Affairs of politics and heart mark French election

PARIS (AP) — Back-room deals, black lists and bitter duels. Political and personal intrigue has wormed its way into Sunday's final round of French legislative elections. President Francois Hollande's Socialist Party is battling to ensure a solid majority and fulfill his vows to boost growth in Europe and redefine the presidency as one beholden to the people.

Barring surprises, the Socialists and their allies should win enough seats to control the crucial 577-seat lower house of parliament, after a strong showing in the first round a week ago. To get there, the party is trying to fend off conservatives who dominated parliament under former President Nicolas Sarkozy.
They're also trying to shame those in the mainstream right who are cutting vote-getting deals with the extreme right, anti-immigrant National Front, which is conniving for its first real presence in parliament in more than a quarter century.
"The right no longer knows where it lives. It no longer knows what it is," said Economy Minister Pierre Moscovici this week on France 2 TV. "It's lost its markers, its identity, its values."
One unexpected hitch for the Socialists flew straight out of Hollande's most inner circle: His live-in companion's tweet this week in support of a dissident candidate in western France, a not-so-subtle attack on the Socialist Party's official candidate — the president's ex-partner and mother of his four children, Segolene Royal.
Royal is portrayed in the French press as the nemesis of a jealous Valerie Trierweiler, whose tweet on Tuesday upended the image Hollande has been trying to project: that of a "normal" leader intent on keeping the public and private spheres separate.
That stance is meant to set Hollande apart from the brash Sarkozy, who grabbed headlines with his complicated private life while building up a presidency that critics said was too centered on his own personality and his rich friends' interests. Hollande defeated him in the May 6 presidential vote, amid voter frustrations with Sarkozy's handling of the economy and the presidency.
The tweet also dealt a blow to Royal, whose chances of winning her parliamentary race were already shaky. Polls suggest that Royal, a former presidential candidate, will lose to dissident Socialist Olivier Falorni by a wide margin, a defeat that would leave her without a job in politics.
Far more grave is the perception that the moral ramparts built to ensure that the anti-immigration National Front remains a political pariah are being chinked away by conservative politicians. Sarkozy's conservative UMP party is struggling to hold onto seats, and many candidates are angling for far-right votes to defy polls and win.
Polling firms have calculated the National Front could get up to three seats in the National Assembly, a symbolic victory. The party's leader, Marine Le Pen — who is running in a former coal mining region in northern France — says one seat would be a victory since the party hasn't had a real parliamentary presence since 1986. In that year, 35 lawmakers were elected under a voting system that favors smaller parties — but the system was abolished two years later. Le Pen thinks pollsters underestimate the National Front's potential.
The newly robust anti-immigration party, which wants to abandon the euro currency and stop immigration, is on a roll. Le Pen has revamped the party to bury its reputation as racist and anti-Semitic inherited under the reign of party founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Daughter Marine placed a solid third in spring presidential elections and its candidates ranked third in last Sunday's first round of parliamentary voting.
Sarkozy has disappeared into the shadows but he and his Union for a Popular Movement, or UMP, are being blamed for blurring the lines between the mainstream and extreme right by taking up some National Front themes, including the need to preserve France's national identity or try to ensure a low profile for Muslims.
Socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault accuses the conservatives of creating a "strategic alliance" with the National Front.
"There is no alliance," UMP leader Jean-Francois Cope said in an interview published Friday in the daily Le Figaro.
"The French must understand that if the left gets all the power Sunday, it's like signing a blank check for five years," Cope said.
The Socialist Party already controls the Senate and most regional and local governments, and adversaries say the majority it expects on Sunday would amount to a "Socialist state" in France.
Any candidate who won support of more than 12.5 percent of registered voters in the first round advances to Sunday's runoff, and many districts have three-way races, including several with National Front candidates.
Nadine Morano, a former Sarkozy minister battling for a parliamentary seat in the eastern Moselle region, has publicly reached out to National Front voters "who share our values, my values."
"I don't hear extremist words coming from their mouths," she said this week on TF1, in the company of former Prime Minister Francois Fillon on a campaign outing.
For Le Pen, the isolation wall "has imploded."
The conservatives "have evolved under the pressure of their voters and their base," Le Pen was quoted as saying Wednesday in the online publication Le Telegramme." A very large majority of UMP voters feel close" to National Front's views.
The anti-Racism group SOS Racism denounces deal-makers as the "candidates of shame."
Says the No. 2 in the Socialist Party, Harlem Désir: "The extreme right is advancing inside UMP like in Swiss cheese."

Hurricane Carlotta hits Mexican coast, weakens

ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — A weakening Hurricane Carlotta pushed northward toward the resort city of Acapulco on Saturday after making landfall near the Mexican beach town of Puerto Escondido, where it toppled trees and shook tourist hotels.

Rain was falling in Acapulco, but authorities lifted a hurricane warning for the resort late Friday and replaced it with a tropical storm warning.
"We don't care about the rain, we're going to have fun at the club," said tourist Alejandra Flores, who took a bus with a friend yesterday from Guadalajara to Acapulco. People in Acapulco were calm and dining in restaurants late Friday.
Earlier Friday, Carlotta had toppled billboards and shattered some windows in Puerto Escondido, a laid-back port popular with surfers, where it reached land as a Category 1 hurricane.
"The wind is incredible and the trees are swaying so much. A window just shattered," said Ernesto Lopez, a 25-year-old engineer who was visiting Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca state for a graduation.
Coral Ocampo, receptionist at the Hotel Careyes, said the wind was tearing down the skinnier palm trees and that she had asked guests to return to their rooms and stay there until the storm had passed.
Oaxaca's civil protection service said some roads near the resorts of Huatulco and Pochutla were affected by mudslides, and that authorities had opened emergency shelters and evacuated dozens of families from low-lying areas.
Carlotta had strengthened into a powerful Category 2 hurricane earlier Friday and forecasters had expected it to move northward, parallel to the coastline, possibly reaching Acapulco as a hurricane. But instead it moved inland and weakened. Forecasters now expect Carlotta to become a tropical storm on Saturday and a tropical depression on Sunday.
By late Friday night, Carlotta's winds had lessened to 90 mph (150 kph), according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. The center of the storm was about 10 miles (15 kms) northwest of Puerto Escondido and was moving to the northwest at about 10 mph (17 kph).
Ines Vos, a German who has lived on Mexico's coast for 22 years and now runs the Beach Hotel Ines in Puerto Escondido, said she had readied the hotel's generator and stocked up on gasoline and bottled water in preparation for the storm.
"In the morning, a lot of people left, they didn't want to stay because nobody knows how the roads will be" after Carlotta, said Vos, who lived through Hurricane Pauline in 1997. Pauline made landfall at Puerto Escondido with winds of 109 mph, killing at least 230 people along the Pacific coast.
The part of Oaxaca state and neighboring Guerrero state that the storm will pass over is full of mountainous terrain that can experience flash floods under heavy rainfalls. Officials warn that rains could still present a danger.

Kidnapper in Chowchilla case wins prison release

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — After more than 35 years in prison, one of three men who kidnapped a busload of California schoolchildren in a ransom attempt that captured the nation's attention will soon be released.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced Friday that it would release Richard Schoenfeld later this month at an undetermined location.
The announcement comes after an appeals court earlier this year ordered Schoenfeld's immediate release, ruling that the Board of Parole Hearings unfairly set his release date for 2021 even though it concluded he wasn't a threat to society.
But Schoenfeld has remained locked up while CDCR appealed to the California Supreme Court. On Thursday, the high court notified CDCR that it was refusing to take the case.
"As such, CDCR does not have any legal option other than to release inmate Shoenfeld and will do so," CDCR spokesman Luis Patino said Friday.
The cases of Schoenfeld and his accomplices — his brother John Schoenfeld and their friend Fred Woods — has become something of a cause celebre among lawyers, judges and others lobbying for reforms in the California parole system they view as too harsh. All three have good prison records and became eligible for release years ago, which has been opposed by many of the victims and some residents of Chowchilla. Chowchilla Mayor Janan Hebert and Mayor pro tem Jim Kopshever did not return messages sent to their government email accounts.
John Schoenfeld and Woods have parole hearings later this year.
Richard Schoenfeld's attorney Scott Handleman didn't return a phone call.
"After some 36 years, Richard Schoenfeld's parole release is long, long overdue," said Gary Dubcoff, John Schoenfeld's attorney. "He worked extremely hard to rehabilitate himself, and my great hope is that his two codefendants, his older brother James Schoenfeld and Fred Woods, will soon follow him as they have worked equally hard and are equally worthy."
Schoenfeld and his brother John Schoenfeld, who grew up as the sons of a podiatrist in the tony San Francisco suburb of Atherton, along with friend Fred Woods hatched their kidnap-for-ransom plan in 1976 after falling into debt because of a real estate deal gone sour. They spent 18 months working on the plan.
On July 16, 1976, they pretended their van had engine problems along Avenue 21 about 35 miles south of Fresno, prompting bus driver Ed Ray to pull over and park his bus of 26 summer school students.
The trio, who were wearing pantyhose on their heads, forced the victims into two vans and hid the bus in a creek bed. They drove about 100 miles to a Livermore quarry owned by Woods' father and sealed the children and Ray in a trailer in a cave. They then left to make their $5 million ransom demand.
The Chowchilla Police Department was swamped with so many calls that the kidnappers couldn't get through so they decided to take a nap before calling in their demand.
When they awoke, Ray and the two oldest children had managed to stack mattresses high enough to escape through the roof. Eventually, all the abductees staggered to safety.
Richard Schoenfeld turned himself in eight days later. His brother and Woods were arrested the next week.
The case was turned into a 1993 made-for-television movie titled "They've Taken Our Children: The Chowchilla Kidnapping," starring Karl Malden as Ray.
Ray, 91, died last month.
CDCR spokesman Patino, speaking generally about parole, said parolees are generally sent to the county of their last address before they entered prison, "but sometimes there are other considerations, such as the location of the victims."