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Benin will vote on April 12, with Finance Minister Romuald Wadagni favored to win after the main opposition candidate was barred from running.
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Benin will vote on April 12, with Finance Minister Romuald Wadagni favored to win after the main opposition candidate was barred from running.
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Romuald Wadagni dossier
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Benin
Benin will vote on April 12, with Finance Minister Romuald Wadagni favored to win after the main opposition candidate was barred from running.
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Chronology
Off Leash update 6 April COMING UP THIS WEEK •Tomorrow at 8 pm ET is Pres. Trump's extended deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on its power plants and bridges. Iran's leaders have publicly dismissed the ultimatum, but Trump told Fox he thinks there's a "good chance" that private talks will reach a deal today to avoid escalation. •The first round of the golf Masters Tournament opens Thursday at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. FOUR ELECTIONS NEXT WEEKEND •Djibouti votes for president on Friday. Longtime incumbent Ismail Omar Guelleh is sure to win, thanks to a late parliamentary decision scrapping an age limit of 75 that would've rendered him ineligible. Incidentally, that age limit was only imposed as part of a 2010 electoral "reform" that did away with term limits so he could run for a third term. This will be his sixth. •Hungary will hold a parliamentary election on Sunday. The Fidesz party's populist incumbent, Viktor Orban, is trailing in (independent) polls by 11 points to the center-right Tisza party's Peter Magyar, but government polls tell a different story, and analysts think Orban will pull out all the stops to extend his 16-year premiership. •Benin will vote for president on Sunday. The ruling party's candidate - current finance minister Romuald Wadagni - is heavily favored and the opposition's main candidate was barred from running. •Peru votes for president and parliament on Sunday. Two right-leaning candidates are leading the presidential polls, but - with a record 35 candidates contesting the race - it's likely to go to a runoff. COMMODITY AND COIN MARKET PRICES •Aluminum: $3,470/ton •Antimony (global avg. from Antimony Global): $34,352/ton [Note: I'm switching to a new antimony benchmark that should be a better indicator of global average prices than the unconvincingly flat benchmark I was using for trioxide min. 99.65% fob China. Unlike exchange-traded commodities, antimony is usually traded through private over-the-counter contracts, which means prices are highly volatile and variable. This Antimony Global world average seems like the best big-picture benchmark out there.] •Bitcoin: $68,928 •Cobalt: $56,290/ton •Copper: $12,360/ton •Ethereum: $2,126 •Gold: $4,665/toz •Lead: $1,933/ton •Natural Gas (Nymex): $2.80/MMbtu •WTI Crude Oil (Nymex): $111.71/barrel •Zinc: $3,265/ton IRAN •Oil markets are volatile while waiting to see whether the U.S. and Iran will make a deal or - in the absence of a deal - if Pres. Trump will make good on his increasingly brash threats against Iran if it doesn't "open the fuckin' strait" by his deadline of 8 pm ET tomorrow. •Trump seemed emboldened to escalate his rhetoric by the success of a high-risk rescue mission to locate and extract a U.S. Air Force colonel whose F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down in southern Iran on Friday. •Iranian forces were desperately searching for the downed airman, too, and would've used him as negotiating leverage if they'd found him first. A CIA deception campaign helped ensure that didn't happen. •Separately, Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey proposed a 45-day ceasefire plan to both Iran and the U.S. that includes a proposal for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Neither has responded yet, and it's unclear whether this is the deal that Trump gave a "good chance" of closing today. •Meanwhile, a likely Israeli strike killed Majid Khademi - the head of intelligence for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) - earlier today. Khademi had only been in his post since last June, when his predecessor was killed in an Israeli strike. TRADE •Bloomberg reported that 13 ships have transited the Strait of Hormuz in the past week: 10 exiting the Persian Gulf and three entering. •That's the highest seven-day rolling total since the war began, and it included a French container ship and a Japanese-owned LNG tanker - both with no clear links to Iran. However, it's still just a trickle compared to the historical average of 138 transits per day. •Iran has reportedly set up a tolling system - which witty commentators dubbed an "ayatollah booth" - to charge some ships a rumored $2 million (in yuan) for safe passage. It has also restricted transits to a narrow northern passage, creating a natural limit on traffic too. •Meanwhile, European leaders are exploring options for safeguarding trade in the Strait. They're reportedly considering naval escorts (French Pres. Macron's preferred option), minesweeping, aerial interceptors, and - the bureaucrats' favorite - negotiations and economic measures. All have drawbacks, and none are sure to work. CHINA •Cheng Li-wun, who leads Taiwan's largest opposition party - the Kuomintang (KMT) - won her party's leadership in October after campaigning on closer ties with mainland China. That platform also won her an invitation from Xi Jinping to visit the mainland, which she's doing this week with a delegation that will stop in Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Beijing. •Xi's courtship of the KMT under Cheng is likely part of his push to reunify Taiwan. It would be easier if a pliant future KMT government simply agreed to reunification than if Beijing had to take the island by force. •To that end, Beijing also reached out to the current (more defiant) Taiwanese government in early March to offer energy guarantees if it agreed to reunify. Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party leaders quickly rejected the proposal, which was probably more of an optics play (to show Taiwan that its leaders refuse dialogue even at the expense of energy security) than a real offer. HUNGARY •Serbian officials discovered two backpacks containing explosives near a pipeline carrying Russian gas to Hungary. That appears to corroborate Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's claim that "Ukraine has been for years trying to cut off Europe from Russian energy." •However, Hungary's opposition leader, Peter Magyar - who's leading Orban in independent polls ahead of Sunday's election - was skeptical. Magyar accused Orban of staging a "false flag" operation to scare voters into rallying behind their strongman leader on Sunday.
Open source report