CongRess hopes foR 100 seats

The Congress has asked Akhilesh Yadav for 100 seats in Uttar Pradesh and is willing to settle for 80 seats, if the alliance materialises. Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi are believed to have already met over dinner. Rahul is supposed to have met even Ajit Singh.

Watching Donald Trump’s first press conference as President Elect the other day, I was reminded of my meetings in the late 1980s with Ted Turner, the founder of CNN. “Captain America” as he was nicknamed, wanted to be seen as a swashbuckling rebel out of his fetish film Gone with the Wind, but there were rumours that his initial asset, Superstation WTBS had grown into a global network with CIA support and funding. Turner used CNN to open channels of communication with the USSR, then ostracised by the GOP government. The brash TV mogul set up the Goodwill Games as an alternative to the Olympics, which Washington and Moscow had reciprocally boycotted, but he also helped promote the Soviet pro-western reformist current led by Mikhail Gorbachev and thereby played a role in the birthing of a weakened Russia under US influence.

At his recent press conference, an angry PresidentElect Trump accused CNN, now part of the US’ third largest media conglomerate, to be “fake news”. He officialised the well known fact that the cable network, like other mainstream news organisations in the US, is entwined with the military industrial and intelligence systems, with its reporters often doubling as propagandists, counter-intelligence agents and cheerleaders. The derisive monickers “Clinton News Network” and “CIA News Net” are not unsubstantiated.

Barack Obama, a President literally raised and trained by the intelligence complex as a role model of politically correct “BoBo” liberalism, has bound even more tightly than before media and IT powerhouses with the political machine that took him to the White House. While dramatically expanding government secrecy, repression and surveillance, he dropped an