Monday, 14 March 2016

Germany's Merkel suffers election setback after nationalist surge

A nationalist, anti-migration party powered into three German state legislatures in elections on Sunday held amid divisions over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal approach to the refugee crisis.

The elections in the prosperous southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate and relatively poor Saxony-Anhalt in the ex-communist east were the first major political test since Germany registered nearly 1.1 million people as asylum-seekers last year.
The three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD — which has campaigned against Merkel’s open-borders approach — easily entered all three legislatures.
AfD won 15.1 percent of the vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg, official results showed. It scored about 12.5 percent in Rhineland-Palatinate and 24 percent in Saxony-Anhalt, where it finished second, according to projections by ARD and ZDF television with most districts counted.
“We are seeing above all in these elections that voters are turning away in large numbers from the big established parties and voting for our party,” AfD leader Frauke Petry said.
They “expect us finally to be the opposition that there hasn’t been in the German parliament and some state parliaments,” she added.
There were uncomfortable results both for Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union and their partners in the national government, the center-left Social Democrats. The traditional rivals are Germany’s two biggest parties.
“The democratic center in our country has not become stronger, but smaller, and I think we must all take that seriously,” said Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democrats’ leader.
Merkel’s party kept its status as strongest party in Saxony-Anhalt. It had hoped to beat left-leaning Green governor Winfried Kretschmann in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a traditional stronghold that the CDU ran for decades until 2011. It also hoped to oust Social Democrat governor Malu Dreyer from the governor’s office in Rhineland-Palatinate.
However, the CDU finished several percentage points behind the popular incumbents’ parties in both states and dropped 12 percentage points to a record-low result in Baden-Wuerttemberg, with 27 percent support.
The Social Democrats suffered large losses in both Baden-Wuerttemberg and Saxony-Anhalt, where they were the junior partners in the outgoing governments, finishing behind AfD.
Other parties won’t share power with AfD, but its presence will complicate their coalition-building efforts.
In all three states, the results were set to leave the outgoing coalition governments without a majority — forcing regional leaders into what could be time-consuming negotiations with new, unusual partners. Merkel’s CDU still has a long-shot chance of forming an untried three-way alliance to win the Baden-Wuerttemberg governor’s office.
Germany’s next national election is due in late 2017. While Sunday’s results will likely generate new tensions, Merkel herself should be secure: she has put many state-level setbacks behind her in the past, and there’s no long-term successor or figurehead for any rebellion in sight.
A top official with Merkel’s party called for it to stay on its course in the migrant crisis. CDU general secretary Peter Tauber pointed to recent polls indicating that her popularity is rebounding and added: “this shows that it is good if the CDU sticks to this course, saying that we need time to master this big challenge.”
Merkel insisted last year that “we will manage” the challenge of integrating migrants. While her government has moved to tighten asylum rules, she still insists on a pan-European solution to the migrant crisis, ignoring demands from some conservative allies for a national cap on the number of refugees.
AfD’s strong performance will boost its hopes of entering the national parliament next year. It entered five state legislatures and the European Parliament in its initial guise as a primarily anti-euro party before splitting and then rebounding in the migrant crisis.
The CDU may have been hurt by an attempt by its candidates in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate to put cautious distance between themselves and Merkel’s migrant policies, which may simply have created the impression of disunity. The party slipped in polls there over recent weeks.
The two last month called for Germany to impose daily refugee quotas — something Merkel opposes but which neighboring Austria has since put in place. Separately, Merkel’s conservative allies in Bavaria have attacked her approach for months, demanding an annual refugee cap.
Center-left incumbents Kretschmann and Dreyer often sounded more enthusiastic about Merkel’s refugee policy than their conservative challengers.
“The result hopefully will be that the CDU and (their Bavarian allies) will realize that this permanent quarreling doesn’t help them,” Vice Chancellor Gabriel said.
(AP)

Critical Syria peace talks get underway in Geneva

Syria faces a moment of truth, U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura said on Monday as he opened the first of three rounds of peace talks envisaged to negotiate a “clear roadmap” for a future Syria.

Saying there was no “plan B” but a return to war, de Mistura asked to hear from all sides but said he would have no hesitation in calling in the big powers, led by the United States and Russia, if the talks get bogged down.
“If during these talks and in the next rounds we will see no notice of any willingness to negotiate... we will bring the issue back to those who have influence, and that is the Russian Federation, the USA... and to the Security Council,” he told a news conference.
The talks are the first to be held in more than two years and come amid an unprecedented cessation in hostilities sponsored by Washington and Moscow and accepted by President Bashar al-Assad’s government and most of his foes.
The truce, the first of its kind in a 5 year-old war that has killed 250,000 people, has sharply reduced the fighting over the past two weeks, giving rise to hope that this diplomatic initiative will succeed where all previous efforts failed. The cessation was agreed after de Mistura called off a previous attempt to convene talks last month.
The talks must focus on political transition, which is the “mother of all issues”, de Mistura said, while separate taskforces would keep tackling humanitarian issues and the cessation of hostilities.
“As far as I know, the only Plan B available is return to war, and to even worse war than we had so far.”
All sides attending the talks have committed to a political transition that will follow the war, but Assad and his opponents disagree fundamentally on what that means, including whether the president must leave power.
The first round of talks will end around March 24, followed by a break of 7-10 days, then a second round of at least two weeks before another recess and a third round.
“By then we believe we should have at least a clear roadmap. I’m not saying agreement, but a clear roadmap because that’s what Syria is expecting from all of us.”
De Mistura did not mention whether Kurdish leaders would be involved for the first time, but said that the “proximity” format of indirect talks gave him flexibility to hear as many voices as possible, and all Syrians should be given a chance.
The main Kurdish YPG militia, which controls a swathe of northern Syria and is backed by the United States in combat with Islamic State fighters, has so far been excluded from talks in line with the views of Turkey, which considers it a terrorist group.
“The rule of the game will be inclusiveness,” de Mistura said.
“In fact, the list of those whom we are going to consult or meet, or will be part of—eventually, I hope—not only of proximity negotiations but in fact direct negotiations is going to be constantly updated.”
(REUTERS)

Yemen conflict: UAE jet missing on mission against Houthis

The United Arab Emirates has said that one of its warplanes taking part in a mission against Houthi rebels in Yemen is missing.
The country's official news agency, WAM, announced the disappearance without giving further details.
The Saudi-led coalition of which UAE is a part has been carrying out air strikes since March 2015 in support of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.
Some 6,000 people have been killed in the Yemen conflict.
It is the first known loss of an Emirati jet in the conflict.
Officials have not yet announced the type of jet lost, or whether any pilots were harmed.
The UAE Air Force operates both F-16 and Mirage 2000 fighter jets.
In December, a Bahraini F-16 crashed in Saudi Arabia due to a "technical error", while in May a Moroccan warplane came down over Yemen.
Both jets were taking part in the Yemen campaign, which has the codename "Operation Restoring Hope".
The UN has criticised both the Saudi-led campaign and the Houthis for causing civilian casualties.
 Journalists inspect the damage at a tea factory after it was hit by Saudi-led air strikes in Yemen"s capital Sanaa January 30, 2016

South Korea, U.S. deter North Korea with 'largest ever' military drill


Pohang, South Korea (CNN)Amid blasts of explosives and camouflaging smoke, U.S. and South Korean marines and sailors stormed a beach aboard assault vehicles Saturday in a mock amphibious landing.
The carefully choreographed drill begins a much larger, eight-week series of annual joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea.
They take place against a backdrop of growing tension and missile tests just across the Demilitarized Zone in North Korea.
South Korea's defense ministry spokesman is calling the maneuvers "the largest scale ever," involving 300,000 South Korean troops and at least 17,000 from the U.S.
Small detachments of forces from Australia and New Zealand also participated in Saturday's operations.

Heightened tensions

9 photos: South Korea, U.S. hold 'largest ever' drills
9 photos: South Korea, U.S. hold 'largest ever' drills
9 photos: South Korea, U.S. hold 'largest ever' drills
9 photos: South Korea, U.S. hold 'largest ever' drills
9 photos: South Korea, U.S. hold 'largest ever' drills
9 photos: South Korea, U.S. hold 'largest ever' drills

The truth about Syria Undercover behind rebel lines



Clarissa Ward and Salma Abdelaziz spent six days in rebel-held Syria working with filmmaker Bilal Abdul Kareem.
Rebel-held Syria (CNN)There's a sickening moment between hearing the planes and waiting for them to drop their payload. A pit forms in your stomach. You know you could die, but you also know there's no way to divine where the strike will hit.
On a hill overlooking Ariha, our guard Abu Youssef seems to have located the jet in the sky and is following it with his eyes. "Russian planes," he says.
Suddenly he ducks. The sound of the explosion rings out with a "thwoomp."
Where the strike hit, there are other sounds. Sirens. People screaming for help. Rescue workers shouting for an ambulance. A woman wailing. Metal scraping against rubble as volunteers furiously try to dig people out of the debris. Survivors in this battered Syrian town cursing President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian supporters.
At the nearest hospital, some 10 miles away, still more sounds. Men arguing as they try to delicately move a gravely injured boy from the back of a car. Doctors shouting at people to get back. A family member weeping softly.
To a visitor, there is something dizzyingly surreal about it. The sounds stay with you as long as the sights. But these are the sounds of everyday life in northern Syria. 
We had been on the ground for less than 24 hours when the airstrikes hit. Now, five years into this war, the attacks against areas controlled by rebels are relentless, particularly from the air.
It began with crudely made barrel bombs pushed, seemingly haphazardly, out of the back of Syrian Air Force helicopters. Then, last September, Russia joined the fight and the airstrikes -- thousands of them -- became even more powerful and punishing.
Russia says it is only targeting "terrorists" -- fighters with ISIS and the al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. But the strike we saw hit a fruit market.
Ordinary people out buying fruit. One minute they were arguing about the price of oranges. The next minute they were dead.
Monitoring groups say nearly 2,000 civilians have been killed since the Russian intervention began. 
"Every day, I struggle with whether to send my daughter to school," the young woman tells me.
We're sitting on cushions on the floor of a house in Maarat al-Numan, a town ravaged by airstrikes in the past few months. Her 6-year-old daughter stands next to her, shyly eyeing these foreign visitors as she chews her hair.
"Of course I want her to have an education, but every time she leaves the house there's always a chance ..." Her voice trails off. I don't finish the sentence for her. There's always a chance she won't come back. There's always a chance she will be killed. There's always a chance she will get maimed in a strike.
Several Syrians have told me that you don't hear the planes if you get hit, you only hear them if you're not the target. It seems to provide some comfort -- at least you don't know you are going to die in the moments before it happens. I don't share this thought with the young woman. I nod silently.
In Syria now, there are lots of silences. Much remains unsaid. Questions are generally greeted with suspicion. A culture of fear permeates the place.
Almost no Western journalists have visited this part of the country in over a year. Turkey has all but sealed the border into rebel-held areas -- and inside, the threat of indiscriminate air strikes and kidnapping looms.
We traveled undercover, wearing the niqab, a black veil that covers the entire face, except for a small slit at the eyes. It doesn't take long for people to work out that I'm a foreigner, yet very few ask where I am from or what I am doing here. They know better than to ask such questions. Instead they tell their stories. They want the world to know.

David and Goliath

The journey to get into Aleppo is now extremely difficult and dangerous. Assad's ground troops have used Russian air cover to encircle the rebels who control the eastern part of the city, where up to 320,000 people may be trapped.
There is now only one road that rebels can use to get in and out of the city -- once Syria's largest, a bustling economic and cultural hub -- and it is flanked on either side by enemy forces. Snipers are everywhere. They call it the road of death.
We hurtle down the road at top speed, hearts in our throats. I look at the berms of earth built up on either side to conceal cars from enemy view. They seemed pathetically vulnerable.
I am reminded of a visit to Syria four years ago when one rebel leader proudly showed me a weapon they had been working on for months. It was a homemade catapult. A catapult to fight against artillery shells. "David and Goliath," I whispered to myself. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Closing in from all sides

A search team inspects a collapsed building in Aleppo in July.
"The first was my grandson. And after him his cousin, my son, my daughter's son, my middle son, and one of his children, then my third son, and his son. All died on the frontlines, and I thank God for that."
In a dark and cramped apartment in eastern Aleppo, 70-year-old Souad is listing family members who have been killed fighting in this war. Her milky eyes gaze blankly into the air as she counts them all on her bony fingers.
There are nine in total. My brain struggles to process the scale of the loss. There are no tears. Sadness and loss long ago hardened into grim acceptance, made possible by an unwavering faith in God.
"I thank God for any situation. I hear the news and I say thank God for anything," Souad says, adjusting her black headscarf. "We come from Allah and to him we return."
Her grandson sits next to her as she speaks, listening attentively as he sips thick black Arabic coffee. He looks 40 but is probably in his late 20s. His beard is long and he wears camouflage pants. He is a fighter with Ahrar al Sham, an Islamist rebel group that is fighting on three fronts. On one is Assad's army. On another is ISIS. On the third, Kurdish forces lie in wait.
When I address him, he looks down shyly to avoid meeting my eyes. To some, it might appear as sexism or disdain. But I understand it as it is intended, as a gesture of respect.
I wonder what will happen if he is killed -- if Souad will continue to stay here in Sukkari, a neighborhood shattered by Russian and regime bombs.
Yes, she tells me. She will stay here until she dies.

The war on normalcy

Rescue workers pull victims from an Idlib hospital hit by an airstrike in February.
Doctor Firas al Jundi doesn't have long to sit down with us. He is one of a handful of surgeons in the only hospital still standing in Maarat al-Numan. Last month, the largest hospital, supported by Doctors Without Borders, was destroyed by airstrikes. Twenty-five people were killed. The group said it believed Russian or regime missiles were responsible. Russia has categorically denied involvement.
Jundi tells us he now sees up to a hundred people in a day. His face is gray and dark circles line his eyes. It's the face of someone who doesn't know what to think or feel anymore, of someone who is just going through the motions. When he talks, he presses his hands down on the desk, as if it is somehow the only thing holding him up.
He tells us that they don't have enough medicine, that the water is too dirty to use for surgeries. He says that, despite their denials, the regime and Russia are targeting hospitals deliberately and cynically. That four hospitals were hit in one day last month. That they want to destroy all medical services so that people will be forced to flee.

I ask him why he doesn't leave Syria. With a medical degree it would be relatively easy for him to go somewhere safer. He pauses before answering. I can hear him swallow.
"If I did that I would abandon my conscience," Jundi says. His face cracks and he whimpers softly. He is breaking down.
"This is our country, we can't desert it. If we leave then we have sold our morals. Who would treat the people?" He stops and sobs. I dig my fingernails into my palms to stop my own tears.
"I can very easily leave, but we will remain steadfast," he pushes on, growing stronger as he continues. "I am prepared to die rather than to leave. And I will carry on no matter what."
It's the kind of bravery that leaves you baffled. The day before, we interviewed a lawyer who survived a strike on a courthouse. It was one of two we visited that have been leveled. "This is the tax we pay for living in a liberated area," he said matter-of-factly as we stood in the rubble.
Assad and his Russian allies say that theirs is a war against terrorism. But on the ground, people believe that everyday life is the target. It's a war on normalcy.
Going to settle a dispute at the courthouse? We'll hit you. Going to the hospital to get your heart checked out? We'll hit you. Going to buy some fruit? We'll hit you.

'Imagine that you're drowning'

Men treat a child after an airstrike on a residential area of Aleppo in February.
I look out the car window through the slit in my niqab. "Democracy is the religion of the West," a sign reads in black and white. There are lots of signs like this in these parts now. Billboards urge men to join the jihad against Assad and encourage women to cover themselves completely. We drive through checkpoint after checkpoint manned by Jabhat al-Nusra, the al Qaeda affiliate here.
The radicalism that has taken hold in rebel-held Syria is more pronounced each time I visit, but the writing has been on the wall for years.
In 2012, I asked then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton if she was concerned that Islamist and jihadist groups would exploit the vacuum created by the chaos and violence in Syria if the international community didn't somehow fill the void. She deftly avoided answering the question.
Almost everyone you meet here will tell you that they want to live freely and fairly. But most will also tell you that they want to live under some type of Islamic governance.
People will tell you that they hate extremism. Yet Jabhat al-Nusra enjoys a huge amount of support on the ground.
It is a conflicted and complicated relationship. One young media activist told me in one breath that he hated Nusra -- and in the next, added that his cousin was a fighter with them.
Years ago, a Syrian-American doctor explained it to me like this: Imagine you're drowning, that you're about to die and you're desperately looking for anyone to help you, but there's nobody there.
But then you see someone holding out their hand. And maybe you don't like the look of that person, but it's your only chance to survive. So you take their hand.

Hell and paradise

It's our last day in Syria and we are in a sun-drenched olive grove near the Turkish border. It is spectacularly beautiful, serene even -- a world away from the devastation we witnessed hours earlier at the site of an apparent airstrike in the town of Daraat Izza.
The contrasts and contradictions of this country leave me feeling light-headed. Syria is hell. But standing in the warm sun, watching the silver green olive leaves shiver in the breeze, it is also paradise. A ceasefire has been in place for a couple of days, though based on what we saw and heard, it's difficult to have much faith that it will hold.
We are preparing to leave, saying our goodbyes. We hand over a bag full of British chocolates to our security guards. Abu Youssef thanks us and quietly hands each of us a folded piece of white paper with our initials on it.
"Promise me you won't read these until you get back home to London," he says.
Two flights and 72 hours later, we open the letters.
"I hope you have a good idea of us," they read. "Please tell the world the truth about Syria."


Clinton and Sanders accuse Trump of inciting violence

(CNN)Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both accused Donald Trump of inciting violence, with the former secretary of state calling him "bigoted" and alleging he had perpetrated "political arson," while the Vermont senator labeled him a "pathological liar" at a town hall on Sunday night.
"It is clear that Donald Trump is running a very cynical campaign pitting groups of Americans against one another. He is trafficking in hate and fear," Cinton said during the event at Ohio State University hosted by CNN and TV One. "He actually incites violence in the way he urges his audience on, talking about punching people, offering to pay legal bills."
Clinton charged that Trump was guilty of a case of "political arson" by throwing fuel on political divisions in the country.
"He has been incredibly bigoted towards so many groups," she continued. "You don't make America great by tearing down everything that made America great."
Clinton followed Sanders at the town hall moderated by CNN's Jake Tapper and TV One's Roland Martin. Sanders and Clinton are making closing arguments to voters in their increasingly contentious Democratic nominating marathon, two days before five states vote in crucial primaries that could set the tone for the rest of the contest.
On Sunday night, Clinton's comments followed Sanders' own sharp criticism of Trump.
"I hesitate to say this because I really don't like to disparage public officials, but Donald Trump is a pathological liar," Sanders said.
Sanders also blasted Trump for saying that he might pay the legal fees of a man charged with punching a protester at one of his rallies, adding that doing so was tantamount to "inciting violence."
"I would hope Mr. Trump tones it down big time and tells his supporters that violence is not acceptable in the American political process," Sanders said.
In one of the most dramatic moments of the night, Clinton was asked by audience member Ricky Jackson -- who spent 39 years in jail for a murder he did not commit, including a period on death row -- to justify her support for the death penalty in some cases.
She replied that the states had proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials and said she would "breathe a sigh of relief" if the Supreme Court and the states began to eliminate capital punishment.
But she argued that there was a case for a "very limited use" of the death penalty in cases of "horrific" terrorist crimes in federal cases like the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 during her husband's administration.
Speaking directly to Jackson, however, she told him, "I just can't even imagine what you went through and how terrible those days and nights must have been for all those years. All of us are so regretful that you or any person had to go through what you did."
Jackson, who is an undecided voter, was then asked by Martin if he was satisfied with Clinton's response. He replied, "Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you, senator."

The town hall took place in the wake of Sanders' surprise victory in the Michigan primary last week, which raised his hopes of competing with Clinton across Midwestern Rust Belt states.
They faced questions from Buckeye State voters as they vie for the support of blue collar and minority voters who underpin the Democratic coalition.
It also came at the end of a weekend filled with violence and disruption of Trump rallies, in which the real estate mogul pointed the finger at Sanders for the unruliness.
But Sanders said Sunday night, "Our campaign does not believe and never will encourage anybody to disrupt anything."
He added that people have the right to protest even though he said other candidates' rallies shouldn't be disrupted.
"Trump has to get on the TV and tell his supporters that violence in the political process in America is not acceptable, end of discussion," he said.
At the same time, Sanders dismissed the idea that he was responsible for the actions of all his supporters.
"Millions of people voted for me. If I have to take responsibility for everybody who voted for me, it would be a very difficult life," Sanders said
The town hall was also an opportunity for the two Democratic candidates to highlight their differences even if they didn't meet face to face.
One questioner, Amit Majmudar, a radiologist born to Indian immigrant parents and Ohio's poet laureate, told each one that he had one mission at the ballot box, to keep Trump out of office and asked what each would do to defeat Trump.
Clinton argued that she was the best candidate to take on Trump because she was "the only candidate who has gotten more votes than Trump" in the 2016 contests held so far.
She added that she was building a broad-based campaign to convince people that this was the highest-stakes election they had ever been involved in, explicitly because Trump was likely to be the Republican nominee.
And she said that the fact that Republicans had been "after me" for 25 years meant there wasn't anything the GOP had not already dug up about her.
"I am not new to the national arena and I think whoever goes up against Donald Trump better be ready," she said.
Clinton also said that there would be many arguments that Democrats could make against Trump but that she didn't want to "spill the beans right now."
"I am having foreign leaders ask if they can endorse me to stop Donald Trump," Clinton said, though she declined to name any other than Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who she said had done so publicly.
Sanders, for his part, pivoted to his Democratic opponent on the issue of trade, which is emerging as a key theme on both sides of the aisle in the 2016 presidential race.
He lashed out at "corporately written trade agreements," which he said were designed to shut down U.S factories and pay people "pennies an hour" in China and Mexico.
"One of the very strong differences between Secretary Clinton and myself -- she has supported almost all of those trade agreements, I have vigorously opposed (them)," he charged.
At one point while talking about trade though, Sanders slipped in another backhanded slap at Trump. Defending his position on trade, Sanders said that he did not want to cut off the United States from global trade flows.
"Nobody is talking about building a wall around the United States," Sanders said, before trailing off when people in the audience started chuckling. "Oh, I beg your pardon, there is one guy who is talking about building a wall. Let me rephrase it: no rational person is talking about building a wall."
During Clinton's appearance, she sought to match her rival's rhetoric on trade after she was asked by a laid-off steel worker how she would deal with alleged dumping of steel in the U.S. market by foreign nations.
"I believe that the dumping is illegal and we have to summon up the political and the legal arguments to take it on," Clinton said, specifically accusing China of the practice. Other nations, including Italy, South Korea and India have in recent months been accused of dumping corrosion-resistant steel in the U.S. market.
The town hall segment with each candidate concluded with a few more personal questions.
Clinton was asked to elaborate on her recent comment that she's not a natural politician like her husband Bill Clinton or President Barack Obama.
Clinton turned the question into a way of stressing her particular skills while admitting her liabilities, saying she had worked hard to become a better politician but wanted to be more than just good at campaigning.
"I don't want to be hired to be a constant candidate, I want to be hired to be the president because I think that I, in this moment in our country's history, bring the combination of skills and understanding and experience that can be really put to work immediately to do all parts of the job," she said.
She also said that the campaign skills of her husband and Obama are "poetry," relating that "I get carried away and I have seen them a million times." She added that such stump skills were not her forte.
Sanders, asked which ideological opponents he got along with the best, mentioned Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, even though he's someone who Democrats have pilloried as a climate-change denier.

Though Sanders has been scoring some points on trade, Clinton has so far built a more diverse constituency resting especially on African-American voters and Hispanics and appears to have the edge going into Tuesday's primaries in Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina.
Still, Sanders has high hopes of good results in the Midwest in particular and has been driving his message that the economy is stacked against working Americans and underpinned by a corrupt political system.
Tuesday's primaries are hugely significant because they make up the third-highest allocation of delegates available on a single day in the Democratic presidential race.
A new poll by The Wall Street Journal and NBC published on Sunday shows Clinton leading Sanders for the three biggest prizes available on Tuesday. She is up 61% to 34% on Sanders in Florida, leads him by 58% to 38% in Ohio and by six points in Illinois.
Sanders will be hoping that last Tuesday's results are an omen for this week after he went into the Michigan primary trailing badly in polls but still managed to best Clinton.
The former secretary of state, however, is looking to further bolster her lead in delegates over Sanders on Tuesday.
According to CNN estimates, Clinton has 1,244 delegates (including 772 pledged delegates and 472 superdelegates). Sanders has 574 delegates (including 551 pledged delegates and 23 superdelegates). Superdelegates are party officials and lawmakers who can vote at the convention and have already made their intentions clear.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated with the correct number of superdelegates for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.


Syria conflict: Damascus under pressure ahead of peace talks

Western powers have condemned efforts by the Syrian government to set limits to the agenda of fresh peace talks starting on Monday.
Syria's Foreign Minister Walid Muallem on Saturday ruled out any discussion of presidential elections.
US Secretary of State John Kerry responded by accusing Damascus of "trying to disrupt the process".
The UN-led talks represent the first serious diplomatic intervention since Russia began air strikes in September.
At the Geneva talks, diplomats are hoping to build on the fragile and partial truce, which has reduced the level of violence in Syria since it came into effect at the end of February, notes the BBC's Bethany Bell.
But expectations for the talks are low, she adds.
Mr Kerry met foreign ministers from France, Germany and the UK in advance on Sunday.
A cessation of hostilities agreed by most participants in the conflict began late last month. It excludes so-called Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda's branch in Syria.
The purpose of the partial and temporary truce was to enable the warring sides and their foreign backers to launch a fresh attempt to end the five-year conflict.
But the latest diplomatic row began when Mr Muallem said that any talk of a new presidential election was off the agenda. "This is an exclusive right of the Syrian people,'' he said.
The main Syrian opposition umbrella group, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), said the pre-conditions could halt the talks before they had even started.
On Sunday Mr Kerry said Mr Muallem was "clearly trying to disrupt the process", adding that Syria's allies, Russia and Iran, had made clear "there must be a political transition and that we must have a presidential election at some time".


French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault (R), US Secretary of State John Kerry (C) and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier after talks in Paris, 13 March

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Syria's "provocations" were a "bad sign and did not reflect the spirit of the ceasefire".
On Sunday the HNC said it would push for an interim government in which President Bashar al-Assad and the current leadership would have no role.
The indirect talks in Geneva are mediated by the United Nations. UN special envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura has said he wants presidential elections to be held in the next 18 months.
The fate of President Assad has been one of the main stumbling blocks in previous talks. The last round collapsed in February without agreement.
More than 250,000 Syrians have been killed and about 11 million people have been forced from their homes in five years of Syria's civil war, which began with an uprising against Mr Assad.
Government forces, supported by Russian air strikes, have made gains against rebel fighters in recent months.
Map showing control of Syria