Latest news with #antiCommunism
Bloomberg
4 days ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Polish Boxer-Turned-President Set for Showdown With Government
Karol Nawrocki has made a career out of fighting. An amateur boxing champion and self-confessed football hooligan, the historian-turned-politician has written books on anti-communist groups and organized crime. The fight will now turn to where Poland goes next after Nawrocki beat his government-backed rival in Sunday's presidential election runoff. As head of state, the 42-year-old nationalist is able to undermine Prime Minister Donald Tusk by vetoing key legislation, and he promised to 'save Poland' from a 'monopoly of evil power.'
CBS News
26-05-2025
- General
- CBS News
San Jose leaders to ask nonprofit to add South Vietnam flag to emoji list
As people continue to use emojis more and more frequently, the options are becoming even more important. San Jose leaders are now asking a nonprofit that standardizes emojis to include the flag of South Vietnam. The flag is already prominent in the city. At the Vietnamese Heritage Garden, three flags billow overhead: the American flag, the California flag, and a yellow flag with three red stripes representing South Vietnam. Many refugees, like District 7 City Councilmember Bien Doan, still resonate with it. "By having this freedom flag, it means so much to them," said Doan about some of the Vietnamese community. Doan immigrated to the U.S. back in 1975, right around the end of the Vietnam War. "We had to," Said Doan about his experience. "The communists had taken over Saigon and if we didn't get out, my father would have been imprisoned for a long time." It's a story shared by many Vietnamese immigrants from that time. The flag of South Vietnam is no longer an official flag, but still remains a powerful symbol of anti-communism and cultural heritage. But on most standard smartphones, the only option is the flag representing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Doan's team found this out the hard way. "It started out with a mistake," explained Doan. "One of my vendors punched up Vietnam and an emoji popped up with the red flag and the yellow star, and the community got a little upset about that. Within five minutes, we pulled it down, but by having that it brought it to my attention." He realized just how many people felt a lack of representation. That encouraged him to lead an effort to formally request that the nonprofit that standardizes emojis, Unicode Consortium, based in Mountain View, add the flag of South Vietnam. "We got 11 of us to sign on," said Doan. "Meaning all of the councilmembers, including the mayor." There are already more than 200 flag options on the emoji keyboard. He says this isn't about taking away the Vietnam flag that's already there, but adding another choice. "If you look at many other emojis, you have many, many different options, and why can't we have that?" questioned Doan. "The freedom of choice, and that's what America is all about." Next, the city manager's office will bring the request to Unicode. Doan hopes to meet with leaders there. "We'll have a meeting with Unicode as well and tell them what is the story, how proud we are, what is the sacrifice," said Doan. "How do we bring this forward so when people punch up Vietnam, they will have a choice?" Unicode Consortium clients include tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. They did not respond at the time of this report.
Daily Mail
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Cruel irony for pro-Trump Cuban rapper... as he faces deportation
A pro-Trump Cuban rapper faces being deported for being an illegal migrant - despite his support for President Donald Trump. Eliexer Marquez Duany, who raps under the name El Funky, made the 2021 hip-hop song Patria Y Vida, which led Marco Rubio to introduce a law in the Senate named after it. But his application for residency under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act was denied and he posted to Facebook that he will be deported in 30 days. The rapper wrote: 'I have 30 days to leave the country or I will be deported. I ask all my Cuban brothers and sisters who know of my anti-communist history and the members of Congress of this country, who need your support more than ever today.' He captioned a photo of himself holding a cardboard sign reading: 'SOS Cuba.' His anti-communist views will likely make returning to his homeland dangerous and could potentially land him in prison. When he fled Cuba in 2021 he was told: 'What we want is for you to leave. Go, but don't come back because you're not welcome here.' His song is not only banned on the island but two of his collaborators have been imprisoned for it. Rubio and other Cuban-American members of Congress who have celebrated El Funky's music in the past have not commented on his case. Republican Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida is the only notable public figure to take up his case. 'El Funky is a political refugee who deserves the full protection of U.S. immigration law,' she told Politico. 'We are working with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to ensure they understand the serious risk of torture and political persecution he faces if returned to Cuba.' Salazar has said they have been making progress on El Funky's case. Statement: 'I have 30 days to leave the country or I will be deported,' he told his followers The silence from the Trump administration hasn't changed the rapper's support for the president. 'If I could vote, I would have voted for Trump. He's the strongest president when it comes to Cuba,' he said. El Funky has since married a Cuban-American woman and gotten a steady job while continuing his recording career. But his application for residency came at a time when the law was in limbo, as Trump had limited it under his first term. Joe Biden attempted to come up with a workaround program but it was also limited. El Funky is now hastily attempting to file for asylum after his CAA application was denied without any reason. However, he still sees Trump's point, while wishing he could receive sympathy from the administration. 'There are probably too many people here. I understand trying to get rid of those who shouldn't be here. But Trump should look at each individual case. Like mine.' Making El Funky's case even more difficult is Trump's request to the Supreme Court to revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States. The announcement was made by Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem on a notice to a Federal Register in March, the latest expansion of his crackdown on immigration. The order applies to about 532,000 people from the four countries who came to the United States since October 2022 under a program called CHNV that the Biden administration was heavily criticized for. Uncertainty still remains for some 240,000 Ukrainians who sought refuge in the US following the Russian invasion in 2021. Trump was said to be considering ending their legal status even before recent tensions between Washington and Kyiv. The migrants losing legal status arrived with financial sponsors and were given two-year permits to live and work in the U.S. Noem said they will lose their legal status in 30 days after the publication of the notice in the Federal Register. The new policy impacts people who are already in the U.S. and who came under the humanitarian parole program.
Fox News
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Reagan admin official who helped America defeat communism dead at age 83
Michael A. Ledeen, a major American historian and intellectual, died after suffering a series of small strokes on Sunday at his residence in Maryland. He was 83 years old. Ledeen was a vigorous participant in contributing to the demise of the communist Soviet Union and its Iron Curtain allies in Eastern Europe. Ledeen served as a special advisor on terrorism to President Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig, and later worked as a consultant for the National Security Council. Writing for the Asia Times, author and journalist David P. Goldman argued that Ledeen's "personal contribution to America's victory in the Cold War is far greater than the public record shows." Goldman noted that the Reagan administration, in 1983, sent Ledeen, a scholar of Italian history and fascism, to meet Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi to convince the Italian leader to allow the U.S. to deploy Pershing missiles to counter rising Soviet jingoism. Goldman added, "The incident reflects the high trust that Ledeen commanded in the Reagan administration and the strategic role that he played." After Italy accepted the Pershings, the then-Social Democratic German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was reluctant for his nation to be first to house Pershing missiles, agreed to Reagan's demand. Leeden was a fan of former anti-communist American philosopher Sidney Hook, who declared during the Cold War that "Freedom is a fighting word." Ledeen would take his hard-charging world view against a new set of U.S. enemies after the ground zero of communism was defeated: radical Islamism in Iran, North Korea's totalitarian regime, and Arab and Latin American despots bent on the eradication of the U.S. In 2003, while working as the resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen wrote about former President George W. Bush's Axis of Evil (Iran, North Korea and Iraq), "Most commentators ridiculed the very idea of the Axis of Evil, just as they laughed at Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire. The deep thinkers laughed at Reagan, and then somberly warned that such language was not only misguided but provocative, as if the Kremlin would be more aggressive as a result of the president's speech." Ledeen stressed the importance of American leadership breeding inspiration among dissidents trapped in totalitarian systems: "The greatest of the Soviet freedom fighters, from [Vladimir] Bukovsky to [Natan] Sharansky, have since written about the surge of hope they felt when they saw that the American president understood why they were fighting." He would bring his same intellectual freedom toolkit to his principal worry in this century: the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ledeen garnered enormous respect and praise from Iranian dissidents seeking to dissolve the theocratic regime in Tehran, the world's worst state-sponsor of terrorism, according to the U.S. State Department. His wife, Barbara, told Fox News Digital about her late husband, "My only regret is that he didn't outlive the regime." Leeden did not advocate military intervention in Iran. He was in the business of replicating Reagan's anti-Soviet playbook for Iran's clerical regime. He told Fox News Brit Hume in 2005 that "the Western world, and in particular the United States" needs to support political prisoners in Iran and demonstrations against the regime. He told Hume, "We should be giving money to the various ... Farsi-language broadcasters, some here, some in England, some in Sweden and so forth, some in Germany, to go on the air and share with the Iranian people the now-demonstrated techniques for a successful, nonviolent revolution." He coined the phrase "Faster, please!" for his widely read blog at PJ Media to denote the great urgency to dismantle America's enemies and stop Islamist-animated terrorism. Ledeen was born in Los Angeles in 1941 and authored numerous books on national security, including "Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair." He earned a Ph.D. in history and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His academic advisor at Wisconsin was the prominent historian George Mosse, who fled Nazi Germany because of antisemitism. Ledeen cultivated a new generation of academics, journalists, think tank scholars and authors at his Chevy Chase home. His residence became a kind of informal salon for intellectuals and foreign policy types who had freshly arrived in Washington, D.C. He was also a top-level bridge player and won a national championship, the Truscott/U.S.P.C. Senior Teams. He is survived by his wife, a daughter, Simone, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense during the first Trump administration, and his two sons, former Marine Corps officers Gabriel and Daniel.
