Category World News

The administration of US President Donald Trump declassified thousands of documents related to the 1963 murder of former president John F. Kennedy (JFK), whose death has fueled at least six decades of conspiracy theories.

What we currently know is as follows:

What number of documents were made public?

The US National Archives and Records Administration’s website hosted 2, 182 PDF documents that totaled 63,400 pages on Tuesday evening. Two rounds of the documents, a few hours apart, were released.

All records previously withheld for classification are available online or in person, according to the National Archives. Many of the documents had typewritten or handwritten signatures.

On January 23, Trump announced that all documents relating to the deaths of JFK, his younger brother, Senator Robert F Kennedy (RFK), and Martin Luther King, Jr., an activist for civil rights, would be declassified.

Trump made the announcement at the Kennedy Center on Monday that the documents would be made immediately. Released pages were anticipated to number at least 80 000.

It might take months for conspiracy theorists and historians to go over the new documents and understand what they contain.

JFK was killed when?

JFK, a Democrat, served as president of the United States from January 1961 until his death on November 22, 1963.

Along with his wife Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas governor John Connally, Connally’s wife Nelly Connally, Connally was shot dead while riding his motorcade through Dallas, Texas. Governor Connally was also hurt in the attack.

His vice president Lyndon B. Johnson sworn in as president after JFK’s death. Johnson commissioned an investigation into the assassination under the direction of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, a former marine turned communist activist, was ruled out by the Warren Commission as the sole perpetrator of the killing.

Why did JFK’s death spark a conspiracy?

Oswald was acting alone, out of the control of other domestic or international actors, according to the Warren Commission’s findings.

However, Kennedy’s murder at the height of the Cold War has always sparked speculation. According to a Gallup poll in November 2023, two-thirds of Americans now think Oswald acted with complices. The findings of the investigation have been doubted even more by the fact that several documents related to the assassination have been kept secret for decades.

“I’m just a patsy,” I say! Oswald was filmed saying something in a videotape of his arrest at the Dallas police headquarters. This is what Oswald claims was a scapegoat, according to many who disagree with the official narrative.

Oswald was shot and killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby as he was being transported from police headquarters to county jail two days after JFK’s death. Further bolstering the conspiracy was the lack of a trial, which allowed Oswald to reveal the identities of those he was working with or for.

A single 6. 5 millimeter bullet, according to the Warren Commission, claimed the lives of JFK and Governor Connally. Many people believe that two adult men’s bodies could have been the target of one bullet.

A second shot apparently struck JFK’s skull in the grisly footage that was captured by clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder. Before ABC News aired this frame of the video in 1975, it was not made public for many years.

Are the Kennedy files in their entirety available?

No, but the majority of them did.

According to Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for documents relating to the assassination, there were nearly 3,500 still redacted documents with the archives prior to Tuesday’s releases, according to The Associated Press. On Tuesday, there were a little over 2,000 releases.

However, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced last month that it had discovered 2,400 new assassination records. None of the recently discovered documents were included in the trove of files released on Tuesday, according to Morley.

Under pressure from the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency, Trump released 2,800 files regarding JFK’s death in his first year in office, but he did not release hundreds of others that were pending review. Former President Joe Biden made approximately 17, 000 more documents available in 2023.

The African National Congress (ANC) recruited Sue Dobson, a young white woman from Pretoria, as a spy within the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1986.

She was transported to Moscow for specialist training as part of her mission.

Dobson, who is now retired and resides in England, described it as a very intensive training course. It covered strategies for being out and about, secret writing, photography, and how to pick up surveillance. In addition to the street exercises, I would have to spot six or eight people who were following me, whether they were on foot or by car, by tram or in a train carriage, or something similar. ”

Although she had little free time, she did manage to spend a few days in Leningrad, which is now known as St. Petersburg.

She recalls that 1986 had to have been a wintertime event because everything was covered in snow. It was truly stunning. ”

She was hired by the Bureau of Information, the apartheid regime’s propaganda wing, as a reporter the following year. She was given access to ministers and other well-known information as a result of the job. However, when the authorities learned about her family’s connections to the ANC, her cover suddenly vanished.

According to Dobson, whose memoir Burned: The Spy South Africa Never Caught is a slang expression for the intelligence department, I was told to stay where I was and that I would be taken back to Pretoria on a plane with someone from Foreign Affairs, which was a slang for the intelligence department.

I had to travel to Botswana, and the Soviet diplomats there assisted me and took me on a plane to the UK because the game was over. ”

Dobson claimed she had not the knowledge to make a comment on Russia’s most recent full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

While Western powers have largely condemned the aggression against its neighbor, Africa has shown some unanticipated sympathy for the Kremlin.

In 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sparked the war, only half of African governments formally condemned Russia at the UN.

According to experts, this trend stems from Moscow’s long support of anti-imperialist causes.

Russia’s resistance to Western influence in Africa dates back to the 19th century. In the 1895-96 Italo-Ethiopian War, the Russian Empire provided weapons and other support for the Orthodox Christians who were plundering and dividing the continent during the Scramble for Africa.

However, Russian involvement has been greatly exaggerated, according to Oleksandr Polianichev, a historian of the Russian Empire in Ukraine.

Nikolai Leontiev, a Russian adventurer who arrived in Ethiopia in the early 1895s and buffed his way into Menelik II’s inner circle, is credited in large part with this narrative, according to Polianichev.

Leontiev lavishly described the crucial role he claimed to have played on the battlefield in his account of the Ethiopian resistance to Italy, claiming to be one of the decisive forces behind the Battle of Adwa victory. However, this was a self-serving  fiction . ”

Levittev is frequently credited with delivering a shipment of ammunition and weapons that helped Ethiopia withstand the Italian colonists.

According to Polianichev, the Russian government never delivered these weapons to Ethiopia in time, despite Leontiev’s request for the old Berdan rifles, which the Russian army was switching to the new Mosin rifles. The Italians detained the steamship, and the shipment didn’t arrive in Ethiopia until after the war was over. ”

Although Russia’s naval capabilities prevented Nikolai Ashinov, the leader of a band of Cossacks, from setting foot on Djibouti in 1889 and declaring it to be Russian territory, colonizing Africa for themselves was never a feasible idea. However, the French had already established a colony and quickly bombarded Ashinov’s settlement with warships.

Later, during the Cold War, the Soviets fought off Western-backed alliances in conflicts in Angola, Mozambique, and the Congo, but sometimes not successfully.

Under General Gamal Abdel Nasser, the USSR provided arms and infrastructure assistance to Egypt.

According to Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, an American historian of the USSR, “the Soviet Union had ideological and practical reasons to support anti-colonial movements and decolonization in the Global South.”

On the one hand, it was battling Western Europe and the United States to demonstrate that socialism was the ideal form of society and government. Following the end of the empire, socialist socialism was intended to serve as the blueprint for the establishment of new states’ economies and governments.

On the other hand, trade agreements helped the Soviet Union export goods to allies and provided the USSR with a range of natural resources imported at market rates from the Global South. Soviet infrastructure projects in Africa had the benefit of being reciprocally beneficial because the recipient state would receive a kind payment. ”

The Patrice Lumumba University, which is named in honor of the Congolese leader, was established in Moscow as part of its outreach to African countries. From the 1960s, about 500 scholarships were awarded to African students each year.

Some people, however, claimed to have been racist. A rare protest erupted in Red Square after Edmund Assare-Addo, a student from Ghana, was allegedly brutally murdered in 1963 due to an alleged interracial relationship.

According to St Julian-Varnon, “This was a glaring contradiction to Soviet propaganda in their home countries,” which portrayed the nation as the antithesis of European colonial powers.

The Soviet Union’s racism stories occasionally reached Western media and undermined Soviet attacks on American anti-Black racism. Despite the racism, African students in the Soviet Union and Russia continued to study because they saw the benefits of an education like this. ”

The Soviets have been supporting the ANC and its armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), since the 1960s, arming and training operatives like Sue Dobson, despite apartheid propaganda that depicted the USSR as savoring South Africa’s resources.

Dobson remarked, “I think the ANC would not forget the significance of the Soviet Union’s contribution to the ANC coming to power.”

It is something that is regarded and honored in my opinion.   Significant historical ties exist; going back to the very first ANC members; between the ANC and the USSR. who came to Moscow very early and read The Bolsheviks’ Book; regarding the liberation movement and revolution. ”

The government of South Africa is currently the ruling party of the ANC, and while maintaining a neutral stance, it may be a sign of lingering sympathies because many senior ANC members were educated or trained in the USSR, which Russia is regarded as the country’s replacement.

Russia’s anti-colonial narrative appeals, in essence.

At the local level, there is more outspoken pro-Russian support.

Counterprotesters in Durban who were waving Russian flags and playing the meme song Sigma Boy, a Russian pop hit, interrupted a small rally of South African Ukrainians in Durban in February.

Other locations on the continent are dotted with Russian flags.

In response to security concerns in nations like Mali and the Central African Republic, where local leaders have welcomed the support despite allegations of atrocities by Russian mercenaries, Moscow has forgiven the debts of several African nations and provided boots on the ground to address them.

According to historian Polianichev, the appeal of Russia’s “anti-colonial” narrative lies in its appeal to societies and ruling elites from throughout Eurasia and beyond, who are willing to accept or even embrace it as long as it aligns with their own political sensibilities.

Following the most recent budget cuts made by the administration of US President Donald Trump, pro-China commentators and Chinese state media have welcomed the de facto closure of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) in Taipei, Taiwan.

Following Trump’s defunding of the news outlets, the Global Times published an editorial over the weekend claiming that “the so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”

The daily paper described VOA as a “carefully crafted propaganda machine” whose “primary function is to serve Washington’s need to attack other nations based on ideological demands.”

Former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin, who wrote a post on the microblogging website Weibo, echoed his remarks.

The “US propaganda operatives'” were toppled by Nury Vittachi, a writer from Hong Kong who has written for state-run newspapers like China Daily.

According to Vittachi, “These groups issue “news” in 62 languages to sway 350 million people around the world to adopt a pro-American slant and poison people’s minds against Chinese, Russians, Iranians, and other people Washington views as adversaries or “allies”,” they say in a statement on X.

Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Mao Ning described VOA as a “lie factory that stirs up conflict” with a “notorious track record in their China coverage,” while declining to comment directly on the Trump administration’s domestic policies.

The Chinese Communist Party has relied on VOA and RFA to provide commentary and news that challenged Beijing’s position on sensitive issues like Taiwan and the ethnic minority of the Uighur.

According to the parent company of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), China was one of VOA’s initial target audiences when it first launched in the middle of World War II.

The outlet’s coverage expanded to 49 languages over the years, eventually claiming a 361 million-person global audience.

The smaller RFA, which was established in 1996, relied on a network of on-the-ground contacts throughout Asia to bring attention to areas like Tibet and Xinjiang, which are off the radar of the majority of Western journalists.

According to Bethany Allen, head of the program for China investigations and analysis at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, “Both RFA and VOA do something that essentially nobody else does, which is reach audiences inside China via non-internet means.”

People who otherwise wouldn’t have access to independent information are reached by VoA TV broadcasts and RFA radio. Many censorship-hacking tools are now prohibited in China, making them dangerous to use, and they are also too complicated, according to Allen.

RFA’s Uighur-language service became the first news outlet to cover the widespread detention of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang’s so-called “vocational education and training centers,” which in 2017 made headlines.

In 2021 and 2022, BuzzFeed News and Business Insider published articles about how the Uighurs were treated.

According to David Bandurski, director of the Taiwan-based China Media Project, RFA has also been “exceptional” in “covering stories unfolding on the ground in China that are not otherwise covered.”

Bandurski claimed that VOA has had “a significant impact on its history.”

Over the past 20 years, I’ve met a number of Chinese journalists and editors who recall listening to VOA on their shortwaves in the 1980s.

Trump signed an executive order on Friday, directing it to be “to the maximum extent in accordance with applicable law.”

About 1,300 VOA employees, or nearly the entire organization’s workforce, were on leave as of Saturday.

The Middle East Broadcasting Network and the Open Technology Fund, which were both founded during World War II to counter Nazi propaganda, are expected to lose due to Trump’s gutting of USAGM, whose 2024 budget stands at $886.7 million.

Trump and his allies have long criticized VOA and other publicly funded US media, claiming that they promote liberal bias and covert coverage of American adversaries.

VOA and its sister networks have received criticism for their journalistic standards, despite the widely condemned order by press freedom organizations and mainstream journalists.

The outlet’s “wildly inconsistent journalistic acumen of the language services” was a statement made in 2013 by former VOA journalist Gary Thomas in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Some people have a lot of journalistic expertise, while others are woefully lacking, according to Thomas.

The disparity is merely due to the difficulty of finding fluent speakers of a given language and having done so in-depth journalism as VOA has traditionally required, the author says.

Former US-based VOA journalist Tracy Wen Liu stated in a post on X on Monday that some of the network’s “capable and ambitious” Chinese-language reporters had concerns internally about the “lack of professionalism” in the newsroom before being expelled from promotion.

According to Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a South Korea-based religious group, over 4,000 members of the church who recovered from COVID-19 are willing to donate plasma for developing a new treatment.

Mr. Man Hee Lee, founder of the Shincheonji Church, said that members of the church are advised to donate plasma voluntarily. “As Jesus sacrificed himself with his blood for life, we hope that the blood of people can bring positive effects on overcoming the current situation,” said Mr. Lee.