JD Vance visits Indiana as Trump mulls a new census and pushes for GOP-led redistricting
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Thursday that FBI Director Kash Patel had granted his request for the agency to get involved in corralling Democratic state lawmakers who left Texas to deny the Republican majority a quorum necessary to vote on a U.S. House redistricting plan advancing Trump's initiative.
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Toronto Star
2 hours ago
- Toronto Star
Japan and China commemorate World War II anniversary on different dates
BENXI, China (AP) — Eighty years after the end of World War II, Japan and China are marking the anniversary with major events, but on different dates and in different ways. Japan remembers the victims in a solemn ceremony on Aug. 15, the day then-Emperor Hirohito announced in a crackly radio message that the government had surrendered, while China showcases its military strength with a parade on Sept. 3, the day after the formal surrender on an American battleship in Tokyo Bay.
Winnipeg Free Press
2 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Japan and China commemorate World War II anniversary on different dates
BENXI, China (AP) — Eighty years after the end of World War II, Japan and China are marking the anniversary with major events, but on different dates and in different ways. Japan remembers the victims in a solemn ceremony on Aug. 15, the day then-Emperor Hirohito announced in a crackly radio message that the government had surrendered, while China showcases its military strength with a parade on Sept. 3, the day after the formal surrender on an American battleship in Tokyo Bay. Japan occupied much of China before and during WWII in a devastating and brutal invasion that, by some estimates, killed 20 million people. The wartime experience still bedevils relations between the two countries today. A museum in the Chinese city of Benxi highlights the struggles of anti-Japanese resistance fighters who holed up in log cabins through fierce winters in the country's northeast, then known as Manchuria, before retreating into Russia. They returned only after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and launched an offensive into Manchuria on Aug. 9, 1945 — the same day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki — adding to the pressure on Japan to surrender. Nowadays, it is China's military that raises alarm as it seeks to enforce the government's territorial claims in the Pacific. When Japan talks of building up its defense to counter the threat, its militaristic past gives China a convenient retort. 'We urge Japan to deeply reflect on its historical culpability, earnestly draw lessons from history and stop using hype over regional tensions and China-related issues to conceal its true intent of military expansion,' Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said last month. Japan's surrender broadcast Hirohito's prerecorded surrender broadcast on Aug. 15, 1945, was incomprehensible to many Japanese. He used arcane language and the sound quality was poor. What was important, historians say, was that the message came from the emperor himself. Hirohito was considered a living god, and the war was fought in his name. Most Japanese had never heard his voice before. 'The speech is a reminder of what it took to end the wrong war,' Nihon University professor Takahisa Furukawa told The Associated Press in 2015. The current emperor, Hirohito's grandson Naruhito, and the prime minister are set to make remarks at the annual ceremony in Tokyo on Aug. 15, broadcast live by public broadcaster NHK. At last year's event, Naruhito expressed deep remorse over Japan's actions during the war. But on the same day, three Japanese cabinet ministers visited Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine, drawing criticism from China and South Korea, which see the shrine as a symbol of militarism. China marks Victory Day Japan surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945, in a ceremony on board the American battleship USS Missouri. The foreign minister, in a top hat and tails, and the army chief signed on behalf of Hirohito. The signatories on the other side were U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur and representatives from China and other nations that had fought Japan. China designated the next day, Sept. 3, as Victory Day. Eleven years ago, the Communist Party stepped up how China marks the anniversary. All of China's top leaders, including President Xi Jinping, attended a commemorative event on Sept. 3. The renewed focus came at a time of rising tension with Japan over conflicting interpretations of wartime history and a still-ongoing territorial dispute in the East China Sea. The next year, China staged a military parade on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war. A decade later, preparations are underway for another grand parade with missiles, tanks and fighter jets overhead. Russian President Vladimir Putin is among those expected to attend.
Winnipeg Free Press
3 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Barred from Bolivia's elections, ex-leader Morales campaigns hard for invalid votes
EL ALTO, Bolivia (AP) — Barred from appearing on Sunday's ballot, former leftist president Evo Morales has launched a scrappy campaign for a presidential contender with no name, no face and no formal platform. The contender's known as 'Nulo' — Spanish for the null-and-void vote. Nulo has a reliable base in Bolivia, where voting is compulsory. For many years, voters disillusioned with Morales' increasingly high-handed attempts to prolong his presidency over three consecutive terms defaced their ballots or left them blank. Supporters of Morales to declare their votes null But with the coca-farming union leader disqualified from the race and seeking to distance himself from the unpopular President Luis Arce and other leftists associated with Bolivia's worst economic crisis in four decades, Morales has emerged as Nulo's greatest champion. 'Brothers, we are on the right track. Absenteeism, blank ballots, undecided voters, all of it,' Morales told Radio Kawsachun Coca, his media outlet in the Bolivian jungle of Chapare, where he has been holed up for months among fiercely loyal coca-growing labor unions. If Morales leaves his tropical stronghold, he risks arrest on charges related to statutory rape. He denies the allegations. 'Nulo is where we belong,' he said, urging voters to scratch, scribble and sketch on their ballots. 'We've already won here.' But under Bolivian law, Nulo cannot win the elections— nor trigger a redo. Because authorities must remove spoiled and blank ballots from the final count, a surge by Nulo would give all the candidates a boost without affecting the distribution of votes. Morales bets on 'Nulo' to stay in the game Morales is betting that an unusually high proportion of votes for Nulo would embarrass the right-wing front-runners, former President Jorge 'Tuto' Quiroga and businessman Samuel Doria Medina, undermine the credibility of the consequential election and extend his own political relevance. 'Evo wants to be in the election and say, 'This is my vote … I'm the winner without even having participated,'' said political analyst Carlos Saavedra. Morales' bid for Nulo comes after the iconic leftist leader, like other Latin American populists of his generation, exhausted a range of tactics to stay in power. To run for a third term in 2014, Morales changed the Constitution's two-consecutive-term limit and stacked the top courts with his supporters. To run for a fourth term in 2019, he found a way around a referendum blocking his bid. That last attempt six years ago led to Morales resigning under pressure from the military and fleeing into exile as violent protests erupted over his disputed reelection. From ruling bloc to running alone This time, with his ally-turned-rival Arce in power, Morales had all the cards — rather, courts — stacked against him. The ex-president's power struggle with Arce splintered his once-dominant Movement Toward Socialism. Although running with a different faction, Senate President Andrónico Rodríguez represents the MAS party's best hope. But support for Rodríguez, a coca-farming union activist like Morales, has declined in recent weeks as an accelerating currency crisis stokes outrage at the long-dominant MAS party. Morales' followers can appear even more disgusted with the left than with the right-wing establishment that their leader built his career opposing. 'Evo Morales taught Andrónico everything he knows, and Andrónico stabbed him in the back. How can we trust a candidate like that?' asked Wendy Chipana, a 28-year-old volunteer at a Nulo campaign office in El Alto, the sprawling city of rural migrants overlooking Bolivia's capital of La Paz. 'We only have one candidate, Evo Morales. That's why we're deciding not to cast a single valid vote.' As anger flared in June over Morales' disqualification, his supporters blocked highways and clashed with police in unrest that left eight dead. Morales warned that the country would 'convulse' should Sunday's election proceed. Yet in recent weeks he has changed his tune, urging his followers to register their frustration through the ballot box. For 'Nulo' voters, the ballot becomes a canvas Nulo campaigners are asking voters to get creative. Chipana distributes decals of Morales' face that voters can stick on their ballots. Retired professor Martha Cruz, 67, says she'll mark hers with a large X. Diego Aragon, 32, a coca farmer in Chapare, plans to paste a coca leaf on his paper in a nod to Morales' legalization of the medicinal plant, maligned during the U.S.-backed war on drugs as the base product in cocaine. Clothing vendor Daniela Cusi, 44, wants to take her time in the voting booth. 'I'm going to bring paint and draw his pretty little face all over,' she said. Voter cynicism intensifies With just days to go before the election, Nulo is drawing even some of Morales' detractors who prefer to vote for nothing than back any of the uncharismatic candidates. 'I'm done with Evo, but I have no information about these other candidates,' said Diana Mamani, 30, selling shivering lambs at a market in the far reaches of El Alto. 'The right-wing spends all this money on propaganda but they haven't bothered to come out here.' The two right-wing candidates, Quiroga and Doria Medina, have run for president and lost three times before. Despite disenchantment over his autocratic tendencies, sexual abuse cases and profligate state spending, Morales, as Bolivia's first Indigenous president, retains a level of fervent support that no other candidate can claim. 'I look in the mirror and realize I am just like him,' said Cristina Sonco, 43, a worker at the scenic cable car linking La Paz to El Alto, one of the many infrastructure projects Morales built as president. Like Morales, Sonco is an Aymara, the Indigenous group forming the majority of Bolivia's population. Recalling how his presidency reduced inequality and increased her rights in a country historically dominated by a white and mestizo, or mixed-race, elite, she started to weep. 'He's like a father to me,' she said. 'Not like these other candidates.' The light-skinned, Western-educated Quiroga and Doria Medina represent the same ruling class that Morales swept aside when he first rode to power in 2005, vowing to bury 20 years of pro-Washington, free-market policies that failed to lift Bolivians out of poverty. Bolivia's crisis summons ghosts of the past Twenty years later, Bolivia finds itself at the end of another historic cycle. Prices are rising and fuel is scarce. Families can no longer access their dollar savings. In some ways, analysts say, Sunday's elections could leave Morales right back where he started. 'I think that's why Morales is pushing for Nulo, not a left-wing vote,' said Aymara author Quya Reyna. 'It would suit him for the right-wing to come to power.' After all, Morales' past five years spent bickering with his former protégé wasn't a great look for the maverick leader, Reyna said, adding: 'He's much more comfortable confronting neoliberal administrations. That would lend him social legitimacy, even if he's not in the government or Congress.'
