RUTHFULLY YOURS

Frau Merkel was much more gemutlich to Obama who just happened to be in Deutschland while our president was in the Middle East….She just air-brushed the fact that the Obama administration wire-tapped and spied on German government and media…..rsk
Angela Merkel’s declaration on the weekend that Germany and continental Europe will have to depend more on themselves is being portrayed as the Donald Trump -inspired end of American leadership in Europe. But if that’s true, and we have heard this dirge before, the erosion of U.S. leadership hardly began with Mr. Trump. It started under Barack Obama, whose failure to lead was too often reinforced by his main partner in Europe, Mrs. Merkel.

“All I can say is that we Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands,” the German leader told a crowd during a re-election campaign event at a beer tent in Bavaria. “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days.”

That was widely perceived as the German Chancellor’s reaction to last week’s NATO and G-7 summits, when the new U.S. President challenged NATO members to spend more on defense and refused to sign on to the climate-change policies of the other six leaders.

Mrs. Merkel seemed especially miffed about Mr. Trump’s decision not to embrace the Paris climate accord that Mr. Obama signed in his final year as President. “The whole discussion about climate has been difficult, or rather very unsatisfactory,” Mrs. Merkel told reporters. “Here we have the situation that six members, or even seven if you want to add the [European Union], stand against one.’

But wait. Since when is a difference of opinion on climate policy a signal of U.S. retreat from Europe? And why is Mr. Trump’s reluctance to sign on to Paris—he says he’ll decide whether to leave the accord this week—a failure of leadership? Mrs. Merkel’s comments suggest that she is most upset because Mr. Trump declined to follow her lead on climate.

Mr. Trump should decline if he wants to fulfill his campaign promises to lift the U.S. economy. Mrs. Merkel’s embrace of green-energy dogmas has done enormous harm to the German economy. She reacted to the Fukushima meltdown by phasing out nuclear power, and her government has force-fed hundreds of billions of dollars into solar and wind power that have raised energy costs. As Der Spiegel once put it, electricity is now a “luxury good” in Germany.

It’s not surprising that Mrs. Merkel and the Europeans should want to shackle the U.S. with similarly high energy costs, and Mr. Obama was happy to oblige. But Mr. Trump was elected on a promise to raise middle-class incomes, and domestic energy production is essential to that effort. Mrs. Merkel doesn’t care if Mr. Obama committed the U.S. to Paris without any Congressional approval, but Mr. Trump has to take that into account.

MANCHESTER, England—Britain’s MI5 security service has launched an internal investigation into how it handled intelligence about Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi, who killed 22 people in an attack outside a pop concert last week, a U.K. security official said Monday.

Abedi, a 22-year-old British-born son of Libyan immigrants, had been reported to the authorities for espousing extremist sentiments, saw combat as a teenager in Libya’s civil war and lived in a neighborhood that has produced recruiters and fighters for Islamic State.

Last week, Abedi, dressed in a puffy Hollister winter jacket, bluejeans and a gray baseball cap, walked into a crowd of concertgoers streaming out of a performance by American pop star Ariana Grande and detonated a shrapnel-filled explosive device in the deadliest terror attack in Britain since 2005.

British officials have said Abedi was “known” to security services. He was one of 20,000 suspected extremists MI5 has tracked in the past, but wasn’t among 3,000 under active investigation by the agency at the time of the bombing, the official said.

“He was part of an investigation that was closed, when it was decided it was not necessary or proportionate to continue it,” the official said. “We’re reviewing things in the sense that we’re looking back and want to learn lessons.”

Police on Monday were holding 14 people—including Abedi’s older brother and two cousins—as they tried to piece together what authorities have described as a possible “network” of accomplices that helped him prepare for and carry out the attack.

Abedi’s father and younger brother, Hashem, were in the custody of a Libyan militia in Tripoli.

Authorities worried Abedi had manufactured bomb materials that weren’t used in last week’s attack. But after days of searches and arrests around Manchester, the security services believed they had tracked down all of the hydrogen-peroxide-based explosives linked to Abedi, the official said.

Manchester police on Monday published a photograph of Abedi carrying a blue suitcase and appealed to members of the public for any information about the bag. The police said there was no reason to believe the suitcase or its contents were dangerous, but advised caution.

Friends and acquaintances of Abedi say he had become increasingly religious and expressed interest in extremist groups in recent years.

In 2011, Abedi fought alongside his father as Libyan rebels sought to oust dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Many from Manchester’s Libyan community did the same. Abedi and other teenagers returned from the battlefield hardened, friends and community leaders said.

In the years that followed a number of young people from south Manchester left to fight with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hezbollah’s strength has multiplied, and conflict is inevitable unless the world acts.There’s Still Time to Avert War in
Lebanon.Mr. Prosor, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N., is chairman of the Interdisciplinary Center’s International Diplomacy Institute and an executive-in-residence at Liontree.

Donald Trump called out Hezbollah at both stops on his Middle East trip last week. In Saudi Arabia he praised the Gulf Cooperation Council for designating the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia a terrorist organization and noted that Riyadh had placed sanctions on a senior Hezbollah figure. In Jerusalem Mr. Trump scored Hezbollah for launching rockets “into Israeli communities where schoolchildren have to be trained to hear the sirens and run to the bomb shelters—with fear, but with speed.”

The president and his national-security team must have taken a good look across Israel’s northern border. Lebanon is at a crossroads. Decisions the president makes now could help prevent a devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah. Such a war would severely damage Lebanon and could drag the U.S. into another complex and costly entanglement in the Middle East. Engagement today can prevent risks to American lives tomorrow.

Hezbollah is sponsored by Iran and has become increasingly brazen in the last decade. It is now more militarily powerful than most North Atlantic Treaty Organization members. It has 150,000 missiles and could launch 1,500 of them a day. From the ground, air or sea, it can strike anywhere in Israel. Lebanon’s president, Michel Aoun, hasn’t distanced the Lebanese army from Iran’s proxy. Rather, he has embraced it. “Hezbollah’s weapons do not contradict the national project,” he said in February, but are “a principal element of Lebanon’s defense.”

Yet when Hezbollah acts, it does so with Iran’s interests in mind—not Lebanon’s. Iran would have no qualms spilling Lebanese blood in a war with Israel. Just look at Syria, where under Iranian direction, the Assad regime has unleashed genocide against the Sunni Arab population using Hezbollah as its storm troops.

War between Israel and Lebanon is avoidable, but only if the world acts now—with American leadership. Hezbollah’s ability to destabilize the region stems from the abject failure of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 and the peacekeeping force tasked with enforcing it, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or Unifil.