Displaying posts published in

May 2016

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

North Korea-Flagged Ships Visiting Iran; Any Problem Here? By Claudia Rosett

By on May 4th, 2016

In January, North Korea carried out its fourth illicit nuclear test. On March 2, after weeks of diplomatic haggling, the United Nations Security Council approved a new sanctions resolution on North Korea, which U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power described as “establishing the strongest sanctions the Security Council has imposed in more than two decades.”

So how’s that going?

In the big picture, not so well. North Korea has carried on with its forbidden missile tests, including a submarine launch, and has been visibly preparing for a fifth nuclear test.

Nor are things looking all that good if you home in on some of the details, such as merchant ships linked to North Korea. This latest UN sanctions resolution included a list of 31 ships linked to North Korea, targeted for an asset freeze. The Philippines moved swiftly to comply, impounding one of these ships, the Jin Teng, which was in its waters. Then China demanded that four of the designated ships, including the Jin Teng, should be removed from the sanctions list. It appears the U.S. rolled over and agreed. The Philippines had to let the Jin Teng go. As I note in an April 26th article for the Wall Street Journal on “The Failure of Sanctions Against North Korea,” this sent the message that no one need rush to enforce the new North Korea sanctions.

That’s not a huge surprise; as of last October, almost half the UN’s 193 member states had displayed no particular interest in enforcing the previous sanctions on North Korea — failing to file the implementation reports required by the UN. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump and Supporters Insult Our Intelligence By C. Edmund Wright

By on May 4th, 2016

I am not #NeverTrump, but I’m getting close… thanks to Donald Trump and his supporters.

The fact is, Trump often makes profoundly stupid and manifestly false statements. These are the kind of statements that always offend the intellect of anyone who thinks analytically and is interested in the actual truth, regardless of who is saying them. If you are not offended by such, then by definition you simply have jettisoned any concern for truth and intelligence. That Trump runs afoul of both concepts is beyond debate.

Written words are the least emotional medium possible, so let’s remove the feeling of the mob rally or the sycophantic television interview and dispense with a few Trump pronouncements in the cold harsh reality of the written word.

No doubt some of Trump’s supporters will quickly retort that Trump is a billionaire, so there’s no way he could possibly say anything stupid about any topic. Or that it’s impossible that Trump would lie. Yet Trump can, and does, routinely lie. In the words of Victor David Hanson, for Trump “truth is simply a narrative whose veracity is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.”

Let me translate: Trump repeats nonsense loudly and often. Moreover, he daily adds insults to anyone who opposes him, which is an odd strategy for someone wanting to “unite the party.” He’s doing everything now to make that impossible for anyone to do anytime soon. His apparent cliching of the nomination simply lends more urgancy to the matter.

But I digress. To the cold hard words, in perfect context, starting this week in Indiana.

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up? They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”

What is this, coming from a man who wants to be the most powerful in the world? Does Trump consider the National Enquirer to be the gazette of truth? Was Ted Cruz’s father at Area 51 too? It’s not even clear that Trump has any idea whose death he’s even rambling about. Serious people would be bothered by a candidate who is capable of saying this.

How about the Mike Tyson endorsement: “So Cruz is now saying, ‘Oh, he (Mike Tyson) was a rapist. This guy is a real liar, that’s why we call him Lyin’ Ted Cruz. I mean, the greatest liar that ever lived except he gets caught every time.”

Trump may have no responsibility over embarrassing endorsers. But Tyson was in fact convicted of rape and served hard time for it.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas A Hypocrite of Titanic Proportions

By on May 4th, 2016

The troubles of this carbon-plagued world weigh heavily on Leonardo DiCaprio, who uses every tool at his disposal to save the planet from global warming — tools that mostly consist of CO2-spewing private jets, jumbo yachts, energy-gobbling private palaces and his own hot air.
Don’t tell my wife but I’ve had a man-crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. At this bit in Titanic, I just couldn’t take my eyes off him:

Kate: Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls. Wearing this…
Leo: All right.
Kate: Wearing only this….

But now my man-crush for Leo is over. If I could live my life again, I’d be kinder to my mother, but I wouldn’t see Titanic.

My about-turn came after reading DiCaprio’s speech to the UN gabfest on April 22 pledging more gabfests. He doesn’t just talk about warming’s armageddon. He wants you and me to catch a bus, while he gets around on his private jets and mega-yachts. And the media reports his frothings in a reverential way, as if he were the Dalai Lama or Gillian Triggs.

At the UN he conflated 19th century slavery in the US with current global warming (under 1degC in the past 100 years) as “the defining crisis of our time… a runaway freight train bringing with it an impending disaster for all living things.” Quoting Abraham Lincoln, he concluded:

“The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation… We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. That is our charge now – you are the last best hope of Earth. We ask you to protect it. Or we – and all living things we cherish – are history.”

Two years ago, Ban Ki-Moon appointed DiCaprio as the UN’s climate-change Messenger for Peace, saying, “Mr. DiCaprio is a credible voice in the environmental movement. I am pleased he has chosen to add his voice to UN efforts to raise awareness of the urgency and benefits of acting now to combat climate change.”

Six months later, DiCaprio was paparazzi’d lounging between parties at Cannes on his 140-metre superyacht, Rising Sun, borrowed from Dreamworks Studio co-founder David Geffen. It’s the 11th largest yacht in the world, cost $US200m, takes a crew of 45 and runs on 48,000 horsepower-worth of diesels.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Mirror Imaging’ and America’s Dangerous Middle East Illusions Tehran and Riyadh don’t operate under Western assumptions: Religion is their political ideology. By Henry A Crumpton and Allison Melia

By on May 4th, 2016

Intelligence officers are taught to avoid “mirror imaging.” That is, assuming your adversary shares your analytic reference points and thinks the way you do. Americans tend to ascribe to other countries the best of our own values: tolerance, equal opportunity, rule of law, freedoms of speech and religion, and separation of church and state. But many countries do not share these values. Two of them are among our most problematic foreign relationships: Saudi Arabia and Iran.

These states, one friend and the other foe, promote ideologies that compete with America’s vision of liberal institutions, secular democracy and world order. Yet instead of confronting their illiberal, repressive, and often reprehensible narratives, we attempt to reconcile their views with our own, giving them a free pass based on our own tolerance of religious differences. The problem is that in these states religion does not exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, their religion is their political ideology—and a critical element of their foreign policy.

Despite its status as an important ally, Saudi Arabia poses a major challenge to the U.S. The ruling Saudi royal family depends upon support from the Wahhabi clergy, who represent an ultraconservative doctrine that is the cornerstone of the country’s identity and the source of the monarchy’s legitimacy. The kingdom has long exported the Wahhabi ideology with billions in funding for religious schools, or madrassas, world-wide. While Saudi rulers proscribe religious leaders from actively supporting violent revolution, terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State frequently cite or distort Wahhabi principles to justify the repression of women, autocratic rule and violence against non-Muslims.

Moreover, as Princeton scholar Cole Bunzel recently detailed in a report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Saudi religious establishment has been practically mute as ISIS has laid claim to Wahhabi principles. This irresponsible silence, a tacit endorsement of political violence, especially against Shia Muslims, allows terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS to use the Wahhabi faith as a steppingstone to their violent, apocalyptic political ideology.

Although Saudi Arabia, sometimes with U.S. support, has launched effective counterterrorism operations against al Qaeda and ISIS, these efforts are shortchanged if the Saudi kingdom does not also address the underlying ideology that inspires ISIS attacks around the globe. And Riyadh, as custodian of Islam’s holiest sites, is uniquely positioned to act. Americans’ natural aversion to government involvement in religious matters should not become an excuse for U.S. failure to tackle this ideological challenge. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Rolls Up Welcome Mat Foreigners revisit assumption that openness that started under Deng could only grow By Andrew Browne

By on May 4th, 2016

SHANGHAI— Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, was raised in China as the son of a Presbyterian missionary.

He and his family were among a population of foreigners that swelled to as many as half a million before 1949. Some were teachers, doctors and journalists. Others were merchants, engineers, architects and bankers. Within a few years of the Communist takeover almost all had fled or been kicked out. Mao harbored such loathing for Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city, that he considered emptying it out completely after the revolution.

Deng Xiaoping’s “open door” economic reform policies in 1978 brought many of these groups flocking back. Many thought the openness would only grow.

It may be time to review that judgment: These days, foreigners are starting to feel less welcome. The Chinese legislature passed a law last week that puts all foreign NGOs under police administration with onerous registration and reporting requirements, essentially treating them as a security risk. Many will be forced to leave.

In line with this new mood of suspicion, a public poster campaign is warning young female government workers about “dangerous love” with foreign spies, a label frequently attached to the few foreigners who stayed on after 1949, particularly Americans.

State media regularly inveigh against “hostile foreign forces” trying to topple China’s socialist system.

Restrictions on foreign publications are tightening. Time, with a storied past in China, has joined a growing list of foreign news websites blocked by the Great Firewall. It includes the Economist, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times —in addition to search engines and social-network sites like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Christianity is in the firing line again: Authorities in eastern China, where missionaries labored before the revolution, are tearing down crosses atop churches. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

DONALD TRUMP: ISRAEL SHOULD KEEP BUILDING SETTLEMENTS

By on May 4th, 2016

EXCLUSIVE: Trump insists Israel should keep building West Bank settlements as he says Netanyahu should ‘keep moving forward’ because Palestinians fired ‘thousands of missiles’ at Jewish state

In interview with DailyMail.com, Donald Trump says Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu should continue building West Bank settlements
Rejects call for a pause in settlements as a precursor to peace talks with Palestinians
‘I don’t think there should be a pause,’ Trump said; ‘Look: Missiles were launched into Israel’
The billionaire GOP front-runner said of Netanyahu: ‘I don’t know him that well, but I think I’d have a very good relationship with him’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3571403/Trump-insists-Israel-building-West-Bank-settlements-says-Netanyahu-moving-forward-Palestinians-fired-thousands-missiles-Jewish-state.html#ixzz47fti572A

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary’s Appalachian Trial She tries to mollify the coal miners she said she’d put out of work.

By on May 4th, 2016

Hillary Clinton ventured into Appalachia this week, seeking forgiveness for promising to destroy the carbon-based economy. Her 53%-47% loss to Bernie Sanders in Indiana suggests she’ll need it, especially among working-class voters, even if she still maintains a commanding delegate lead.

Mrs. Clinton calls her swing through West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio a “Breaking Down Barriers” tour—but the truth is that President Obama’s green agenda broke down coal country, and Mrs. Clinton is promising to preserve these barriers to the region’s economic revival.

The presumptive Democratic nominee told out-of-work coal miners in Williamson, West Virginia that she felt their pain, promising to “do more to see how we can get coal to be a fuel that can continue to be sold and continue to be mined.” In a perfect Clintonian non-apology, she added that “I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason and the excuse to be so upset with me because that is not what I intended at all,” referring to her remarks in March.

Mrs. Clinton claimed those remarks were “totally taken out of context,” so here’s the full context: “I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Indiana Trump The GOP’s odds-on nominee must now unify the party.

By on May 4th, 2016

With Ted Cruz’s withdrawal from the race after his loss Tuesday, Donald Trump should be well on the road to the 1,237 delegates needed to secure a nomination majority in advance of the convention.

Mr. Trump’s Tuesday victory in Indiana shows that he was able to transform his wins in the recent eastern primaries into momentum that overwhelmed Mr. Cruz, despite a strong effort from the Senator in the Hoosier State. It wasn’t enough to overcome the consolidation of Republican support by the New York businessman.

While by no means minimizing Mr. Trump’s considerable achievement here, we must ask again why Senator Cruz made so little effort to expand his appeal beyond the slice of very conservative voters who were his target from the start. The time to do that was after his Wisconsin victory, but the broadening never came, and Mr. Trump continued to siphon away the greater share of the GOP primary vote.

Mr. Trump won Indiana among most demographic, income and ideological groups, while Mr. Cruz carried “very conservative” voters and people with post-graduate degrees. Mr. Trump won 46% of women to Mr. Cruz’s 42%.

Now as the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, it is past time for Mr. Trump to start acting like it. He says that it’s time for the GOP to “unify.” But most of the responsibility for unification is now his. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

The Left’s Problem With Israel By Lawrence J. Haas

By on May 4th, 2016

As events of recent days make clear, an ideological cancer continues to grow on the political left across the West: an obsession with Israel that morphs into anti-Zionism and, yes, at times even anti-Semitism.

The cancer is particularly acute within Great Britain’s Labour Party. But it’s infecting America’s left as well, with Bernie Sanders downplaying Israel’s security challenges and exaggerating Palestinian suffering while a top aide lashes out at Israel in vile terms.

Depending on the prospects of progressive parties across the West in the coming years, this cancer has profound implications for the foreign policy of the U.S. and its allies as well as for the global standing of Israel – which, as its critics often ignore, remains the lone democracy in the world’s most turbulent region.

U.S. or European governments under certain leftist elements could revisit longstanding Western ties to Israel, feel less compelled to protect the Jewish state at the United Nations and other global bodies and prove less helpful as Israel’s supporters fight efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state.

To be sure, anti-Israeli hostility is not confined to the left. The extreme right, which is making political inroads particularly in Europe, has long offered its own ugly mix of Israel-bashing, Jew-hating or both.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Negotiate This, Mr. Trump :David Goldman

By on May 4th, 2016

Only The Simpsons got it right: not a single pundit or political scientist guessed that Donald Trump had the ghost of a chance at the Republican nomination, yet there he stood tonight in Indiana with a trail of corpses behind him and a clear road ahead of him. Welcome to the Zero Sum World, where you have to lose for me to win. The facts have been recited often enough: real median household income is still 8% below the 1999 high water mark, real GDP is 10% below the long-term trendline, 10% fewer Americans own their own homes than in 2007, more business have closed since the 2008 crash than opened, and the jobs on offer mainly involve changing bedpans and flipping burgers.

Republican voters bought Trump’s message that the wicked Chinese and the feckless Mexicans have stolen jobs and wealth that rightfully belonged to Americans, and that he, Donald Trump, with his world-class negotiating skills, would go out and get them back.

Don’t hold your breath.

worldtrade

There’s nothing to negotiate, no pie to re-divide, no Chinese hoard to bring home. World exports are down by 12% year-on-year in terms of price and dead flat in terms of volume, something that happens during recessions. The world economy is dead in the water. The US economy grew at an annual rate of just half a percent during the first quarter, which is a recession in all but name. Japan shrank, and Europe grew by 1.6% (and has only just regained its overall output level of 2007). China is growing, but too slowly to move the needle elsewhere.

The trouble is that everyone already has had the same idea as Mr. Trump. The Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank have imposed negative interest rates on their money markets. If you buy a 10-year Japanese government bond or a 5-year German government bond, you get back less than you paid for it: you pay the government to hold your money. When it costs money to save, financial markets lose their reason to exist. The Europeans and Japanese have done this to try to keep their currencies cheap and get a bit more of the stagnant volume of world trade. Now that the Federal Reserve has backed off from raising interest rates in the face of uniformly depressing economic data, the dollar is falling, despite the best efforts of the Europeans and Japanese to cheapen their currencies.

Continue reading →