RUTHFULLY YOURS

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”.

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.

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.

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?