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August 2017

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Gao Zhisheng Disappears The Chinese human-rights lawyer has vanished again.

By on August 21st, 2017

The death of Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo in state custody last month briefly focused world attention on Chinese repression under President Xi Jinping. Now human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has disappeared, perhaps into the state-security maw that presided over Mr. Liu’s death.

Family members in exile in the U.S., who talk to him regularly on the phone, say Mr. Gao disappeared from his home in remote Shaanxi province earlier this month. Mr. Gao has been living under house arrest since 2014, surveilled by Chinese security forces. Local police say they don’t know where he is.

Mr. Gao has been incarcerated, tortured and released several times since 2006, when he was charged for “inciting subversion” for defending such clients as Falun Gong worshippers and factory workers. Yet Mr. Gao remained unbowed, thanks in part to his Christian faith. He went public with gruesome details of his torture, called for the removal of the Communist Party and advocated for a democratic China.

Mr. Gao may have been detained because he recently gave an interview to a Hong Kong magazine reiterating his political beliefs. Or the regime could be rounding up dissidents before the Party Congress this fall to avoid dissent about corruption or the lack of freedom during what is supposed to be a celebration of Mr. Xi’s consolidation of power.

Human-rights lawyers like Mr. Gao have been a particular target of state suppression, perhaps because they make their case by citing the words of Chinese law that embarrass the regime’s claims to legitimacy. The world should keep shining a light on these Chinese patriots, not least during the Party Congress.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hezbollah Is Running Rings Around U.N. Monitors in Lebanon The Security Council should expand the force’s mandate—and make sure they do their jobs. Danny Danon

By on August 21st, 2017

Mr. Danon is Israel’s ambassador to the U.N.

Over the past year, I have given dozens of United Nations ambassadors tours of Israel’s border with Lebanon. During a recent visit with my American counterpart, Nikki Haley, Israel Defense Forces officers identified Hezbollah positions along our northern border. Our guests appropriately asked where the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon was, and why nothing was being done to stop Hezbollah terrorists from blatantly violating numerous Security Council resolutions.

Our answer was simple. The Unifil force is there, but they are not effectively fulfilling their mandate. The good news is that when Unifil’s mandate comes before the Security Council later this month, there are practical steps that can be taken to ensure that this important U.N. force succeeds and another conflict with Hezbollah is avoided.

Unifil was established in 1978 with the goal of restoring “international peace and security” and assisting the Lebanese government in extending its authority over southern Lebanon. The force was altered in 1982 after the First Lebanon War and again in 2000 when Israel completed its withdrawal from Lebanese territory.

In August 2006, following the Second Lebanon War and the subsequent Security Council Resolution 1701, Unifil’s mandate expanded to include monitoring the cease-fire. Most importantly, Unifil was charged with ensuring that the territory south of the Litani River remained free of weapons and fighters other than the Lebanese army.

Unfortunately, these efforts have failed. Over the past year alone, we have shared with the Security Council new information detailing how border towns have become Hezbollah strongholds. One out of three buildings in the village of Shaqra is now being used to store arms or launch attacks on Israel. We also shared with the council intelligence revealing how the Iranians use civilian airlines to smuggle dangerous arms into southern Lebanon. When the Second Lebanon War ended, Hezbollah had around 7,000 rockets. Today, they have more than 100,000.

Hezbollah is lately stepping up its efforts to destabilize the region. In April its fighters posed for pictures with rocket-propelled-grenade launchers during a media “tour” of their positions along Israel’s border. Unifil forces did nothing to halt this live, televised violation of Security Council resolutions.

In June, Israel reported to the U.N. that Hezbollah has established a series of border outposts under the guise of an agricultural organization called Green Without Borders. Our intelligence services have determined that these positions are used regularly for reconnaissance operations against Israel. In this instance too, Unifil insisted on turning a blind eye, claiming that it lacked authority to investigate.

To rectify this situation, and avoid a new conflict, the Security Council must make real changes to Unifil’s mandate. In addition to generally improving Unifil’s performance, the council should insist on three vital steps.

First, Unifil must increase its presence in the territory. This includes meticulously inspecting the towns and villages of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah strongholds, like the one in Shaqra, must be dismantled, and other villages must be kept free of rockets and weapons aimed at Israeli population centers.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Mizzou Pays a Price for Appeasing the Left Enrollment is down more than 2,000. The campus has had to take seven dormitories out of service. By Jillian Kay Melchior

By on August 21st, 2017

Timothy Vaughn dutifully cheered the University of Missouri for a decade, sitting in the stands with his swag, two hot dogs and a Diet Coke. He estimates he attended between 60 and 85 athletic events every year—football and basketball games and even tennis matches and gymnastics meets. But after the infamous protests of fall 2015, Missouri lost this die-hard fan.

“I pledge from this day forward NOT TO contribute to the [Tiger Scholarship Fund], buy any tickets to any University of Missouri athletic event, to attend any athletic event (even if free), to give away all my MU clothes (nearly my entire wardrobe) after I have removed any logos associated with the University of Missouri, and any cards/helmets/ice buckets/flags with the University of Missouri logo on it,” Mr. Vaughn told administrators in an email four semesters ago.

He was not alone. Thousands of pages of emails I obtained through the Missouri Freedom of Information Act show that many alumni and other supporters were disgusted with administrators’ feeble response to the disruptions. Like Mr. Vaughn, many promised they’d stop attending athletic events. Others vowed they’d never send their children or grandchildren to the university. It now appears many of them have made good on those promises.

The commotion began in October 2015, when student activists claiming that “racism lives here” sent administrators a lengthy list of demands. Among them: The president of the University of Missouri system should resign after delivering a handwritten apology acknowledging his “white male privilege”; the curriculum should include “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion” training; and 10% of the faculty and staff should be black.

Two weeks later, a student announced he was going on a hunger strike, and the football team refused to practice or play until the university met the demands. As protesters occupied the quad, administrators bent over backward to accommodate them, even providing a power strip so they could charge phones and a generator so they could camp in comfort. A communications instructor, Melissa Click, appeared on viral video calling for “muscle” to remove a student reporter from the quad. By Nov. 9, both the president and the chancellor of Mizzou, as the flagship Columbia campus is known, had resigned.

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.

The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.

Mizzou’s 2016 football season drew almost 13,000 fewer attendees than in 2015, local media reported. During basketball games, one-third of the seats in the Mizzou Arena sat empty. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Steve Bannon Leaves the White House And a new phase of the war for America begins. August 20, 2017 David Horowitz and Matthew Vadum

By on August 21st, 2017

After helping to elect Donald Trump and pilot his White House through the turbulence of its first seven months, Stephen K. Bannon has left the administration and returned to Breitbart News, the conservative online news giant he captained before joining Trump a year ago.

What distinguishes Steve Bannon from other GOP operatives and conservative politicians are two things: vision and guts. The left in this country, the progressive and Democratic Party left is now organized around the anti-American creed of “identity politics.” This is the idea that “people of color” in America are oppressed by white supremacists – by people who are not “of color” and only a general purge of white racists and suppression of their free speech will rectify the injustice. This is the new racism, which serves as the principal weapon in Democrat attacks not only on the Trump White House but on all Republicans and patriots who oppose them.

“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” Steve Bannon told the American Prospect. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the Left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

You can probably count on one hand the number of Republican office-holders who think clearly and strategically like that. Or maybe one finger.

It is because Bannon understands the civil war which has now engulfed the political life of this nation that the secessionist left has focused its most vicious attacks on him, calling him a white nationalist, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite. Such attacks are transparently false, but they are in line with the left’s attacks on all their opponents as racists and fascists. These are the verbal equivalents of a nuclear option in political warfare and they reflect the existential nature of the conflict that is upon us. It is existential because the left has aimed at nothing less than the foundations of our democracy.

This was not a battle that could be fully engaged from the White House itself because so many people including the mainstream of the Republican Party are not yet awake to the nature of the conflict. They are too eager to seek approval from progressives who hate them.

Some on the right are concerned that without Bannon’s White House presence, Trump will become a prisoner of the globalist tendencies inside the administration and the appeasement instincts of the Republican in Congress. But they are wrong. Trump will still be Trump. He is not going to abandon the agendas or bury the instincts that made him endure the most hate-filled campaign in the history of American politics because he loves this country and wants to restore its greatness.

Although conservatives may thrill to the president’s frequent street fights with the Left, a president cannot be a relentless rebel. He has to put together a non-ideological majority and pick his fights shrewdly. Trump has already expressed his appreciation for the asset Bannon will be to him outside the White House. “Steve Bannon will be a tough and smart new voice at @BreitbartNews…maybe even better than ever before,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Fake News needs the competition!” Yet, it’s more than fake news organizations that better look out when Bannon gets going.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

NY Times Eclipse Coverage Amounts to Puerile Preaching By Clay Waters

By on August 21st, 2017

In Sunday’s New York Times, the paper’s most activist environmental reporter Justin Gillis, who has a knack for getting scary yet inaccurate stories on the paper’s front page, delivered a condescending lecture to the effect that if you believe an eclipse will occur on Monday, then you’d better believe everything “science” tells you about “climate change” as well, in “Should You Trust Climate Science? Maybe the Eclipse Is a Clue.” Of course, neither Gillis nor anyone else could tell you for certain whether there will be clouds blocking your view of the eclipse tomorrow, but they’ve got the weather for the next century locked in?https://www.newsbusters.org/author/clay-waters

It’s the latest climate change article from the Times evidently written for children.

Straight from the lead, you can see where Gillis is going:

Eclipse mania will peak on Monday, when millions of Americans will upend their lives in response to a scientific prediction.

….

Thanks to the work of scientists, people will know exactly what time to expect the eclipse. In less entertaining but more important ways, we respond to scientific predictions all the time, even though we have no independent capacity to verify the calculations. We tend to trust scientists.

For years now, atmospheric scientists have been handing us a set of predictions about the likely consequences of our emissions of industrial gases. These forecasts are critically important, because this group of experts sees grave risks to our civilization. And yet, when it comes to reacting to the warnings of climate science, we have done little.

….

Considering this most basic test of a scientific theory, the test of prediction, climate science has established its validity.

That does not mean it is perfect, nor that every single prediction is correct. While climate scientists have forecast the long-term rise of global temperatures pretty accurately, they have not been as good — yet — about predicting the short-term jitters.

In other fields, we do not demand absolute certainty from our scientists, because that is an impossible standard.

….

When your aging mother is found to have cancer, the recommended treatment will be rooted in a statistical model of how tumors respond to the available medicines. Your family is likely to follow that advice, even though you know the drugs are imperfect and may not save her.

We trust scientific expertise on many issues; it is, after all, the best advice we can get. Yet on climate change, we have largely ignored the scientists’ work. While it is true that we have started to spend money to clean up our emissions, the global response is in no way commensurate with the risks outlined by the experts. Why?

….But a bigger reason is that these changes threaten vested economic interests. Commodity companies benefit from exploiting forests. Fossil-fuel companies, to protect their profits, spent decades throwing up a smoke screen about the risks of climate change.

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