Latest news with #pro-Soviet
Yahoo
29-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The JFK files: the truth at last?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. "It's been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH." So declared Donald Trump on the campaign trail, vowing to order the release of all official records related to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Last week that cache of documents, nearly 64,000 pages of it, was duly released, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Some are illegible owing to age, and it will take months for people to scour through them all. Many, though, will be eager to do so. The JFK assassination is the "source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking". Hosts of self-styled sleuths will be poring through them for evidence that Kennedy was killed by the Mafia or the CIA or the "Deep State". They won't find any, of course, said David Harsanyi in the New York Post, but that won't allay their suspicions. Why? Because conspiracy theorists aren't really looking for the truth; "they're looking for more questions". Still, it was high time these files were released. Washington's tendency to overclassify documents only fuels paranoia. They're unlikely to contain any revelations, but they should yield some intriguing titbits. And those are sure to be misinterpreted by conspiracy theorists. One file already much shared on social media, for instance, contained a copy of a 1967 article in Ramparts magazine casting suspicion on the death of Gary Underhill, a CIA man who died by suicide after JFK's death. This means nothing, as it happens: Ramparts was a pro-Soviet magazine that "blamed literally every modern atrocity on the CIA". So far, it seems that decades of secrecy were mainly protecting the CIA's murky practices, said Talya Minsberg et al in The New York Times: illegal surveillance, break-ins and the like. There's not a peep about any "second gunman". The only shocking thing about this data dump, said Jack Ohman in the San Francisco Chronicle, is that Trump hyped it up so much. But it's not the first time he has used JFK's killing for political advantage. In 2016, he falsely claimed the father of Ted Cruz, his Republican presidential rival, was implicated in it. His evidence? A blurry photo of Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans with a dark-haired man who wasn't Rafael Cruz. For all the fanfare over the JFK files, all it really shows is that Trump will "do anything for attention", including "exploiting the murder of a predecessor".
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Germany's Left party stages late poll surge with fiery call to the 'barricades'
By Leon Kuegeler BERLIN (Reuters) - The successor to East Germany's Communist Party has made a late surge two weeks before a national election after its leader stood up in parliament to lash the front-running conservatives for breaking a historic taboo on cooperating with the far right. Many legislators were numb after the conservatives passed a non-binding motion on restricting immigration on January 29 with the votes of the nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), unprecedented in a nation still painfully aware of its Nazi past. But Heidi Reichinnek was in her element. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. "To the barricades!" she shouted in a speech that, polls suggest, has single-handedly rescued her party from oblivion and added a late twist to the election campaign. Speaking so fast that the words tumbled over each other, the 36-year-old accused conservative leader Friedrich Merz of recklessness for letting the AfD claim its first parliamentary victory. "You still don't get it," she told Merz, drumming the lectern, before urging voters: "Stand up to fascism in this country!" The speech has been seen over 30 million times on social media and, while other parties' posts are more viewed, the Left's posts have more "likes" - suggesting that engagement is genuine and not the result of paid promotion. A month ago, the party was languishing below the 5% threshold needed to enter parliament, deflated by the defection of its best-known figure, Sahra Wagenknecht, who took half its legislators to set up her own leftist-nativist party. GERMANS PROTEST AT CONSERVATIVES' TOLERANCE OF FAR RIGHT But her Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) has flagged. It abstained on Merz's motion and, with the AfD, backed a similar draft law he attempted to pass two days later, disappointing those who had hoped it would be an anti-AfD bulwark. The vote sparked protests nationwide and Reichinnek, a social worker from eastern Germany now living in the west, seemed to satisfy a broad hunger for a stronger political repudiation of the AfD. The Left was still only scoring 7% in a survey released on Friday, but that was still its highest in years in a race of tight margins, with the BSW down at 4% from a high of 8%. As disquiet grows over the power of billionaires, much of its appeal lies in its hard-left economic policies: its president Jan van Aken, a former U.N. weapons inspector, often sports a "Tax the Rich" t-shirt. Merz's conservatives rule out working with a party whose predecessor ran a pro-Soviet dictatorship for 40 years, so it has almost no chance of entering government. But the Left's gains are a warning to the centre-left Social Democrats and Greens, who could be asked to help Merz form a ruling coalition after February 23. The Left is especially strong among fickle younger voters, where the SPD is weak, and its surge suggests that both the SPD and the ecologist-leftist Greens risk losing support on the left if they fish for voters on the right.
Reuters
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
Germany's Left party stages late poll surge with fiery call to the 'barricades'
BERLIN, Feb 14 (Reuters) - The successor to East Germany's Communist Party has made a late surge two weeks before a national election after its leader stood up in parliament to lash the front-running conservatives for breaking a historic taboo on cooperating with the far right. Many legislators were numb after the conservatives passed a non-binding motion on restricting immigration on January 29 with the votes of the nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), unprecedented in a nation still painfully aware of its Nazi past. But Heidi Reichinnek was in her element. "To the barricades!" she shouted in a speech that, polls suggest, has single-handedly rescued her party from oblivion and added a late twist to the election campaign. Speaking so fast that the words tumbled over each other, the 36-year-old accused conservative leader Friedrich Merz of recklessness for letting the AfD claim its first parliamentary victory. "You still don't get it," she told Merz, drumming the lectern, before urging voters: "Stand up to fascism in this country!" The speech has been seen over 30 million times on social media and, while other parties' posts are more viewed, the Left's posts have more "likes" - suggesting that engagement is genuine and not the result of paid promotion. A month ago, the party was languishing below the 5% threshold needed to enter parliament, deflated by the defection of its best-known figure, Sahra Wagenknecht, who took half its legislators to set up her own leftist-nativist party. GERMANS PROTEST AT CONSERVATIVES' TOLERANCE OF FAR RIGHT But her Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) has flagged. It abstained on Merz's motion and, with the AfD, backed a similar draft law he attempted to pass two days later, disappointing those who had hoped it would be an anti-AfD bulwark. The vote sparked protests nationwide and Reichinnek, a social worker from eastern Germany now living in the west, seemed to satisfy a broad hunger for a stronger political repudiation of the AfD. The Left was still only scoring 7% in a survey released on Friday, but that was still its highest in years in a race of tight margins, with the BSW down at 4% from a high of 8%. As disquiet grows over the power of billionaires, much of its appeal lies in its hard-left economic policies: its president Jan van Aken, a former U.N. weapons inspector, often sports a "Tax the Rich" t-shirt. Merz's conservatives rule out working with a party whose predecessor ran a pro-Soviet dictatorship for 40 years, so it has almost no chance of entering government. But the Left's gains are a warning to the centre-left Social Democrats and Greens, who could be asked to help Merz form a ruling coalition after February 23. The Left is especially strong among fickle younger voters, where the SPD is weak, and its surge suggests that both the SPD and the ecologist-leftist Greens risk losing support on the left if they fish for voters on the right.
