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Ruth King

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Brazil’s Bolsonaro arrives in Israel for 4-day visit

By on March 31st, 2019

http://www.israelhayom.com/2019/03/31/brazils-bolsonaro-warmly-received-by-netanyahu-in-israel/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warmly welcomed Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on his first state visit to Israel on Sunday.

Bolsonaro touched down Sunday and received red carpet treatment from Netanyahu, who is running for re-election in nine days. The Brazilian leader opened his speech after landing with the words “I love Israel” in Hebrew.

The Brazilian president is expected during his four-day trip to decide whether to follow U.S. President Donald Trump’s lead and move the Brazilian Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move he has repeatedly promised.

Netanyahu called Bolsonaro a “good friend” and said Israel and Brazil have entered “a new era” of relations.

The prime minister said he and Bolsonaro would sign “many agreements,” including security deals, and that the Brazilian leader would visit Judaism’s holy Western Wall, “in Jerusalem, our eternal capital.”

Israeli financial news website, Calcalist, reported on Sunday that Brazilian state-run oil firm Petrobras was considering bidding in a new tender to explore for oil and gas offshore Israel and a final decision would be announced during Bolsonaro’s visit.

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Hunt for knifeman in north London after four people are stabbed at random Martin Evans

By on March 31st, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/31/hunt-knifeman-north-london-four-people-stabbed-random/

There have been more than 20 fatal stabbings across the capital since the start of the year, with two knife murders in the past few days.

Scotland Yard officers were urgently hunting a crazed knife-man who stabbed four complete strangers in the space of a few hours after approaching them at random.

A 45-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man remained in a critical condition in hospital and two others were seriously hurt following what detectives described as a series of “senseless and cowardly” attacks.

Officers flooded the streets of Edmonton in north London and warned the public to be vigilant following the spate of linked knifings which occurred in the space of just over 12-hours.

The attacker was described as a black man, approximately 6ft 3ins tall, of skinny build and wearing dark clothing, possibly a hooded top.

The incidents followed another upsurge of bloody violence across the country with at least six fatal stabbings in recent days.

On Monday Theresa May, the Prime Minister, will host a major knife crime summit at Downing Street as the police desperately try to get a grip on the rising tide of violence.

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Theresa May risks survival of the Conservatives by siding with Remainers Suella Braverman

By on March 31st, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/03/31/theresa-may-risks-survival-conservatives-siding-remainers/

Trust. Such a simple word yet difficult to define. Can the British people trust their politicians? In fact, do we deserve their trust?

That question is being tested as we find ourselves in the middle of a constitutional crisis and political failure.

As a Leave-supporting MP, I resigned my ministerial job over the final terms of the Withdrawal Agreement in November. I then voted against it for the third time on Friday.

I have received a hero’s welcome from those grateful for “not letting us down”. I have also had the finger of blame pointed and have been branded an “extremist” and “hardliner”.

Champion and villain in equal measure. Neither, in reality, are true.

The position in which my Leave-supporting colleagues and I have found ourselves has been difficult.

As the valiant minority in a Remain-dominated Parliament, sidelined by the pro-Remain Government and Civil Service, we have always known that the uphill struggle was worth it for the sake of the 17.4 million majority. We resoundingly rejected the Withdrawal Agreement in January because it did not offer Brexit.

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The Hate Crimes of Jussie Smollett COMMENTARY . By Carl M. Cannon

By on March 31st, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/31/the_hate_crimes_of_jussie_smollett_139915.htmlBy Carl M. Cannon – RCP Staff
March 31, 2019

Let’s be clear: A hate crime did take place in Chicago. It’s an ongoing crime, too.

Yes, a hoax occurred — more like two or three hoaxes — but deliberately stoked racial animosity can’t be washed away with the forfeiture of a $10,000 bond, a few hours of dubious “community service,” or the sealing of public records in a criminal case. If history has taught us anything, it’s that hate tends to fester, especially when aided by fraud and abetted by government.

The latest chapter in America’s dispiriting culture wars began Jan. 22, when television actor Jussie Smollett reported receiving a letter with homophobic and racial invective, accompanied by a nasty threat: “You will die, black fag.” The letter also included a stick figure hanging from a tree and a white powdery substance. As its author knew, ever since the 2001 deadly anthrax letter attacks, sending such powder through the mail to a famous and politically active person would result in first-responders in hazmat suits, which is what happened.

Yet this reaction wasn’t enough to satisfy Jussie Smollett. When the white powder turned out not to be anthrax spores but crushed acetaminophen tablets, the incident attracted little attention, even in Chicago. This apparently irked Smollett.

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Justice for Justine? The Naked Power of the Muslim Brotherhood in America Janet Levy Ross

By on March 31st, 2019

Who Controls America’s Courts?There have been multiple cases of court decisions rendered under sharia in America over the past 2-3 decades.

Recall the 2009 case of a New Jersey woman who was initially denied a restraining order after she was raped by her Moroccan Muslim husband.  The family court judge ruled that the husband was operating under his Islamic belief that a wife is required to satisfy her husband’s sexual desires at all times.  However, under New Jersey law, coerced sex between married couples is called “rape.”  Fortunately, the appellate court overruled the decision and the woman eventually obtained an order of restraint.

In 1996, in Hosain v. Malik, a Maryland district court enforced a Pakistani sharia custody order and granted full custody to the father, even though U.S. law requires the court to consider the well-being of the child and the father was an abusive alcoholic.  The appellate court ruled that in Pakistani culture, the well being of the child is believed to be “facilitated by adherence to Islamic teachings” and the child returned to Pakistan with her father. 

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MY SAY: THE REAL COLLUDERS

By on March 31st, 2019

In the introduction to her book “The Red Thread- A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy” author Diana West asks: “What explains the law breaking lengths to which the highest government officials in Washington, D.C. have gone to stop the election of Donald Trump and then destroy his presidency?

”What indeed? These people were not the apparatchiks of the sixties who mimeographed anti American screeds in basements and couriered them on the subways.  They were not the whiners and prevaricators of the never-Trump media. They were not leftist academics preaching to credulous snowflakes.

As West meticulously demonstrates in this short, timely work, they operated at the highest levels of government agencies where they exerted power and prestige and seeded poison. The Ohrs-Nellie and Bruce, Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, ex British spy Christopher Steele, CIA Director and TV star John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI conspirators and lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page invented dossiers, circulated rumors of collusion with Russia, crimes and coverups, all in the service of distracting and destroying a president.

Much of this has been disclosed, but West goes farther investigating the protagonists of the conspiracy. Drawing on interviews, published writings and academic papers, West builds vivid ideological profiles of anti-Trump conspirators who have otherwise remained enigmas to the public.

 As Frank J. Gaffney, Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy, notes in his foreword “Ms. West’s meticulous research lays bare the ideological thread that runs through all these lives….. a leitmotif of communist mentorship, progressivist education, Marxist indoctrination, and ultimately a willing abrogation of oaths of office in obedience to the diktat of an ideology rooted not in Philadelphia, but St. Petersburg and Moscow.

”In The Red Thread , Diana West,  indefatigable journalist and author employs the same investigative techniques and research used in her previous book “American Betrayal- : The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character” displaying, once again, her unique understanding of how history informs current events.

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The Month That Was – March 2019 Sydney Williams

By on March 31st, 2019

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

March is when we move from winter to spring. We had days with temperatures in the single digits and others when the thermometer approached seventy. Mark Twain once wrote about spring, “I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.” Perhaps we weren’t that extreme, though it did snow here in southeastern Connecticut on the third full day of spring. And there were days when Robins must have thought they came north too early. March is when the clocks advance by an hour – an anachronism from a time when family farms were ubiquitous, and more daylight hours were important. In 1920, 27% of the U.S. population lived on farms. Today, 2% do. So, why do we still change our clocks?

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The month blossomed with news, if not with flora. A terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand; the release of the long-anticipated Mueller report; the fatal crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia; the fifteenth (or was it the sixteenth?) announced candidacy for the Democrat nomination for President; Brexit; a college admissions scandal that rocked Hollywood, Wall Street, law firms and some of our top universities; Nicolás Maduro gained traction in Venezuela, with help from China and especially Russia, while Juan Guaidó’s wife Fabiana Rosales visited the White House; President Trump acknowledged the reality of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and he issued his first veto (sustained) over Wall funding; the ISIS Caliphate in Syria was defeated; China enlisted a deeply indebted Italy into its Belt and Road Initiative; friends in high places, and hatred for Trump convinced the Cook County State’s Attorney to drop charges against Jussie Smollett for a feigned racial attack.

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Three events during the month said much about modern American culture – none of it positive, which should give us pause. The first was the revelation uncovered in the college admissions scandal, a scandal that said a lot about the values of so-called elites – how they lied and cheated to get their children into top colleges.

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A Mole Hunt for Diversity ‘Bias’ at Villanova An atmosphere of fear-imposed silence makes it impossible to achieve a real liberal-arts education.By Colleen A. Sheehan and James Matthew Wilson

By on March 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-mole-hunt-for-diversity-bias-at-villanova-11553898400?

Like many colleges in the U.S., Villanova University has launched an effort to monitor its faculty for signs of “bias” in the classroom. As Villanova professors, we believe this mole hunt for bias undercuts our ability to provide students with a liberal education.

Last fall we were notified by the Villanova administration that new “diversity and inclusion” questions would be added to the course and teaching evaluations that students fill out each semester. In addition to the standard questions about the intellectual worth of the course and the quality of instruction, students are now being asked heavily politicized questions such as whether the instructor has demonstrated “cultural awareness” or created an “environment free of bias based on individual differences or social identities.”

In short, students are being asked to rate professors according to their perceived agreement with progressive political opinion on bias and identity. Students are also invited to “comment on the instructor’s sensitivity to the diversity of the students in the class.” Professors are rated on their “sensitivity” to a student’s “biological sex, disability, gender identity, national origin, political viewpoint, race/ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, etc.” The “etc.” in particular seems like an ominous catchall, as if the sole principle of sound teaching has become “that no student shall be offended.”

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Mueller and the Obama Accounting The former President now owes the country an explanation for the historic abuse of government surveillance powers.By James Freeman

By on March 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-and-the-obama-accounting-11553534271

The Mueller report confirms that the Obama administration, without evidence, turned the surveillance powers of the federal government against the presidential campaign of the party out of power. This historic abuse of executive authority was either approved by President Barack Obama or it was not. It’s time for Mr. Obama, who oddly receives few mentions in stories about his government’s spying on associates of the 2016 Trump campaign, to say what he knew and did not know about the targeting of his party’s opponents.

If he was briefed, for example, on plans by the Justice Department to seek wiretaps on Trump campaign associates, it’s hard to believe Mr. Obama would not have been highly interested in the matter. Going all the way back to his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, Mr. Obama had aggressively advocated for preventing federal abuse of surveillance powers.

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The People’s Sovereignty Is the Foundation of Constitutional Law By Edward J. Erler

By on March 31st, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/30/the-peoples-sovereignty-is-the-found

Although I don’t believe I have ever seen so many errors in such a short essay, the principal error in Mark Pulliam’s response to my recent piece, “Don’t Read the Constitution the Way Robert Bork Did” is this: If one claims to adhere to the original intentions of the Founders, one must first understand those intentions. In that effort, Pulliam fails in every respect.

Beginning with the question of natural law and the Declaration of Independence and moving in all directions from there, Pulliam presents a blinkered understanding of the purposes and meaning of our Constitution. There is not a single prominent American Founder—not Madison, Hamilton, Adams, Mason, Randolph, Wilson or any of a host of others—who did not believe that the Declaration served as the authoritative source of the Constitution’s authority. Miss this point and you cannot understand the original intent of the Constitution.

Pulliam cites Justice Scalia as an authority. However much we may praise many of the conclusions Scalia reached on the bench, it remains that Scalia, unlike Justice Thomas, was a positivist—saying on one occasion that if the majority voted to legalize abortion, then it should be legal. Thomas, however, realizes that according to natural law principles, abortion is a violation of the natural right to life that is expressly protected by the Constitution. In the face of Thomas’ argument, Pulliam collapses: natural law—“whatever that is.” Is it really so difficult!

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