RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/pompeo-sanctions-just-a-part-of-iran-regime-behavior-change-plan/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this morning that snapback sanctions on Iran will be “just a part of the U.S. government’s total effort to change the behavior of the Ayatollah Khamenei” and the regime in Tehran.

Sanctions on Iran’s energy, shipbuilding, shipping and banking sectors that were lifted as a result of the P5+1 nuclear deal will go back into effect Monday, Pompeo told reporters on a call.

Eight countries, though, are receiving waivers that will allow them to keep buying oil from Iran without coming under U.S. sanctions: Pompeo did not identify the countries, but Bloomberg reported that four are Japan, India, China and South Korea.

“We expect to issue some temporary allotments to eight jurisdictions, but only because they have demonstrated significant reductions in their crude oil and cooperation on many other fronts and have made important moves towards getting to zero crude oil importation. These negotiations are still ongoing,” Pompeo said. “Two of the jurisdictions will completely end imports as part of their agreements. The other six will import at greatly reduced levels.”

He stressed that “our actions today are targeted at the regime, not the people of Iran who have suffered grievously under this regime”; the U.S. “will maintain many humanitarian exemptions to our sanctions, including food, agriculture commodities, medicine and medical devices.”

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the U.S. has “gone after the financial networks that the Iranian regime uses to fuel its terrorist proxies in Hezbollah and Hamas, to fund the Houthis in Yemen, and to support the brutal Assad regime in Syria.”

On Monday, Treasury will add more than 700 names to the list of blocked entities, he said, which includes “hundreds of targets previously granted sanctions relief under the JCPOA, as well as more than 300 new designations.”

Senate Republicans including Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) want the administration to cut off Iranian banks from conducting global transactions using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, and are expected to introduced legislation to force President Trump’s hand after the election. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13211/iraq-christians-returning

“Something specific occurred here that requires a specific response. It is called genocide… It is important for these communities to understand that they have a superpower behind them. This is a White House priority. Our goal is to help those communities return to their historic lands.” — Max Primorac, Special Representative for Minority Assistance Programs at USAID, who is responsible for aiding Christians and Yazidis targeted by ISIS.

While roughly a third of the Christians who fled from ISIS in 2014 are returning, the future of their communities in northern Iraq needs political support and a surge of security and economic development. For Christians worldwide, this is our homeland. This is where we began. These are the people we need to protect and help to prosper.

QARAQOSH, Iraq — Christians are gradually returning to their historic homeland in northern Iraq, after three years of ISIS occupation.

The lucky ones managed to flee before the ISIS onslaught in the pre-dawn hours of August 6, 2014, and returned to find their houses intact. Most, however, are facing tremendous damage to their homes and families from a war that pitted neighbor against neighbor, community against community, tearing apart bonds forged over generations.

Yohanna Younis Towaya, 54, a prominent businessman and farmer, returned to find his home burned and looted. “One wall, next to my father’s house, was completely blown out but we repaired it,” he says. His father’s house, next door, he says, has been flattened by an allied air strike: ISIS fighters turned it into a fighting post.

Towaya says he doubts he will ever rebuild his father’s house, like the 116 such buildings in this once-thriving Christian economic center. “ISIS fighters are buried there beneath the rubble,” he says. “Sometimes, you can smell them.”

The smell of the unburied dead is pungent. You can smell it from here in the Christian heartland all the way into ancient Mosul, 12 miles to the west. The area was totally devastated in the final battle to crush ISIS hold-outs fighting from tunnels and underground bunkers.

No one really knows who provided ISIS with their tunneling machines, but there are many of them. On the outskirts of Qaraqosh, members of ISIS had dug a maze of tunnels beneath a Syriac Orthodox monastery at Qortaya to an ancient Assyrian mound 150 meters away. Those firing positions, high enough for an ordinary person to walk upright, allowed them to dominate the surrounding plains.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13190/britain-terror-investigations

If you do not even dare to link terrorism to its source, then surely neither can you prepare for it.

No one seems to be holding roundtable talks with non-Muslim communities across the UK to address their legitimate fears and concerns about religiously-motivated terrorism on their lives.

Perhaps the main reason that terror victims had nowhere to turn is that even after years of living with Islamic terrorism, British authorities and public services still appear to be more concerned with dealing with perceived “Islamophobia” than with the real, devastating consequences of terrorism.

Britain’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Max Hill, recently recommended:

“…the Police should consider and reflect upon the community impact of a large-scale [terror] investigation, centering as it did on particular areas of Manchester with a large Muslim population… Good community policing, as well as good counter-terrorism policing, demands that real efforts are made to work within and with local communities, where many blameless residents will have been inconvenienced if not traumatised by the regular appearance of Police search and arrest teams on their street or in their home. I would like to see the outcome of Police reflections on this aspect…” [Emphasis added]

Hill’s recommendation was published in his recent report on how the UK handles its counter-terrorism efforts. In the report, Hill examines police investigations of the major 2017 terrorist attacks; his recommendation was connected to the investigation into the terrorist attack in Manchester in May 2017, in which Salman Abedi murdered 22 people and injured 139, half of them children, at an Ariana Grande pop concert at the Manchester Arena.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/haley-cuba-vote-just-one-more-time-un-members-feel-they-can-poke-u-s-in-the-eye/

Ambassador Nikki Haley lashed out at the United Nations’ annual condemnation of the U.S. embargo on Cuba as “one more time that countries feel they can poke the United States in the eye.”

“You are literally hurting the Cuban people by telling the regime that their treatment of their people is acceptable. For 27 years we’ve had this debate, and nothing has changed in Cuba – at least nothing for the better,” she told members. “…The sorry state of liberty and human rights in Cuba is not lost on anyone in this chamber – even as countries vote to blindly support the resolution every year.”

The resolution calling on the U.S. to lift the embargo was first introduced in 1992 and has passed overwhelmingly each year. This year the vote was 189-2, with the U.S. and Israel opposing.

In 2016, when the Obama administration was trying to forge better relations with the communist country, both the U.S. and Israel abstained during the vote.

Haley said proponents of the resolution “falsely blame America for all kinds of evil things, even genocide.”

“Those who support this resolution every year have it wrong. Our reason for the embargo is and has always been Cuba’s denial of freedom and the denial of the most basic human rights for the Cuban people. The United States will continue to stand with the Cuban people until their rights and their freedoms are restored. Period. We won’t back down,” she added. “Last year, we were joined by just one nation in voting against this resolution. And that’s fine. We were in very good company. We have no problem standing alone on behalf of the things that we believe in and will proudly do so again today if necessary.”

During a speech today at Miami Dade College’s National Historic Landmark Freedom Tower, National Security Advisor John Bolton warned that “in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, we see the perils of poisonous ideologies left unchecked, and the dangers of domination and suppression.”

“The ‘Troika of Tyranny’ in this hemisphere — Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — has finally met its match,” he added.

Regarding the mysterious “sonic attacks” that have driven most U.S. diplomats from Havana and caused illness including traumatic brain injury, Bolton vowed that “this president will not allow our diplomats to be targeted with impunity.” Cuba has denied being behind the attacks.

Haley said at the UN that “for 27 years we’ve had this debate, and nothing has changed in Cuba – at least nothing for the better.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-who-oversaw-corruption-probe-to-be-named-brazils-justice-minister-1541083888?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=undefined&cx_artPos=4#cxrecs_s

Brazil’s President-elect Jair Bolsonaro picked the country’s crusading anticorruption judge to be justice minister, signaling that Latin America’s largest nation will step up its battle against endemic graft but fueling criticism of the judiciary among his opponents.

Mr. Bolsonaro said Thursday that Sergio Moro had accepted his invitation to head a beefed-up version of the justice ministry from January 1, which will also give Mr. Moro control over the country’s efforts to combat spiraling violence that saw nearly 64,000 people slain last year.

“His agenda against corruption and organized crime, as well as his respect for the Constitution and the law, will be our guiding principle,” Mr. Bolsonaro said on Twitter.

In a note sent by the Bolsonaro transition team, Mr. Moro was quoted as saying that his appointment means “consolidating the advances of the past few years against crime and corruption and reducing the risks of going backwards,” and adding that he made the decision for “the greater good.”

The appointment of the widely-respected judge as minister is considered by legal experts to be a stamp of approval for the future government of Mr. Bolsonaro, who swept to victory Sunday with his promise to restore law and order.

But the move has also fueled criticism of partisanship in the country’s vast Car Wash corruption investigation that Mr. Moro helped lead, adding weight to accusations by the leftist Workers’ Party that the operation was part of a soft coup by the right to seize power. CONTINUE AT SITE