RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/italys-salvini-rises-with-fiery-words-and-pragmatic-decisions-11550066401

Far-right lnterior Minister Matteo Salvini strolled through a crowd of supporters in the main square of this southern Abruzzo town. Leaping on stage to campaign for regional elections, Mr. Salvini took aim at prosecutors who have charged him with kidnapping 177 African migrants last year after he refused to let them disembark from a rescue ship.

“They will have to put me on trial for the next 20 years, because I’ll go on blocking the migrants ships,” Mr. Salvini told the cheering crowd last week. “If they think they are scaring somebody, they chose the wrong person.”

In practice, though, Mr. Salvini is working to preserve his immunity against prosecution as a member of Italy’s Senate. His electioneering effort worked. On Sunday, a far-right candidate for governor backed by Mr. Salvini’s League party won the Abruzzo election.

Mr. Salvini is one of the fastest-rising politicians in a major European Union country. He has turned the League, a moribund regional movement in Italy’s north, into the nation’s most popular political force. His combative anti-immigration rhetoric and down-to-earth persona on social media have tapped anger at Italy’s aloof, ineffectual political establishment in swaths of Italian society.
A look at Mr. Salvini’s decisions in power suggests he is more of a pragmatist than his rhetoric implies.

Next, he says, he wants to take the EU by storm in this May’s European Parliament elections. He has become the central figure in efforts to build a pan-European alliance of nationalists and nativists, including politicians such as France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. It’s unclear, though, whether Europe’s disparate far-right parties can unite, and what their aims would be.

Mr. Salvini, a bearded 45-year-old former journalist, has built his rise on the image of a revolutionary chief, or “the Captain,” as his devoted fans call him. In recent years he has promised to overthrow Rome’s rotten political class, to split Italy’s richer north from the rest of the country, and to take Italy out of the euro.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/13/heroin-addict-convicted-killing-100-year-old-holocaust-survivor/

A heroin addict has been convicted of killing a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor when he broke her neck while trying to steal a handbag. Artur Waszkiewicz, 40, was found guilty of killing widow Zofija Kaczan in the street robbery on May 28 last year.

Jurors took just over two hours to convict Waszkiewicz of both manslaughter and robbery.

Wearing a black velvet jacket and velvet slipper shoes, the defendant showed no emotion and looked straight ahead as the verdicts were delivered.

Judge Nicholas Dean QC adjourned sentence until Thursday morning at the same court.

Addressing the jury, the judge said: “The sentence will inevitably be one of lengthy imprisonment. Mr Waszkiewicz knows that.”

Polish-born Ms Kaczan, who survived a Nazi camp during the Second World War, suffered multiple injuries, including a fractured neck and cheekbone.

She died from pneumonia in hospital on June 6 – a condition brought on by the injuries she sustained in the attack.

A jury of seven men and five women at Derby Crown Court found Waszkiewicz guilty of killing her close to the junction of St Chads Road and Empress Road in Normanton, Derby.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/emmanuel-

Why no mention in the French president’s Armistice Day address of the British and Americans whose bones rest in French soil? Perhaps because neither the British nor the Americans are currently on-message with the project for a morally transformative European imperium.

NOVEMBER saw the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, commemorating the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front in 1918. While the British Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition remained in the UK to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph, sixty heads of state or heads of government gathered in Paris for the commemoration. In attendance were Trump, Putin, Merkel and Trudeau. The focal point of the event was an address by the French President, Emmanuel Macron.

Based on much of the mainstream media coverage of Macron’s speech, one could be forgiven for thinking that Macron’s main purpose in inviting the leaders of Russia and the United States to France had been to reprimand them. The Independent ran the headline, “Emmanuel Macron warns of ‘dangers’ of nationalism in Armistice speech aimed at Trump and Putin”, while the Washington Post claimed, “Macron denounces nationalism as a ‘betrayal of patriotism’ in rebuke to Trump at WWI remembrance”. A report on the CNN website observed that “it was impossible to view his remarks as anything less than a rebuke of Trump, who has proudly espoused an ‘America First’ foreign policy”.

Had this been the case, it would have been an instance of appalling manners on the part of the French President (this fact was apparently lost on the media). The President of the USA was present in his role as head of state, not as Make America Great Again demagogue. Thousands of Americans lie buried in French soil, having fallen fighting for, among other things, the cause of France. To directly rebuke their representative on this occasion would have represented an extraordinary lapse of both manners and judgment.