while a drill instructor hurried me, yelling that enemies were at the gate. I had to do this while fellow Marines wept nearby from doing hundreds of burpees as punishment for not being able to reassemble their weapons fast enough.The military issue M-16 is the model for the AR-15 assault rifle that the accused shooter used to kill 17 people this month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The shooter bought the weapon lawfully. He received zero hours of mandated training. There is no reason that any civilian, of any age, should possess this rifle.
I was surprised that I was even asked to speak at CPAC. My views on Trump, Roy Moore and Steve Bannon are no secret. I knew the crowd would be hostile, and so I was tempted to pass.But too many of us have given up the fight. We've let disgust and dismay lead us to withdraw while bad actors take control of the direction of our movement. I know how encouraged I feel whenever someone simply states the truth, and so I decided to accept CPAC's invitation.Like the Republican Party, CPAC has become heavily Trumpified. Last year, they invited alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (and withdrew the invitation only after lewd tapes surfaced). This year, in addition to the president and vice president, CPAC invited Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of National Front leader Marine Le Pen.Matt Schlapp, CPAC's chairman, described her as a "classical liberal" on Twitter. This is utter nonsense. Ms. Maréchal-Le Pen is a member of the National Front party, and far from distancing herself from her Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic and racist grandfather, she has offered him a more full-throated endorsement than her aunt has. "I am the political heir of Jean-Marie Le Pen," Maréchal-Le Pen told the Washington Post last year. "He was a visionary. He was right about a lot of things."So it has come to this: a conservative group whose worst fault in years past may have been excessive flat tax enthusiasm now opens its doors to the blood and soil nationalists of Europe.
...for the Trumpbots to convince themselves that all the ties between Donald, the Right, Vlad and money-laundering were just a never-ending series of coincidences and you're forced to conclude that they are malevolent, rather than just naive.Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee that is probing Russian influence on the election, sought the documents after McClatchy reported last month that the FBI was investigating whether a top Russian banker, Alexander Torshin, may have illegally funneled money to the group. Torshin is a lifetime NRA member who has attended several of the organization's national conferences.The NRA was the biggest financial backer of Donald Trump's Republican presidential campaign, spending at least $30 million on his behalf - nearly triple what it spent to support Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. [...]Torshin hosted an elite NRA delegation, which included a past NRA president and a top fundraiser for the organization, in Moscow in December 2015, and attended the NRA's convention in May 2016 where Trump received the NRA's coveted endorsement. During the convention, Torshin had a brief conversation with then-candidate Trump's eldest son, Donald Jr., and reportedly tried to set up a meeting during the campaign between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. [...]In his Feb. 2 letter to the NRA, Wyden had asked for any documents or information about possible Russian contributions by Torshin or other Russians to the NRA or intermediaries aimed at helping Trump win the 2016 elections. The senator's letter stated that, as McClatchy and several other news outlets had written, "Torshin has reported links to money laundering."El Pais, a Spanish newspaper, last year wrote that Spanish authorities investigating Russian money-laundering operations in Spain planned to arrest Torshin in 2013 during a scheduled visit, but he was apparently tipped off and canceled his trip. Another Russian businessman, who was heard talking to Torshin on numerous tapes in the hands of Spanish authorities, has pleaded guilty to a money laundering scheme and was imprisoned for his crimes. [...]Torshin, who has attended several NRA national conventions going back at least to the 2013 event in Houston, was instrumental in founding a pro-gun group in Russia called Right to Bear Arms. An early meeting of the group, held in the fall of 2013, was attended by NRA leader David Keene, who helped cement the NRA's ties to Torshin. Keene was also a leader of the NRA delegation that visited Moscow for a week of lavish meals and at least one meeting with a high-level Russian official in late 2015.
Despite the popular narrative of economic decline, the American family is earning more than ever before recorded. https://t.co/Lm1e0evwpG
— HumanProgress.org (@humanprogress) February 12, 2018
President Donald Trump's approval rating in a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS stands at 35%, down five points over the last month to match his lowest level yet.The slide follows a January bump in approval for the President, a finding that appeared connected to a bullish stock market and strong reviews for the economy. His new rating matches a December poll, which marked his lowest approval rating in CNN polling since taking office in January 2017.The President also earns his lowest rating yet among Republicans, though he is still viewed positively among his own partisans. Overall, 80% of self-identified Republicans say they approve of the President, one point below his previous low mark of 81%, hit in late September of last year.
On Friday night, still high on the rhetoric of the French far-right, attendees booed the claim that Mexicans coming to America have more in common with conservatives than liberals and shouted down a suggestion that Republicans, like Democrats, ought to recruit voters at naturalization ceremonies. Then, when THE WEEKLY STANDARD's Fred Barnes pointed out that many Mexican immigrants share these values, he likewise drew ire from the crowd.By Saturday afternoon, the convention audience had dwindled to "diehards," according to the man working media registration. And Charen was ready to take the stage.In an email on Friday night, Charen explained to me that "There remains a sizable contingent of conservatives in America who have not drunk the Trump kool aid and they are very thin on the ground at CPAC." She continued: "I feel an obligation as one of the only Trump critics on the program to express dismay at some of the invitations CPAC has extended." [...]"This is the party that endorsed the Roy Moore for the Senate in the state of Alabama, even though he was a credibly-accused child molester," she said. "You cannot claim that you stand for women and be all right with that."At this statement, two young men thunderously applauded, while many more booed and shouted, "Not true! Not true!" (From my vantage, I did not see any of the young women in the audience reacting audibly.)Later, the discussion turned to talk about the influence of sex panic on young men. And Charen turned her attention to Le Pen. "Speaking of bad guys," she said, "there was quite an interesting person who was on this stage the other day. Her name is Marion Le Pen. Why was she here?"Boos and grumbles rose from the crowd. "Why are you here?!" a male voice boomed."She's a young, no-longer-in-office politician from France. I think the only reason she was here is that she's named Le Pen. And the Le Pen name is a disgrace. Her grandfather is a racist and a Nazi." Here, a smattering of applause swelled to battle the boos, and Charen strained to talk over them. "The fact is she stands for him. The fact that CPAC invited her was a disgrace."
Sometimes moral leadership requires getting booed. @monacharenEPPC https://t.co/1WEJKTmlPk
— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) February 24, 2018
Conservatives used to boast that the Right has ideas, while the Left has only an enemies list. There was a time when that was true, but it isn't true anymore. [...]Republicans have never been entirely immune to that sort of thing, of course: "Pink right down to her underwear," welfare queens, etc. Republican appeals to our baser instincts have historically been couched in expressions of nationalism. T. Boone Pickens, visiting the offices of National Review, flew into a rage when I suggested that his plan to mandate the use of natural gas in trucking was in fact a plan to put a whole lot of money into the pockets of T. Boone Pickens, thundering: "You must be in favor of foreign oil!" Donald Trump's early focus on the issue of illegal immigration was clever in that it offers the combination of a real issue -- illegal immigration is a genuine problem, as is the persistence of poorly assimilated immigrant ghettos around the country -- while also appealing to the strain of xenophobia that has always been associated with populist politics in the United States, currently most energetic on the right side of the political spectrum. (But it is by no means exclusively a right-wing phenomenon: Senator Bernie Sanders, the grumpy Muppet socialist from Vermont, talked a great deal like Trump on immigration during the Democratic primary, denouncing the "open borders" view as a billionaires' plot to undermine the American working man.) But from the 1980s until approximately the day before yesterday, the Republican party was an instrument of the conservative movement. It was the inverse of the Democratic party, in which various intellectual tendencies and political constituencies serve the party and are dominated by it. The Republican party was more strongly an ideological organization, the Democratic party more strongly a collection of interest groups. (Of course both parties are both things, but the GOP has long been the more ideologically rigorous of the two.) The Republican party had invective, of course, but it also had ideas, and, especially in the 1980s, a lively and enriching transatlantic relationship with conservatives in the United Kingdom. Intellectuals such as Milton Friedman and Jeane Kirkpatrick were enormously influential figures, especially for young conservatives, and the most prominent spokesman for conservative views was William F. Buckley Jr.Rick Brookhiser is right to insist that the emergence of Fox News as the Right's loudest voice was a "gigantic mistake, frenzied and stupefying." It has left the Right angrier and less intelligent -- and it has made the Right more like the Left in its instinctive reliance on the enemies-list model of politics. You've seen how this works by now, I'm sure. The Parkland students get some predictably good press for this gun-control rally, and Fox News jackasses like David Clarke see the shadowy hand of George Soros. The special counsel hands down another passel of criminal indictments against Trump's campaign executives, and the real story is all about . . . Hillary Clinton. The enemies list is long: "elites," Washington insiders, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Bill Kristol, the Deep State, Barack Obama, out there, somewhere, scheming . . .Conservative critics of Trump receive a constant complaint: "You don't know who your friends are or, even worse, who the enemy is." Warming to the "moral equivalent of war" -- in this case, the Cold War -- they insist that we must smile and nod and happily swallow whatever unsalted s**t sandwich is being served up today because to do anything else is to give aid and comfort to the "cultural Marxists," one of the most ridiculous bits of voguish new terminology on the right. For them, it's always the end of the country, the republic hanging by a thread. It's a fundamentally unserious view of the world that serves mainly to provide its adherents with a form of emotional catharsis that is not at its root about politics at all. They get a frisson of virility when they hear the president -- the president of the United States of America -- describe his political rivals as "treasonous." The idea that opposition to the Big Boss is opposition to the nation itself -- that to criticize the Big Boss is treason -- is a very ancient superstition, and a very stupid one.But these are stupid times, especially for Republicans, who in their pursuit of fleeting political advantage must pretend to be something other than what they are and pretend that Trump is something other than what he is. The easiest way to get through that is to do what the Left has been doing since the 1950s -- convince yourself that the alternative is Hitler. (And, hey, if you read Dinesh D'Souza, you know that George Soros was a Nazi, right? And Soros is behind . . . everything.) And that works, if you don't think too hard about it, which doesn't seem to be an obviously pressing problem for Sean Hannity and his ilk. But as Republicans work their way down their enemies list, they ought to stop, if only for a moment, to ask what it is they are working their way towards. This year at the annual CPAC conference, the president and the vice president shared billing with Marion Maréchal-Le Pen of the French fascist political dynasty. Funny that some of her admirers on the American right such as the gentlemen at Breitbart are fond of denouncing their critics as "Vichy" conservatives. If you're looking for the road to Vichy, ask the Le Pens -- they know the way, if that's the way you want to go.
Delta (DAL) is ending discounted rates for members of the organization. United Airlines (UAL) will no longer offer discounts on flights to the NRA annual meeting.Enterprise Holdings, which runs the Enterprise, Alamo and National car rental groups, will end the discount deal it has with the NRA. So will Avis Budget Group (CAR), which owns Avis and Budget, and Hertz (HTZ).Similarly, insurance giant MetLife (MET) is ending its discount program for NRA members.The First National Bank of Omaha pledged to stop issuing an NRA-branded Visa card.The National Rifle Association released a statement on Saturday saying companies "have decided to punish NRA membership in a shameful display of political and civic cowardice.""In time, these brands will be replaced by others who recognize that patriotism and determined commitment to Constitutional freedoms are characteristics of a marketplace they very much want to serve," the NRA said.At this point, businesses that work with the NRA are putting their relationships with customers at risk, said William Klepper, a professor at the Columbia Business School."Boards and their CEOs ... are saying, 'This is bad for business,'" he said.Consumers are focusing their attention on businesses that work with the NRA, but gunmakers are losing customers, too.After hearing from their clients, the giant investment management company BlackRock (BAAPX) told gunmakers that it wants to understand their response to the shooting.The firm is the largest shareholder in weapons manufacturers Sturm Ruger (RGR) and American Outdoor Brands (AOBC). It is the second-largest shareholder in Vista Outdoor (VSTO), which makes sporting goods and guns.Its questions are certain to let the gun companies know they're paying attention.Bank of America (BAC) also said it will question gunmakers.The bank plans "to engage the limited number of clients we have that manufacture assault weapons for non-military use to understand what they can contribute to this shared responsibility," it said in a statement.
You're right Steve. French nationalism is *very* different from historic Anglo-American nationalism. Because it's socialist. Because it's absolutist. And also--hope you don't mind my adding--because it's atheist. https://t.co/0tOeaQIllA
— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) February 24, 2018
"He -- just like every other police officer out there at heart -- is a good person. He didn't take action in this event, and I can't explain why ... there are no words to explain why he wouldn't take action to take out this individual, but I think it's a good example of if he didn't take action and four others didn't, I mean, who does?" student David Hogg said in an interview on MSNBC.Hogg was referencing Scot Peterson, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School resource officer and Broward County Sheriff's deputy who has been the subject of criticism for failing to enter the building and defend students during the shooting."Who wants to go down the barrel of an AR-15, even with a glock? And I know that's what these police officers are supposed to do, but they're people too," he added.
Donald Trump's proposal to introduce modest gun control measures in the wake of the Florida shooting has enraged gun owners and gun lobbying groups. [...]Gun Owners of America released an alert earlier this week making a plea for its 1.5 million members to call the White House and "Tell Trump to OPPOSE All Gun Control!" [...]The [NRA] is strongly opposed to raising the legal age for the purchase of long guns from 18 to 21 and has firmly disputed expanding background checks in the past.The NRA spend more than $5m lobbying for guns rights in 2017, according to OpenSecrets.org. The group lobbied for bills to repeal bans on gun silencers, reduce the amount of information available for background checks, and make concealed-carry permits valid across the country, among other things.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Sunday closed its doors until further notice as church leaders angrily retaliated against what they see as a "systematic campaign" by Israel to harm the Christian community in the Holy Land.Flanked by Franciscan Custos of the Holy Land Francesco Patton and Armenian Patriarch Nourhan Manougian, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilus lll read out a statement and then locked the ancient doors of the church in Jerusalem's Old City."We will decide when and how the church will re-open," he said, likening Israeli policies to anti-Semitic laws enacted against Jews in Europe.
Talks are running behind schedule and some officials believe the longer they last, the less likely it is that Trump will dump NAFTA, which he has threatened to do if the overhaul of the accord does not benefit the US.Negotiators had wanted to wrap up talks by March to avoid them being politicized by Mexico's July presidential election.But officials have already raised the possibility that they will run past Mexico's vote, and some say they could continue at a technical level for several months if necessary.A US official noted "there has never been a hard deadline", and among Mexicans following the process, belief is growing that lobbying efforts by US business leaders and politicians to preserve NAFTA have been gaining traction."NAFTA will survive, because the economy wins out in the end. The bosses of the big firms are making the argument for us," said Ernesto Ruffo, a Mexican senator from the border state of Baja California. "That's why we're onto the seventh round."