Tag: assassinations

Revealed: Pensioner poet, 71, accused of shooting Slovakian PM was filmed chanting ‘long live Ukraine!’ – after he gave up his steady life and book club to form anti-violence party when he was attacked at the supermarket by a drunk man

Alleged gunman Juraj Cintula, 71, is facing life in prison if convicted of the ‘lone wolf’, ‘politically motivated’ attack that rocked Europe.

Populist allies of Robert Fico have tried to seize on the shooting with calls to close the Liberal Party and crack down on the free media with some characterising the would-be assassin as a liberal.

But enquiries reveal the poet and retired security guard has a muddled political background having rallied against communism, migrants, and violence – with links to a pro-Russian militia.

Friends in Cintula’s hometown of Levice, western Slovakia, described him as ‘rebellious when he was young, but not aggressive’.

The grey-haired, bearded grandfather wrote poems while chairman of the Duha Literary Club in his hometown and published a racist book on ‘eyeless gypsies’ in 2015.

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Slovakia’s Populist Prime Minister Robert Fico Has Been Shot

Slovakia’s populist prime minister Robert Fico has been shot, according to breaking news reports, after which he was rushed to the hospital and appears to be alive according to early reports. But some reports have listed his condition as “very serious” and that he had to be airlifted.

According to emerging details in The Associated Press, Fico “was injured in a shooting and taken to hospital. The incident took place in the town of Handlova, some 150 kilometers northeast of the capital, according to the news television station TA3.”

Local authorities say that a suspect is in custody. The shooting happened in front of the House of Culture where a government meeting was taking place.

One eyewitness “saw the prime minister being lifted from the ground by security guards and loaded into a car and driven away.”

Several people were greeting Fico and the moment the shots rang out, after which the prime minister fell to the ground. The would-be assassin was then taken by police. No details have been released as to the extent of his injuries.

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BLM activist Quintez Brown who was arrested for trying to kill a Jewish mayoral candidate showed ‘allegiance to anti-Semitic causes including Lion of Judah Armed Forces’ on his social media accounts

A Black Lives Matter activist who was charged with attempted murder last week following an alleged assassination attempt on a Jewish mayoral candidate exhibited anti-Semitic views on social media.

Quintez Brown, 21, was arrested and charged with attempted murder shortly after Monday’s shooting in Louisville, Kentucky, in which Democratic candidate Craig Greenberg narrowly avoided the bullet.

But he was released from prison and placed under house arrest just two days after the shooting when a BLM chapter, the Louisville Community Bail Fund, posted his $100,000 bond. 

In the months leading up to the shooting, Brown’s social media posts showed an increasing interest in Black nationalist and pan-Africanist leaders, and last week he appeared to encourage his followers to join the Lion of Judah Armed Forces. 

The group shares similar ideas to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which claims that Black Americans are the true descendants of the Biblical Hebrews and has been associated with several murders of Jews in the US.

Brown was one of 22 people chosen to meet the former President of the United States in 2019 as part of Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, which is aimed at closing achievement gaps facing young boys and men of color.

He also made regular appearances on the BBC to discuss race matters in the US, and was running as an independent candidate for Louisville’s metro council. 

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An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India

The White House went to extraordinary lengths last year to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a state visit meant to bolster ties with an ascendant power and potential partner against China.

Tables on the South Lawn were decorated with lotus blooms, the symbol of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. A chef was flown in from California to preside over a vegetarian menu. President Biden extolled the shared values of a relationship “built on mutual trust, candor and respect.”

But even as the Indian leader was basking in U.S. adulation on June 22, an officer in India’s intelligence service was relaying final instructions to a hired hit team to kill one of Modi’s most vocal critics in the United States.

The assassination is a “priority now,” wrote Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, according to current and former U.S. and Indian security officials.

Yadav forwarded details about the target, Sikh activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, including his New York address, according to the officials and a U.S. indictment. As soon as the would-be assassins could confirm that Pannun, a U.S. citizen, was home, “it will be a go ahead from us.”

Yadav’s identity and affiliation, which have not previously been reported, provide the most explicit evidence to date that the assassination plan — ultimately thwarted by U.S. authorities — was directed from within the Indian spy service. Higher-ranking RAW officials have also been implicated, according to current and former Western security officials, as part of a sprawling investigation by the CIA, FBI and other agencies that has mapped potential links to Modi’s inner circle.

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Yet Another Drug War Failure

An especially hot news item in 2024 has been the surge of drug-related violence in Ecuador.  Until recent years, Ecuador was hailed as an island of relative stability in the swirling violence of the illegal drug trade in the Western hemisphere.  The situation there contrasted with the level of chaos and violence in neighboring countries such as Peru and Colombia, as well as the central arena of drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America.  American retirees found the country to be an especially appealing destination.

That presumption of stability was always somewhat exaggerated.  In Ecuador violent criminal gangs “have existed for decades,” security analyst David Saucedo notes, “but with the arrival of the Mexican cartels, such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), they made local alliances, and in this way, they became their operating arms for drug trafficking.”

The notion of today’s Ecuador as one of Latin America’s safer countries is a tenacious episode of nostalgia.  The murder rate in that country has soared from 6.9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019 to 26.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, and preliminary statistics indicate that the upward trend is continuing.  When voters elected Daniel Noboa president in October 2023, he made it clear that he would take an especially hard line against the drug cartels.  Drug policy experts now talk about Ecuador with similar degrees of concern that they had reserved for Mexico and other central players in the drug trade.

Even members of the political elite in Ecuador are increasingly vulnerable to the violence.  One prominent candidate in the October 2023 presidential election was assassinated just eleven days before the balloting.  Shortly thereafter, Ecuador’s youngest mayor, Brigette Garcia, was kidnapped and murdered in the coastal town of San Vicente.  Following the January 2024 unrest, new President Daniel Noboa declared an “internal armed conflict” and ordered national security forces to neutralize more than 20 armed groups classified as “terrorists.”

Despite such spectacular policy failures, drug warriors in the United States and other countries cling to hard-line strategies and refuse to face an inconvenient economic truth.  Governments are not able to dictate whether people use mind-altering substances.  Such vices have been part of human culture throughout history.  Governments can determine only whether reputable businesses or violent criminal gangs are the suppliers.  A prohibition strategy guarantees that it will be the latter – with all the accompanying violence and corruption.  The ongoing bloody struggles among rival cartels to control the lucrative trafficking routes to the United States merely confirm that historical pattern.

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CIA Secrecy On JFK Points To Criminal Culpability

More than 30 years ago, Congress enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Enacted in the wake of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, which posited that the Kennedy assassination was a regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, the law mandated that all the assassination-related records of the Pentagon, the CIA, the Secret Service, the FBI, and other federal agencies be released to the public. Having succeeded in keeping their assassination-related records secret for almost 30 years, they didn’t like that at all.

Today — more than 60 years after the assassination — the CIA continues to keep thousands of its assassination-related records secret. Its justification? You guessed it: “national security,” the two most powerful and meaningless words in the American political lexicon. CIA officials maintain, with straight faces, that if those still-secret assassination-related records were released, the United States would fall into the ocean, be taken over by communists, or have its “national security” endangered in some other silly way.

How in the world can “national security” be threatened by the release of records that are more than 60 years old, regardless of what definition is placed on that nebulous term? Indeed, how can any American really believe this nonsense? They obviously take Americans for dupes.

It is a virtual certainty that those still-secret records contain circumstantial evidence that further confirms criminal culpability on the part of the CIA and the Pentagon in the assassination of President Kennedy. After all, the CIA knows that that is precisely what most everyone is thinking with respect to the continued secrecy of those records. Why would the CIA want to leave people thinking that? One reason: Because it’s better to have people thinking that those records contain incriminating evidence rather than knowing that they do.

What could the CIA be hiding with those still-secret records? The answer necessarily has to be speculative in nature, but my hunch is that some of the still-secret information deals with Mexico City, where the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have met with Cuban and Soviet officials.

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Keith Olbermann suggests ‘hope’ for Trump’s assassination in X post

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann appeared to “hope” that former President Trump would be assassinated in a recent X post that prompted calls for his banishment from the social media platform.

Olbermann was referring to the Biden-Harris HQ X account flagging a clip of Trump saying he had been persecuted worse than any president in history, including Abraham Lincoln.

“Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated,” the Biden campaign account posted on Saturday.

“There’s always the hope,” Olbermann wrote, linking to the post.

Olbermann, a far-left personality known for his inflammatory comments, has also recently called for the dissolution of the Supreme Court.

One account that responded to Olbermann’s post suggested the commentator’s account should be “permanently suspended” for appearing to endorse someone killing Trump, the presumptive nominee for the 2024 Republican nomination. Trump is trying to become only the second president since Grover Cleveland to win another White House term after losing a previous re-election bid.

Multiple major media outlets and political figures have criticized Trump in the wake of an Ohio campaign speech in which he argued that the American auto industry would experience a “bloodbath” if Biden were to be re-elected in November.

While speaking to CNN “State of The Union” host Dana Bash on Sunday, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stressed that Trump cannot win the upcoming election and spun his “bloodbath” remark as possibly being a threat to Americans.

“We have – we just have to win this election because he‘s even predicting a bloodbath. What does that mean? He‘s going to exact a bloodbath?” she asked.

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Inside the mystery of Jackie Kennedy’s pink suit: Blood-soaked ensemble worn by former First Lady on the day JFK was assassinated has NEVER been cleaned – and will sit in windowless, climate-controlled room at a secret location for another 80 YEARS

Take a look back at the fascinating true story of the blood-soaked pink suit that former First Lady Jackie Kennedy was wearing when her husband, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated – which has still never been washed, despite being covered in gore, and now sits in a temperature-controlled windowless room in a secret location.

Jackie wore the two-piece set on the fateful day in November 1963 when her husband was brutally killed a mere inches from her while they were riding in the back of an open-topped limo in Dallas, Texas, together.

During the horrific shooting and its aftermath, JFK’s blood splattered across the outfit, but his mourning widow refused to take it off afterwards – and it’s been said that she insisted on continuing to wear it because she wanted his killers to ‘see what they had done.’

The entire world was devastated by JFK’s shock passing and quickly became engulfed in the events that transpired on that devastating day, so it comes as no surprise that the ensemble is now a major part of history.

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Two Mexican candidates for mayor are shot dead in Mexico just hours apart – marking SEVEN political murders in the country this year ahead of election in June

Two mayoral candidates have been shot dead in the span of less than 24 hours in Mexico – marking the seventh political murders ahead of the June general elections.

Diego Pérez, who was running for office in the southern state of Chiapas, was found dead Thursday.

His body showed signs of torture and was left lying next to his wife and son, who were both wounded.

Pérez was the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s nominee for mayor of San Juan Cancuc.

‘We strongly call on the authorities to clarify these facts and punish those responsible,’ the Institutional Revolutionary Party said in a statement.

‘The government cannot continue denying reality: More than 110 acts of violence related to the electoral process demand that measures be taken to guarantee the safety of all and prevent organized crime from being the one who chooses on June 2, and not good citizens.’

Tomás Morales, who aspired to become the mayor of Chilapa, a municipality in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, was executed Wednesday night.

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Widow, ex-prime minister and former police chief indicted in 2021 assassination of Haiti’s president

A judge in Haiti responsible for investigating the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise indicted his widow, Martine Moise, ex-prime minister Claude Joseph and the former chief of Haiti’s National Police, Leon Charles, among others, in a report released Monday.

The indictments are expected to further destabilize Haiti as it struggles with a surge in gang violence and recovers from a spate of violent protests demanding the resignation of current Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

Dozens of suspects were indicted in the 122-page report issued by Walther Wesser Voltaire, who is the fifth judge to lead the investigation after previous ones stepped down for various reasons, including fear of being killed.

Charles, who was police chief when Moise was killed and now serves as Haiti’s permanent representative to the Organization of the American States, faces the most serious charges: murder; attempted murder; possession and illegal carrying of weapons; conspiracy against the internal security of the state; and criminal association.

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