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Ruth King

Julian Assange faces a year in British jail after dramatic arrest at Ecuadorian Embassy – as US demand we hand him over The WikiLeaks founder, 47, has been holed up in the embassy since 2012 and was dragged out this morning

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8839586/julian-assange-wink-thumbs-up-arrest-embassy/
“NARCISSIST” Julian Assange faces a year in British jail after his dramatic arrest at the Ecuadorian Embassy ended seven years in hiding today.

The bearded WikiLeaks founder has spent 2,487 days holed up in the embassy to avoid Swedish sex claims and US authorities, who want him over an alleged conspiracy with whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

Julian Assange winked and gave a thumbs up from the police van as he arrived at court following the dramatic arrest this morning.

The 47-year-old was blasted a “narcissist who can’t get beyond his own self interest” as he was found guilty this afternoon of skipping bail in 2012 – relating to his time at the embassy.He now faces a battle against extradition to America where he was today charged in his absence with “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the US”.

Is Iran Winning in Yemen? by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14053/iran-winning-yemen

“The Yemeni revolution will not be confined to Yemen alone. It will extend, following its success, into Saudi territories.” — Iranian Lawmaker Ali Reza Zakani, trusted adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“If the Shia rebels gain control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, Iran can attain a foothold in this sensitive region giving access to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, a cause of concern not only for its sworn rivals Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf states, but also for Israel and European countries along the Mediterranean.” — IDF Lt.-Col. (Ret.) Michael Segall.

“Hard-line elements [in Iran] appear to see the continuation of the conflict [in Yemen] as a relatively low-cost and low-risk means of sustaining political, economic, and military pressure on the Saudis. Saudi Arabia’s intervention has reportedly cost between $5 billion and $6 billion a month, while Iran’s expenditures in Yemen probably total only millions a year.” — Gerald M. Feierstein, Middle East Institute.

“The Houthis’ intransigence confirms their loyalty to Iran’s negotiating tactics. These usually begin with implicit approval of negotiating solutions, followed by complete retraction in order to force the international community to make more concessions and impose a fait accompli on the Yemeni government….” — Yemeni Foreign Minister Khaled al-Yemany.

A ceasefire deal aimed at ending Yemen’s civil war is collapsing amid disputes between the warring parties over how to implement the agreement. A resumption of hostilities would, according to aid groups, accelerate Yemen’s descent into famine and threaten as many as 15 million people — more than half the population — with starvation.

Yemen’s four-year conflict is generally viewed as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, which backs the internationally-recognized Yemeni government, and Iran, which backs tribal-based Shiite rebels, known as Houthis.

China Rising in the Caribbean by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14050/china-caribbean-sea

About 55 miles east of Palm Beach, Florida on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.

The concern is that the port will become another debt-trap, like the port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka. There are concerns that Hambantota will eventually become a Chinese naval base. Will the Pentagon have to contend with Chinese warships at Freeport?

The Chinese military is already in the Caribbean, in Cuba, apparently to collect signals intelligence from the U.S. Washington splashes plenty of cash around the Middle East, for instance, but American policymakers need also to be concerned, urgently, about critical needy locations closer to home.

There’s a “Red Storm Rising” just miles from America’s shores. “In point of fact, the entire hemisphere is on fire,” said Lou Dobbs on his widely watched Fox Business Network show on April 4. “China and Russia are engaging us in almost every quarter in this hemisphere. Russia and China in Venezuela, but China throughout the hemisphere and throughout the Caribbean.”

Throughout the Caribbean, China’s influence is growing fast. Trade and investment have made Beijing a power. Chinese motives are not solely commercial, however, and do not appear benign.

Four Corners‘ March-Hare Climatology

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-post/four-corners

he ABC has jumped yet again through the climate alarmists’ looking glass.

The recent Four Corners episode on global warming, Climate of Change, reminded me of physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He described a paper as so bad “it was not even wrong.” The ABC’s presenter was Stephanie March, a veteran ABC reporter and foreign correspondent in India and North America. I’ll first discuss the background of March’s main guest on the program, Dr Bill Hare, then run through some of the Four Corners content.

Dr Hare scored ten appearances — 620 words out of the 8100 — during 45 minutes, plus the final words on the episode. So who’s Dr Bill Hare? Just “the best climate lobbyist in the world”, as cited by Murdoch University.

For starters, and unmentioned by Four Corners, his main 16-year career (1992-2008) was as climate policy director and spokesman for Greenpeace International. To the Greenpeace fanatics, he was a “legend” in global climate politics,[1] penning fiery Greenpeace polemics such as warning the top 100 US companies to reject President Bush’s climate policies within a week or “face the consequences” globally. He also accused Australia of behaving like “an international selfish brat”. In 2002, he helped Greenpeace and similar groups start the Exxon Secrets website, described as “a chronicle of ExxonMobil’s efforts to corrupt the debate on global warming.” Greenpeace managed to dredge up $US30.9 million in donations by the company to alleged sceptic groups over 16 years, i.e. $US2m a year. The renewables industry currently involves investments of $US1.5 trillion a year.

Child Soldiers on the Streets of Paris It’s wrong to use kids as political puppets. Theodore Dalrymple

https://www.city-journal.org/children-as-political-puppets

On a pleasant spring evening, at about 7:00, I was walking back to my flat in Paris when I heard the sound of chanting and tambourines being struck in unison. Some of the chanting was unmistakably that of young children, though it was mixed with that of adults.

It came from a political demonstration against a law proposed by the Minister of Education. The proposed law sounded mostly uncontroversial: the age at which children must go to school was to be lowered to three years, but since nearly 97 percent of them do so anyway, this hardly represented a vastly increased burden on the education system. Other proposed changes also sounded less than earth-shattering, though they seemed to be directed toward reducing the influence of teachers’ unions in an extremely centralized system.

Children as young as six and eight held up placards saying that they demanded schools in which there was freedom of thought or that commercialism should be kept out of education. Children are precocious these days, but are they really able, at age six or eight, to argue for freedom of thought or against the entry of market forces into education?

A teacher handed me a flyer that said, “To put an end to this proposed law, parents and school staff are organizing to lead the combat.” No mention was made of the children, who made up half the crowd. I wanted to ask the teacher whether she thought it right to use children in this way: to make them shout slogans and wave banners. They do this kind of thing in North Korea—but in France?

Of Ilhan Omar, Anti-Semitism, and America By Sebastian Gorka

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/of-ilhan-omar-anti-semitism-and-america/

It was only a matter of time. And in this case, it didn’t take long at all.

After Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) made her racist remarks about the “evil” and “hypnotic” influence of Israel, the undue influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington, (“it’s all about the Benjamins”), and the dual loyalty of American Jews, Democrats were on track to censure her by name from the floor of the House. But it never happened. Nancy Pelosi proved too weak.

After almost a week of wrangling, the committee that drafted the final statement on the scandalous freshman representative released a final text that never mentioned her by name, her statements, or any need for her to apologize for her bigotry. (Not coincidentally, Omar sits on this very committee.) In fact, the final language was such generic and anodyne boilerplate that it could have been issued at any time, by either party, for any reason or no reason at all.

That the Speaker of the House was so timid in the face of such shocking behavior should surprise no one.

Behold the face of the Democratic Party: minority, young, and racist. This is the fruit of identity politics. Be it Omar, who is on the cover of the current issue of Newsweek, Rashida Talib (D-Mich.) who signaled the need to obliterate Israel on her first day in office, or the leader of the pack, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), a proud supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement, the “new faces” of the DNC constitute a united front in their hatred for our Semitic brethren.

Will William Barr Get Justice for Carter Page? By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/will-william-barr-get-justice-for-carter-page/

It all started with Carter Page. The biggest scandal in the history of American politics originated with carefully cultivated public suspicions about whether Page, a Naval Academy graduate and campaign volunteer, was a conduit between Team Trump and the Kremlin.

In spring 2016, Page emerged as the first alleged culprit in the nascent Trump-Russia collusion plotline. Bogus allegations about him were included in the infamous Steele dossier; he was the subject of relentless media coverage and public harassment; the FBI enlisted an informant to gather information on him in secret; and his own government accused him of being a Russian agent as it wiretapped him for a year under false pretenses.

Now it appears Attorney General William Barr finally will get to the bottom of why Page first became the target of Trump foes on the Right, then ultimately, of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration. This comes two years to the day since the Washington Post first published illegally leaked details about the FISA warrant on Page, which was obtained by James Comey’s FBI in October 2016.

Barr is poised to hold Page’s antagonists accountable. “The office of the inspector general has a pending investigation into the FISA process in the Russia investigation,” Barr told the House Appropriations committee on Tuesday.

When asked specifically whether the Justice Department also was investigating who illegally disclosed the existence of Page’s FISA warrant, Barr indicated he would await the criminal referrals expected to come this week from Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) regarding the same matter.

Further, Barr has acknowledged that he believes the Trump campaign was spied on in 2016. “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal. Yes, I think spying did occur,” Barr told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. Page was one of a handful of Trump associates also pursued by an FBI informant during the campaign.

California Has Become America’s Cannibal State By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/10/california-has-become-americas-cannibal-state/

For over six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax.

The state legislature sold that confiscatory tax rate on the idea that it was a temporary fix and would eventually be phased out. No one believed that. California voters, about 40 percent of whom pay no state income taxes, naturally approved the extension of the high rate by an overwhelming margin.

California recently raised gas taxes by 40 percent and now has the second-highest gas taxes in the United States.

California has the ninth-highest combined state and local sales taxes in the country, but its state sales tax of 7.3 percent is America’s highest. As of April 1, California is now applying that high state sales tax to goods that residents buy online from out-of-state sellers.

In late 2017, the federal government capped state and local tax deductions at $10,000. For high earners in California, the change effectively almost doubled their state and local taxes.

Christchurch, “Jewish Blame,” and the Global Scourge of Muslim Jew-Hatred Andrew Bostom

https://www.theepochtimes.com/christchurch-jewish-blame-and-the-global-scourge-of-muslim-jew-hatred_2847735.html

Brenton Tarrant committed a heinous, cowardly act of mass murder when he gunned down 50 defenseless Muslims at two Christchurch, New Zealand, area mosques on March 15, 2019.

As revealed in his own alleged manifesto, Tarrant’s ideological paradigm is a bigoted ethno-nationalist, Marxist-Leninist communist state—i.e., the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—“the nation with the closest political and social values to my [Tarrant’s] own.”

The PRC’s brutal behavior on a grand scale—forcibly interning and “re-educating” an estimated 1.5 million Xinjiang province Uyghur Muslims—comports neatly with Tarrant’s ideologically driven violence.

Tarrant alone bears ultimate responsibility for the carnage he wrought. Moreover, predictably hysterical claims by the Jew-hating Turkish President Erdogan—echoed by supposedly more staid Muslim organizations, “expert” media commentators, and “academics”—that Tarrant somehow represents systemic Western Islamophobia, grotesquely distort the global context of both Muslim versus non-Muslim (especially Christian) and internecine Muslim violence.

3 Muslim Terror Plots Targeted US Synagogues in 3 Months American Jews have no idea that they might have been killed this year. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273412/3-muslim-terror-plots-targeted-us-synagogues-3-daniel-greenfield

On Wednesday, April 3, FBI agents converged on a Bozeman shooting range and took Fabjan Alameti into custody.

Alemati, an Albanian Muslim, had traveled from New York to Montana. “When the time will come for us to hunt them down, I will stand over them while I piece their bodies with hollow tips,” the Islamic terrorist had boasted in February. “Inshallah, we take as many kuffars (non-Muslims) with us.”

He had told a government informant back in January that his potential targets included military and government targets, as well as a “Jewish temple”.

Alameti’s terror plot back in January was the second such Islamic terror plot that month.

On December 14, 2018, Hasher Jallal Taheb was discussing some of the targets he had scouted in Washington D.C. They included the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and a specific synagogue.

In the middle of January, Taheb was arrested over in Georgia.

Taheb and Alemati had a number of similarities. Both men were twenty-one years old. Their terror plots were violent but scattershot. The range began with government building and ended with a synagogue.