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CONSPIRACY theorists are buzzing about John Kerry's connection to Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassina tion. While no one in the lunatic fringe has gone so far as to suggest Kerry helped kill Kennedy — yet — they make much of the fact that a cousin of Kerry's, Michael Paine, was a close friend of Oswald who fre quently had the assassin as a house guest. Paine even stored the rifle Oswald used to shoot Kennedy at his house. Paine's mother, Ruth Forbes, and Kerry's mother, Rosemary Forbes, were cousins.[snip] ...according to documents released under the JFK Documents...

Naushon Island Naushon Island has been a Forbes family retreat for some time, where the opium trader John Murray Forbes and his family summered for more than a century. Sen. John Forbes Kerry and his first cousin Brice Lalonde summered there, and at another Forbes family estate in France, at Saint-Brieuc when he was growing up. The family owns the island through the J.M. Forbes Naushon Island Trust. Naushon island is several miles long, just off (SW of) Cape Cod in the Elizabeth Islands, and NW of Martha's Vineyard. The island is owned by the family and they pay little...

(RNS) More than 50 conservative Catholic activists and political leaders have come out in support of Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz in an effort to shore up Catholic backing for Cruz as an alternative to Donald Trump. Among them is a priest from South Carolina who may be skirting the edges of his own church’s policies against clerics becoming involved in politics. Trump is currently leading the three-man GOP field and has drawn strong primary support from Catholic voters despite his controversial rhetoric and past stands on key issues like abortion rights, which he once supported. The Catholics endorsing Cruz,...

Donald Trump is the catalyst who could force a decisive break between Miami-Dade County’s influential Cuban-American voters and the Republican Party, a new poll has found. Local Cuban Americans dislike Trump so much — and are increasingly so accepting of renewed U.S.-Cuba ties pushed by Democratic President Barack Obama — that Trump’s likely presidential nomination might accentuate the voters’ political shift away from the GOP, according to the survey shared with the Miami Herald and conducted by Dario Moreno, a Coral Gables pollster and a Florida International University associate politics professor...

Donald Trump on Tuesday alleged that Ted Cruz’s father was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin shortly before he murdered the president, parroting a National Enquirer story claiming that Rafael Cruz was pictured with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963. A Cruz campaign spokesperson told the Miami Herald, which pointed out numerous flaws in the Enquirer story, that it was “another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage.” “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said Tuesday...

see what happens when they run out of beer: Venezuela's opposition said it delivered 1.85 million signatures to the country's elections authority on Monday as part of the process of seeking a recall referendum against President Nicolas Maduro. Food and medicine shortages, triple-digit inflation, rampant violent crime and increasingly frequent water and power cuts have stoked anger against Maduro. The Democratic Unity coalition (MUD) gathered far more than the required 1 percent of voters' signatures, or nearly 200,000, needed to trigger the next phase of a recall referendum. "With this successful strategy the MUD has progressed in achieving urgent political...

A boisterous welcome greeted the first American visitors to walk out the Sierra Maestra cruise terminal. Several hundred Cubans gathered in Plaza de San Francisco to witness the historic arrival. "I am here just to see it," said Mayalin Suarez Rubio, 41, a Cuban whose daughter lives in Hialeah. "We say welcome."

Cities across Venezuela are increasingly agitated, as government offices closed their doors for the rest of the week in the face of a worsening energy crisis that is causing daily blackouts. Venezuela is among the world's most violent countries, and crime generally spikes here when the lights go out. Looting and fiery protests starting spreading Wednesday in Caracas, as hundreds of angry voters lined up to sign a petition beginning the process of recalling the deeply unpopular President Nicolas Maduro. The socialist administration began imposing a four-hour daily blackout around the country this week to save electricity. Then, Maduro announced...

State and local officials opposed to President Obama’s plan to transfer terrorism detainees from Guantanamo Bay to the mainland U.S. will get a platform to air their concerns Thursday during a House hearing. Republican Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina is among the witnesses who will testify in opposition to the administration’s plan, at the session held by the Homeland Security’s oversight subcommittee. South Carolina is one of the states where the administration is considering transferring detainees, a plan that would need to be approved by a deeply skeptical Congress. Mr. Obama, whose campaign pledge to close the prison is...

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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Venezuelan cities cleaned up from a night of looting and fiery protests Wednesday as government offices closed their doors for the rest of the week in the face of a worsening energy crisis that is causing daily blackouts. The socialist administration began imposing a four-hour daily blackout around the country this week to save power. Then on Tuesday, President Nicolas Maduro announced that millions of officials will now work only Monday and Tuesday.

A disturbing video of a crowd physically beating each other to get at a select few bags of onions outside a supermarket in Venezuela highlights the struggle the average Venezuelan must endure to keep his or her family fed in the increasingly impoverished socialist nation.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's socialist government ordered public workers on Tuesday to work a two-day week as an energy-saving measure in the crisis-hit South American OPEC country. President Nicolas Maduro had already given most of Venezuela's 2.8 million state employees Fridays off during April and May to cut down on electricity consumption. Water shortages and electricity cuts have added to the hardships of Venezuela's 30 million people, already enduring a brutal recession, shortages of basics from milk to medicines, soaring prices, and long lines at shops.

WASHINGTON -- The National Enquirer has published what it says is conclusive evidence that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael B. Cruz, is the man photographed next to JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald distributing pro-Castro leaflets in 1963 in New Orleans. The Cruz presidential campaign fired back unequivocally. “This is another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage,” communications director Alice Stewart told McClatchy. “The story is false; that is not Rafael in the picture.” The explosive suggestion that Cruz’s father would have had any affiliation with Oswald is not corroborated in any other way. Cuban-born Rafael Cruz is now a...

DO YOU remember when Donald Trump crudely mocked the disability of a New York Times reporter, and then lied about having done so? No? That’s just as the Republican candidate might hope. Now that he is nearing the Republican nomination, he says he will become more “presidential.” After winning the New York primary, he referred to “Senator Cruz” instead of “Lyin’ Ted.” You can expect multitudes of office-seekers and sycophants to follow Chris Christie’s craven path to believing, or pretending to believe, in a presidential Trump. So it is important to remember. Remember that Mr. Trump said that Mexicans crossing...

Sanders, he says, is a "false prophet" who could be as dangerous as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.With Donald Trump putting Mexico at the center of the Republican presidential conversation, the country's former president, Vicente Fox, has gone hard at the GOP front-runner, saying, "He reminds me of Hitler." But Fox, who served as president from 2000 to 2006, has some comparisons for Bernie Sanders that are not much more flattering. "In Latin America, we have a century of experience of suffering from messianic, populist leaders that have broken our economies, that have brought poverty into all of Latin America,"...

Venezuela's government has said it will turn off electricity supply in its 10 most populous states for four hours a day for at least 40 days to deal with a severe power shortage.(Snip)Recently, the country's main brewery Polar, which is part of Venezuela's largest cooperative Empresas Polar, announced that it would stop production as a result of financial difficulties. The company, which produces 80 percent of the country's beer, says thousands of workers will lose their jobs as a result of the stoppage.

The 700-passenger cruise vessel Adonia, operated by the new Carnival Group "social impact" Cuba travel brand Fathom, has been prohibited from departing on its first cruise due to inoperable fire doors, the U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement Tuesday. The Adonia was to leave Sunday for its first weeklong trial cruise to the Dominican Republic, but a Coast Guard inspection found that 30 fire doors tested inoperable. A USCG spokesman told Cruise Critic that the agency was working with Carnival to get the problem corrected before Adonia sails. "The cruise ship failed several portions of the [inspection] ....

Living for nearly half a century in the United States offers no guarantee that one can stay. That is the reality facing Cuban exile activist Ramon Saul Sanchez, leader of the Democracy Movement, who received a letter Thursday from the federal government....

HAVANA — Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro delivered a valedictory speech Tuesday to the Communist Party that he put in power a half-century ago, telling party members he will soon die and exhorting them to help his ideas survive. “I’ll be 90 years old soon,” Castro said in his most extensive public appearance in years. “Soon I’ll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and...