Tag: assassinations

Japan’s Shinzo Abe assassination: Who is suspect Tetsuya Yamagami?

The 41-year-old suspect in the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reportedly has told police Friday that he was dissatisfied with the ex-leader and wanted to kill him, but not over his political beliefs. 

Tetsuya Yamagami, who hails from Nara – where the 67-year-old Abe was gunned down while making a speech – is currently facing an attempted murder charge. But local police are expected to upgrade the charge to murder, according to Japanese broadcaster NHK. 

“Former Prime Minister Abe was giving a speech normally, but a man came from behind. The first shot heard only a very loud sound and the person did not fall down. However, the moment the second shot was shot, former Prime Minister Abe collapsed,” a witness told NHK. “The [suspect] didn’t seem to run away, he stayed there and the gun was there.” 

The killing has sent shockwaves around the world and throughout Japan, a country with notoriously strict gun ownership laws. 

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Transgender Activist Who Created ‘Gender Unicorn’ Calls for ‘Supreme Court Assassination Challenge’

A transgender activist who creates widely distributed educational resources for nonbinary students called for a “Supreme Court assassination challenge” on the same day Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Eli Erlick, a founder of Trans Student Educational Resources (TSER) and creator of a popular “Gender Unicorn” graphic for “gender fluidity,” tweeted and later deleted the remark on Friday, when the High Court delivered its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Since 2011, Erlick and the “youth-led” organization have helped implement transgender policies in dozens of school districts, including Wisconsin, New York, and Texas. The group backs sweeping “structural change” as opposed to “equality,” which according to its website, “reinforces systems of white supremacy, transphobia, and injustice.”

Following the leaked Dobbs decision in May, pro-abortion activists have targeted pro-life offices and crisis pregnancy centers across the country. Vandals firebombed pro-life buildings in Wisconsin and New York and defaced four pro-life churches in Washington State. Fears heightened in June when an armed California man was arrested outside the home of Brett Kavanaugh and later confessed to plans to assassinate the justice.

Assassination threats, sometimes from accounts with thousands of followers, erupted on social media on the day the Court ended constitutional protection for abortion.

“Can someone kill Clarence Thomas??” an account with more than 14,000 followers tweeted. The post hadn’t been taken down as of this article’s publication.

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Man With Gun Arrested Near Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Home; Told Police He Was There to Kill Kavanaugh

A California man was arrested overnight near the Maryland home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The man reportedly told police he was there to kill Kavanaugh. After the story broke, the Supreme Court issued a statement confirming the incident.

New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz posted to Twitter, “Breaking: A man was arrested outside of Brett Kavanaugh’s residence around 1:45am last night. The man had a gun and said he was there to kill Kavanaugh. He was taken into custody without incident…I can confirm the man taken into custody outside of Brett Kavanaugh’s house last night is a 26 year old white male with a California driver’s license. Previous address in Seattle…I got it direct from a source but should be out soon.”

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New Evidence Implicates CIA, LAPD, FBI and Mafia as Plotters in Elaborate “Hit” Plan to Prevent RFK From Ever Reaching White House

On June 5, 1968, a few minutes after midnight, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while walking through a narrow serving area called “the pantry.” Kennedy had just won the California primary and was on his way to a room where print media reporters were waiting to hear him speak.

In early March, Lyndon B. Johnson had thrown open the race by announcing that he would not seek re-election because of the failure of his Vietnam policy. Kennedy emerged as a leading contender by energizing the youth wing of the party with his calls for sweeping social change.

Kennedy was in many ways a strange liberal icon because he grew up idolizing Herbert Hoover, was closest in his family to his father, Joseph, the millionaire business tycoon, began his career supporting Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt, called for victory against communism in Vietnam in the early 1960s, and oversaw a terrorist campaign designed to overthrow the Cuban government.

Nevertheless, by the latter part of the 1960s, Kennedy had evolved into a crusader for the poor and dove on Vietnam who was trying to ride the wave of the protest movement into the White House.[1]

Biographers Lester and Irene David wrote that Bobby was the Kennedy who “felt deepest, cared the most, and fought the hardest for humanity—crying out against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, championing the causes of blacks, Hispanics, and Mexican-Americans, and crusading against the suffering of children, the elderly and anyone else hurt or bypassed by social and economic progress.”[2]

After Kennedy’s death, the Democratic Party became a shadow of its former self, with six of the next nine presidents being Republicans. The Party in this period abandoned its core base—union laborers, minorities, and blue-collar workers—focusing instead on Wall Street.

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Nixon’s Plan to Threaten the CIA on JFK’s Assassination

The Washington Post dubbed it “the smoking gun tape.” It was the recording that doomed the presidency of Richard Nixon. The transcript of a conversation that took place on June 23, 1972, when made public by Supreme Court order in July 1974, became the climactic revelation of the Watergate affair, proving beyond all doubt that Nixon used CIA director Richard Helms to suborn the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate burglars.

Fifty years after the botched break-in that transformed American politics, the gangsterly dialogue of the smoking gun tape is less shocking than Trumpian. Blackmail as a mode of White House politics? President 45 had nothing on President 37.

“We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon growled on the tape. “You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, [ex-CIA man and Watergate burglar Howard] Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”

Nixon advised chief of staff H.R. Haldeman on how to get the CIA director to kill the FBI’s probe.

“Say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that, ah, without going into the details … don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’”

The June 23 tape was incontrovertible evidence that Nixon had obstructed justice. The last vestige of support for Nixon on Capitol Hill evaporated. Two weeks later, on Aug. 8, 1974, Nixon resigned.

But the “smoking gun tape” was not only the denouement of the Watergate affair. It was — and is — an unsettling glimpse into the dark heart of the Watergate scandal, and the workings of American power in the mid-20th century. The commander in chief voiced ominous threats that reeked of unspoken crimes to his intelligence chief, whose agency had employed four of the seven burglars. For the next 50 years, Nixon’s entourage, JFK conspiracy theorists, journalists and historians pondered the June 23 tape as a Rosetta Stone of Nixon’s psyche. What “hanky panky” was Nixon referring to? What did he mean by “the whole Bay of Pigs thing?” What story was going to “blow” if the CIA didn’t cooperate?

A long-overlooked White House tape provides the answers. The “hanky panky” referred to CIA assassination operations in the early 1960s. The “whole Bay of Pigs thing” was the Agency’s reaction to its most humiliating defeat. And the story that might blow was the connection between those events and the murder of JFK.

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Former Judge Killed in ‘Targeted’ Attack Against Judicial System, Officials Say

A retired judge was shot and killed at his home in Wisconsin on Friday in what has been described by officials as a “targeted” attack against the judicial system.

John Roemer, a former circuit judge in Juneau County, is believed to be the victim of the murder that happened in New Lisbon at around 6:30 a.m. on June 3, according to reports. The 68-year-old man was found in a residence that a neighbor and public records said belonged to a retired county judge.

A second person, identified as a 56-year-old male and the alleged suspect, was discovered in the basement of the home with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said during a news conference on Friday, also noting that a firearm was recovered from the scene.

Upon recovering the man, law enforcement started life-saving measures and the individual has been transported to a medical facility in critical condition.

Kaul, who refused to name the victim or the suspect, said the shooter had selected targets who were “part of the judicial system” and had other planned victims. The attorney general did not identify them.

“This incident appears to be a targeted act … and the suspect appears to have had other targets as well. It appears to be related to the judicial system,” Kaul said.

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Attempted Reagan assassin John Hinckley to get unconditional release, judge confirms

John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of President Ronald Reagan, will receive an unconditional release from prison, a federal judge has confirmed.

Hinckley, 67, attempted to assassinate Reagan in 1981. U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman announced Hinckley will be released on June 15. The judge previously announced in September that Hinckley would be released so long as he remained in good behavior, which he has.

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