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Ruth King

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The Justice System and Cardinal Pell: Peter Smith

By on May 16th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/the-justice-system-and-cardinal-pell/

While recently away in the UK I read the “best-selling” book The Secret Barrister (2018) authored by, well, a secret barrister. The barrister in question is apparently a junior barrister specialising in criminal law in England and Wales. I figure it’s a man (and will use ‘he’ where applicable) but the forward blurb disguises this by disconcertingly using the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’ for a singular person. Most annoying. Why not use the awkward ‘he or she’ rather than butcher the language? Just asking.

The book is a damning indictment of the British criminal justice system, at least as it applies in England and Wales. From amateur magistrates to sloppy gathering of evidence to missing evidence to poorly-funded legal aid and much, much more, the secret barrister provides an alarming picture of the law gone wrong and justice at grave risk. The Observer described the account of the justice sytem as “terrifying.”

My impression is that the situation simply can’t be as shambolic as described. Nevertheless, if you were falsely accused of a criminal offence (providing, perhaps, it is not child abuse) it might be best to be in Australia rather than in Britain; I hope anyway. On the other hand, the guilty might have a better chance of the incriminating evidence being mislaid in Britain. So, it evens out in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way.

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BOOKS, HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Heroes and Villains: A Talk with Vladimir Bukovsky, Part IV By Jay Nordlinger

By on May 16th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/heroes-and-villains-a-talk-with-vladimir-bukovsky-part-iv/

We are talking over the waterfront — or a good deal of the waterfront — here on the back patio in Cambridge. But, as I’ve mentioned, I also talked by phone with Vladimir Bukovsky last September. At that time, I asked him about Crimea: Putin’s swallowing of.

He said that Putin “did it for his own internal reasons.” He wanted to show Russians, along with the world, that “he doesn’t care about anyone or international law.” He is a big, strong man. He is “playing on people’s emotions.”

Crimea is a test, said Bukovsky. There has long been a principle about the changing of international borders. Putin has broken a taboo. He rubbed the nose of the West in the annexation of Crimea, to show that he is a criminal and that he can do whatever he wants, without anyone standing in his way.

From here on out, instability — including the changing of borders — becomes easier. That’s the game.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Feel the Excitement: Bill de Blasio Is Running for President Too By Jim Treacher

By on May 16th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/feel-the-excitement-bill-de-blasio-is-running-for-president-too/

If the mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana can run for president, why can’t the mayor of the biggest city in America? With Bill de Blasio’s entry in the 2020 race, we now have 24 Democrats trying to save us from Trump. Twenty. Four. Considering the public’s reaction to these candidates so far, you could call it an entire case of cold ones.

“The good thing about New Yorkers is they look the same whether they’re really pissed off at you or they like you.” I’m not sure how Mayor Wilhelm de Blasio can determine that. When has he ever met somebody who likes him?

It’s amazing how much pandering a guy can pack into three minutes: Promise to redistribute wealth, #FightFor15, claim health care is a human right (it isn’t, nor is the product of anybody else’s labor), push for “free” this and “free” that, throw in phrases like “working families” and “a decent wage,” blame Trump for Obama’s immigration policies, stoke fear about global warming killing everybody… and do it all while riding around in your taxpayer-funded limo.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Washington WhodunIt: Who Pushed the Dossier, Brennan or Comey? By Debra Heine

By on May 16th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/washington-whodunit-who-pushed-the-dossier-brennan-or-comey/

Former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan continue to be at odds over whose idea it was to include the unverified Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 (ICA).

The high-level dispute erupted after news broke that Attorney General William Barr appointed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the Russia investigation and to determine whether the FBI and DOJ’s actions were “lawful and appropriate.”

“This is very serious business and for the first time, I now believe that some of these guys are going to go to prison,” Washington attorney Joe diGenova told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday.

According to Fox News’ Catherine Herridge, sources familiar with the records say that “a late-2016 email chain indicated then-FBI Director James Comey told bureau subordinates that then-CIA Director John Brennan insisted the dossier be included in the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference, known as the ICA.”

This would be the same email chain former congressman Trey Gowdy referred to in a Fox News interview with Martha MacCallum on Tuesday, when he said, “In 2016, well after it [the Steele dossier] had been used, it was still unverified and the people responsible for it were referring to it as unverified and one or the other demanded that it be included in the intelligence assessment …”

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HISTORY Comments turned off

Our Modern ‘Satyricon’ By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 16th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/our-modern-satyricon/

“Petronius also argues that with too much rapid material progress comes moral regress. His final warning might be especially troubling for the current generation of Western Europeans and Americans. Even as we brag of globalizing the world and enriching the West materially and culturally, we are losing our soul in the process.”

Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, “The Satyricon,” about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel’s general landscape was Rome’s transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized multicultural superpower.

The novel survives only in a series of extended fragments. But there are enough chapters for critics to agree that the high-living Petronius, nicknamed the “Judge of Elegance,” was a brilliant cynic. He often mocked the cultural consequences of the sudden and disruptive influx of money and strangers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region into a once-traditional Roman society.

The novel plots the wandering odyssey of three lazy, overeducated and mostly underemployed single young Greeks: Encolpius, Ascyltos and Giton. They aimlessly mosey around southern Italy. They panhandle and mooch off the nouveau riche. They mock traditional Roman customs. The three and their friends live it up amid the culinary, cultural and sexual excesses in the age of Nero.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

U.S. Democrats Follow U.K. Labour Party Down The Anti-Semitism Rat Hole By Erielle Davidson

By on May 16th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/16/u-s-democrats-follow-u-k-labour-party-anti-semitism-rat-hole/

What level of Holocaust revisionism or Farrakhan-cavorting might it take for Democrats to realize their party is sick with racism?

This past Tuesday, yet another Labour member of the United Kingdom’s Parliament resigned from the party. After 45 years, Bridget Prentice, a former member of Parliament (MP) for Lewisham East, called it quits in a letter to the acting general secretary of the Labour Party.

Prentice’s letter offered a stinging rebuke of the devolution of the Labour Party under the auspices of Jeremy Corbyn. Unsurprisingly, among Prentice’s top concerns, in addition to the party’s anti-Europe swivel, was Labour’s inability to address concerns about anti-Semitism. Prentice’s letter is a dark omen of what the future may portend for the American Democratic Party, which, similar to the Labour Party, has been reeling from accusations of anti-Semitism.

Prentice writes, “Over the past three years I have watched in horror as Jewish members have begged for support against the growth of anti-Semitism both within and out with the Party.” She criticizes Labour’s “slow, reluctant and inadequate” response to claims of anti-Semitism and the mere “slap on the wrist” that was supposed to reprimand such bigotry.

Luciana Berger was a prominent Jewish MP who left Labour earlier this year due to repeated and unpunished harassment. In reference to her departure, Prentice censures the general secretary, “For a pregnant woman MP to [be] bullied out of the party is shameful and embarrassing.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

CUNY College Disgraces Itself By Giving Honorary Degree To Al Sharpton Craig Traiinor

By on May 16th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/16/cuny-college-disgraces-giving-honorary-degree-al-sharpton/

The indictment against Al Sharpton is public record. For more than 35 years of public life, he has proven himself a charlatan and a race hustler. The evidence is irrefutable.

The City University of New York is a lifeline to the examined life and the middle class for generations of poor and working-class students, from Irving Kristol to Colin Powell to me. Medgar Evers College, a senior college within the City University of New York system, intends to confer an honorary degree on Al Sharpton at its June 5, 2019, commencement. Sharpton is many things; a doctor of humane letters is not one of them.

Medgar Evers was a World War II veteran who organized fellow Mississippi NAACP members to obtain the civil rights being denied to black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s. As dangerous as it was noble, he coordinated voter registration drives and boycotts of segregated businesses. Thurgood Marshall said Evers had “more courage than anybody I’ve ever ran across.” Evers gave his life for the advancement of black Americans when a Klansman shot and killed him in his driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963.

By contrast, Sharpton’s greatest achievement has been avoiding criminal prosecution. Sharpton has spent a public career enriching himself under the banner of advancing civil rights. He didn’t calm racial tensions; he inflamed them. He didn’t work for racial healing; he rubbed the wounds raw. Evers was a genuine civil rights leader; Sharpton played one on TV. Simply put, Sharpton is not a good man. He is unworthy of this honor.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Reason Why the Gaza Wars Continue By Fred Maroun

By on May 16th, 2019

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-reason-why-the-gaza-wars-continue/?fbclid=IwAR2TuleWPf_lOGlqg3kBpyqELHYeIBzpOPu8tJADF_OnbVI0tKOvRffO8TA

Fred Maroun, a Canadian of Arab origin who lived in Lebanon until 1984 (including during 10 years of civil war), says it in a nutshell…thanks to KRD Daily…..Pretty much all the mainstream reporting on Gaza’s conflict with Israel misses the most important fact, leading the general public that relies on the mainstream media to totally misunderstand the situation: The reason why the conflict continues is because Israel does not hit Gaza hard enough to end it. Once it is said, the statement sounds obvious, yet journalists rarely say it.

Israel withdrew its military and its settlements from Gaza in 2005, and left it 100% in the hands of the Palestinians. At first, there was no blockade. The blockade by Egypt and Israel developed later, after terrorists started attacking Israel from Gaza, as even the anti-Israel Al Jazeera recognizes. The only purpose of the blockade, which is backed by the United Nations, is to limit the supply of weapons to Gaza terrorists.

Yet Gaza terrorists keep attacking Israel, knowing that the attacks result in a blockade. The terrorists themselves tell us why they make that choice, by using expressions such as the “Great March of Return” and “Raising the banner of Allah on every inch of Palestine [Israel]”. Their clearly stated objective is to invade Israel.

The Gaza terrorists are not a resistance force because there is nothing for them to resist. Israel would gladly leave Gaza alone if it could. The Gaza terrorists are an invasion force, regardless of the fact that they are not capable of invading Israel at this time, and while they cannot invade, they can kill and terrorize, and they do it at will.

When Gaza terrorists attack Israel, they are attacking a sovereign nation that they have no legal right and no moral justification to attack, and Israel’s duty is to protect its citizens and the integrity of its borders. As was written in the National Review, “The actual law of war would allow Israel to invade Gaza, utterly destroy Hamas, and occupy Gaza City until Israel’s safety is ensured, even if it [Gaza City] burned in the fight”. Yet, Israel chooses to only manage the attacks and not to stop them. It chooses to not burn down Gaza City.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

SAT to Give Students ‘Adversity Score’ to Capture Social and Economic Background New score comes as college admissions decisions are under scrutiny By Douglas Belkin 

By on May 16th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sat-to-give-students-adversity-score-to-capture-social-and-economic-background-11557999000

The College Board plans to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT to try to capture their social and economic background, jumping into the debate raging over race and class in college admissions.

This new number, called an adversity score by college admissions officers, is calculated using 15 factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood. Students won’t be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when reviewing their applications.

Fifty colleges used the score last year as part of a beta test. The College Board plans to expand it to 150 institutions this fall, and then use it broadly the following year.

How colleges consider a student’s race and class in making admissions decisions is hotly contested. Many colleges, including Harvard University, say a diverse student body is part of the educational mission of a school. A lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants by holding them to a higher standard is awaiting a judge’s ruling. Lawsuits charging unfair admission practices have also been filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California system.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

International Law Backs The Trump Golan Policy For decades Syria has defied a U.N. mandate to negotiate with Israel. By Michael R. Pompeo and David Friedman

By on May 16th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/international-law-backs-the-trump-golan-policy-11557875474

Mr. Pompeo is U.S. secretary of state. Mr. Friedman is U.S. ambassador to Israel.

President Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights was met with condemnation from the European Union and others. Leaders called the move “invalid,” “illegitimate” and “absolutely worthless.” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan “null and void and without international legal effect.” These assertions are baseless.

Virtually every nation cited U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which outlined a framework for achieving peace in the Middle East. The preamble speaks of “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” Yet President Trump’s Golan proclamation is entirely consistent with Resolution 242.

Resolution 242 was heavily negotiated and agreed to in 1967 by all but one of the warring parties in the Six-Day War—Syria, which controlled the Golan before the conflict. Damascus stayed on the sidelines until 1973 when, with its Arab allies, it launched and lost the Yom Kippur War. After that defeat, Syria signed on to Resolution 338, which made 242 applicable to all—the only substantive resolution to which all combatants have agreed.

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