No Tea Party in key primaries
Washington, May 21: Mainstream US Republicans led by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell defeated Tea Party challengers in key primaries on Tuesday, setting the stage for their bid to regain full control of Congress in November.
Republicans lead the House of Representatives and are determined to wrest the Senate from President Barack Obama’s Democrats in this year’s mid- term elections.
Voters in six states, from Georgia in the US southeast to the Pacific northwest Oregon, cast ballots on what became known as the “Super Tuesday” of the 2014 campaign. But most eyes were on Kentucky, a key battleground between traditional Republicans and members of the party’s more conservative, populist “Tea Party” wing.
The anti- establishment fervour sweeping much of the country seems not to have taken as strong a hold in Kentucky, and well- funded veteran incumbent Mr McConnell, 72, trounced Tea Party backed challenger Matt Bevin in one of the most expensive — and closely watched — primaries of 2014.
If he is reelected in November, and if Republicans gain a net six seats in the 100- seat chamber to regain control, Mr McConnell would lead the Senate majority and be positioned to block Mr Obama’s legislative efforts in his last two years in the White House.
“Send me back to Washington and Kentucky will always have a champion in the Capitol,” Mr McConnell told cheering supporters in his victory speech.
But he faces perhaps the most formidable election challenge of his 30- year Senate career in Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, who won her party’s primary and immediately set her sites on ousting Mr McConnell.
“Mitch McConnell would have you believe that President Obama is on Kentucky’s 2014 election ballot,” Ms Grimes told supporters, referring to Mr McConnell warning voters that Ms Grimes would merely be a backbencher for the President.
— AFP Berlin, May 21: German authorities said on Wednesday they were probing nearly 20 former guards at a Nazi- era concentration camp on suspicion of aiding and abetting murder.
The investigation targets 18 or 19 German nationals who served at the Majdanek camp in Nazioccupied Poland during World War II, Thomas Will, prosecutor and deputy head of the German office investigating Nazi war crimes, told AFP.
They are being probed on suspicion “of aiding and abetting murder as it also was in the case of Demjanjuk,” he said.
In a 2011 landmark case, a Munich court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for complicity in the extermination of more than 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor camp, where he had served as a guard.
For more than 60 years prior to that ruling, German courts had only prosecuted Nazi war criminals if evidence showed they had personally committed atrocities.
The office investigating Nazi war crimes based in the southwestern city of Ludwigsburg, which cannot itself launch prosecutions, is in the process of handing over its initial findings to prosecutors, Mr Will said.
He pointed to the challenges of laying charges in cases dating back decades, saying that much of the documentation had been destroyed. Nazi Germany set up the Majdanek camp on the outskirts of Lublin in 1941. — AFP