Displaying posts published in

June 2016

Ending Modern Slavery A new study shows that human bondage remains widespread. see note please

Where are the campus “justice warriors” and boycott and divest groupies? Too busy bashing a true democracy….not this internatinal outrage…..rsk

Slaves in the American South numbered four million in 1860, the last time the U.S. Census Bureau counted the victims of the “peculiar institution” before it was abolished. Today there are 18.4 million slaves in India alone and 45.8 million world-wide. The modern slave trade is as cruel as its 19th-century forerunner—and much larger than previously thought.

That’s according to the Walk Free Foundation, founded by Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest, which publishes a Global Slavery Index to measure the scale and prevalence of modern slavery. This year’s index was compiled using a rigorous methodology involving in-person interviews with 42,000 respondents in 53 languages and 25 countries.

The report defines a slave as someone who is held against his or her will or otherwise forced to work through violence or threats of violence or abuse of authority. Modern-day slaves range from Burmese men working on Thai shrimp boats and punished with stingray tails, to Yazidi girls captured for sex slavery by Islamic State in Iraq, to Uzbek citizens forced by their government to pick cotton in harvest season, to North Koreans toiling in Kim Jong Un’s vast gulag.

How someone ends up enslaved varies by country and region, but dictatorship and slavery tend to go together. In some of the world’s least-free nations, governments do the enslaving, including China’s “re-education through labor” camps, which continue to operate despite Beijing’s claim to have formally abolished them in 2014. CONTINUE AT SITE

‘Brexit’ Vote Splits British Political Duo Prime Minister David Cameron and former London Mayor Boris Johnson trade barbs over EU referendum; ‘one for the birds’ By Jenny Gross

LONDON—British Prime Minister David Cameron and former London Mayor Boris Johnson have a lot in common. Two years apart in age, they attended the same boarding school, the same university, then entered Parliament together. Their odd-couple alliance—Mr. Cameron is refined and on message, Mr. Johnson, tousled and hip-shooting—helped their Conservative Party last year win its first general election in more than two decades.

Thirteen months later, they are at each other’s throats. The reason is Britain’s divisive June 23 referendum on whether it should remain a member of the European Union.

Mr. Cameron, 49 years old, is spearheading the push to persuade Britons to vote to remain, asserting that Britain would face economic peril if it detached from Europe. Mr. Johnson, 51, is leading the campaign to exit, or so-called Brexit, with a sharp-tongued assault on Brussels, which he says saps Britain’s sovereignty and burdens it with regulation.

Their rivalry flared in February, when Mr. Johnson informed his longtime friend and party leader Mr. Cameron, by text message moments before making his decision public, that he would support the exit campaign. Since then, both men have infused their campaign rhetoric with barbs about one another.

Mr. Johnson attacked Mr. Cameron’s case for staying in the EU as “baloney” and dismissed the prime minister’s monthslong negotiation to secure concessions from other EU leaders as having achieved “two-thirds of diddly squat.”

Mr. Cameron has accused Brexit campaigners of “resorting to total untruths” and of “literally making it up as they go along,” and has suggested Mr. Johnson is motivated by personal political ambition.

There is a deep divide within the U.K. over whether the country should cut its 40-year-old ties with Europe, as represented by the tussle between the two conservative lawmakers. The pro-EU side say a vote to leave would cause havoc to the economy and create years of uncertainty as the U.K. renegotiated international trade agreements. CONTINUE AT SITE

Why Trumpkins Want Their Country Back Dismissing Trump’s fans as racists and thugs is too self-congratulatory, too easy. There’s something deeper rumbling. By Joseph Epstein

In an infamous remark that made her seem both a naif and a snob, the New Yorker magazine movie critic Pauline Kael said in 1972, after the presidential election: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon.” Although I would sooner have my thumbs removed than vote for Donald Trump, I do know four people who claim that they are going to vote to make him president of the United States.

One is intellectually sophisticated, a product of Yale and the Harvard Law School, the author of many books. Economistic in his thinking, he tells me that he plans to vote for Mr. Trump because after eight years of economic slump under President Obama, he believes that the Republican soon-to-be-nominee and self-acclaimed successful businessman will shake things up. Two other of the Trump backers I know are themselves businessmen, happy Philistines both, who are not in the least put off by the essential Trump coarseness, the absence in him of the least tincture of culture, historical knowledge or humility. My last Trump voter is a man with experience of his own in politics, who worked in the George W. Bush administration and who so deeply loathes the Clintons, mari et l’épouse, that he would vote for a randy mongoose before voting for Mrs. Clinton.

But these are only four voters out of the more than 13 million who bestirred themselves to vote for Donald Trump in the nation’s primary elections. How to account for these millions? Progressives easily enough account for them as racists, fools, thugs, H.L. Mencken’s booboisie, but to a much higher power of ignorance than even Mencken himself, no slouch when it came to contempt for the common people, could have imagined. This interpretation of Mr. Trump’s supporters is, somehow, too easy, and too self-congratulatory.

Something deeper, I believe, is rumbling behind the astounding support for Mr. Trump, a man who, apart from his large but less than pure business success, appears otherwise entirely without qualification for the presidency. I had a hint of what might be behind the support for him a few weeks ago when, on one of the major network news shows, I watched a reporter ask a woman at a Trump rally why she was supporting him. A thoroughly respectable-seeming middle-class woman, she replied without hesitation: “I want my country back.” CONTINUE AT SITE

PALESTINIANS CHEER TEL AVIV SLAUGHTER : ARI LIEBERMAN

How Israel’s “peace partners” react when women and children are ruthlessly murdered.

The calm in Tel Aviv was shattered Wednesday night when two Arab gunmen in their 20s from the Palestinian Authority-controlled village of Yatta drew automatic weapons and began to systematically gun down every civilian in sight. When the carnage was over, four people – two men and two women – were dead and about a dozen others were wounded, three of them critically. Both terrorists were caught alive, though one sustained serious wounds during his apprehension. Israeli doctors performed life-saving emergency surgery on him while his victims were either dead or dying.

The blood on the pavement hadn’t even dried before “Palestinians,” as is their custom, celebrated the “heroic Tel Aviv operation.” In Palestinian lexicon, terrorist attacks targeting innocent civilians – men, women and children – are routinely referred to as “heroic” or “martyrdom operations.”

As Israelis were burying their dead, celebratory fireworks were going off in Hamas-controlled Gaza while elsewhere, in the PA-controlled West Bank, Palestinian Arabs were cheering and passing out sweets in recognition of their comrades’ bestial slaughter. Even the so-called “moderate” Palestinian President for Life, Mahmoud Abbas, couldn’t bring himself to call the Tel Aviv massacre, “terrorism” or “murder.” Instead, all he was able to muster was half-hearted disapproval. He issued a repulsive and disingenuous statement noting that the PA is opposed “to any ‘operation’ that harms civilians by anybody, regardless of the justifications.” Note use of the word “operation” to describe wanton violence and depravity.