RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kidnapping-schoolchildren-in-nigeria-becomes-big-business-11616511947?mod=hp_lead_pos5

KADUNA, Nigeria—The kidnap for ransom business is booming across northern Nigeria, and schoolchildren are its hottest commodity.

Just before midnight on March 11 gunmen barged into a school around 300 yards from a military training college in Kaduna state and seized dozens of students from their dormitories. It took less than 12 hours for the captors to issue a now familiar demand, through a grainy video posted on Facebook.

“They want 500 million Naira,” said one of the terrified hostages from the Federal College of Forestry, sitting shirtless in a forest clearing, a sum equal to around $1 million. Masked men wielding Kalashnikovs paced among the 39 students—mostly young women—then began to hit them with bullwhips.

“Our life is in danger,” a woman screamed. “Just give them what they want.”

On March 13, the Nigerian army foiled an attempt to kidnap 300 more students at a boarding school less than 50 miles away. The following day, children were among a group of 11 people abducted from the town of Suleja, in Nigeria’s Niger state.

This was just one weekend in what has become a routine and brutal business in Africa’s most populous country. Since December, heavily armed criminal gangs have abducted and ransomed more than 800 schoolchildren, rocking Nigeria and drawing calls for urgent action from the U.S. government, the European Union and Pope Francis. Hundreds of school campuses have been closed across four states for fear of more attacks, leaving close to 15 million Nigerian children out of school—more than any other country in the world.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17197/denmark-parallel-societies

“As a society, for too many years we have not made the necessary demands of newcomers. We have had far too low expectations for the refugees and immigrants who came to Denmark. We have not made sufficiently tangible demands on jobs and self-sufficiency. Therefore, too many immigrants have ended up in prolonged inactivity.” — Danish government report, “Showdown with Parallel Societies.”

The number of residential areas on the government’s most recent “ghetto list,” published in December 2020, has declined by half in three years, from 29 in 2018 to 15 in 2020. The number of “hardened ghettos” has declined from 15 in 2018 to 13 in 2020. Interior and Housing Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek attributed the decline mainly to more people finding employment or pursuing an education.

“As a society, we must step more into character and stick to our Danish values. We must not accept that democracy is replaced with hatred in parallel societies. Radicalization must not be protected. It must be revealed.” — Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.

The Danish government has announced a package of new proposals aimed at fighting “religious and cultural parallel societies” in Denmark. A cornerstone of the plan includes capping the percentage of “non-Western” immigrants and their descendants dwelling in any given residential neighborhood. The aim is to preserve social cohesion in the country by encouraging integration and discouraging ethnic and social self-segregation.

The announcement comes just days after Denmark approved a new law banning the foreign funding of mosques in the country. The government has also recently declared its intention significantly to limit the number of people seeking asylum in Denmark.

Denmark, which already has some of the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe, is now at the vanguard of European efforts to preserve local traditions and values in the face of mass migration, runaway multiculturalism and the encroachment of political Islam.

The new proposals, announced by Interior and Housing Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek on March 17, are contained in a 15-page report, “Mixed Residential Areas: The Next Step in the Fight Against Parallel Societies.”

A main element of the plan calls for relocating residents of non-Western origin to ensure that, within the next ten years, they do not comprise more than 30% of the total population of any neighborhood or housing area in Denmark.

The plan also calls for phasing out the term “ghetto areas,” which has been criticized as being derogatory, and replacing it with the more politically correct “prevention areas” (forebyggelsesområder) and “transformation areas” (omdannelsesområder).

The term “ghetto,” which refers to areas with high concentrations of immigrants, unemployment and crime, first came into official use in Denmark in 2010 with the release of a government report, “Reinserting Ghettos into Society: A Showdown with Parallel Societies in Denmark.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17137/china-pattern-of-anti-us-hostility

China’s pattern of hostile acts against U.S. interests seems indicative of a deep-seated antipathy for American values, including its democratic form of government, rule of law, and respect for human rights. While the U.S. and China could, theoretically, cooperate on areas of common interest, the enduring norm seems to have been, at least on China’s part, one of fierce confrontation, similar to the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

China has already been waging an asymmetric war against the U.S. for years. One frequent weapon against used by China against U.S. interests is the cyber attack. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) possesses a sophisticated and predatory cyber infrastructure consisting of several distinct sections of the General Staff.[1] One attack orchestrated by China on the U.S. involved hacking into terminals which contained digital personnel records of millions federal employees. . China’s hacking operations, however, are usually not disruptive, as opposed to Russia’s Iran, and North Korea’s attacks. The clear objective of Chinese cyber assaults has been the theft of intellectual property and trade secrets. In fact, Mike Rogers former Director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has delineated China’s thieving attacks to have been collection missions covering most of the key sectors of the U.S. economy.

Several PLA officers as early as 2014 boasted in a military doctrine periodical that China will win the “Cyber Network War” against the U.S.[2] The scope of China’s cyber offensive against America is massive, frequent, and comprehensive, covering the entire spectrum of critical technologies. China acknowledges the existence of a PLA cyber warfare unit, entitled “The Science of Military Strategy.” One source suggests that this unit may employ as many as 100 hundred thousand personnel.

China, as early as 2006, carried out laser attacks against U.S. imaging during passes over the Chinese Mainland. The Chinese military has lasered U.S. naval personnel on ships in Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea. These aggressions by China also have occurred when U.S. assets were operating near the Japanese owned but Chinese claimed Senkaku Islands (called by the Chinese, Diaoyu Islands).

One particularly aggressive and obvious indicator of Chinese hostile military intent occurred in the East African country of Djibouti where both the U.S. and China have military facilities. A U.S. C-130 transport left Camp Lemonier Airfield in early June 2018 when both pilots sustained injuries from a laser originating on the Chinese Djibouti support base at the Port of Doraleh. The Chinese action prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to issue an official “Notice to Airmen” warning all pilots in the region. These assaults are occurring despite the fact that China is a signatory of the 1995 “Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons. One 2013 PLA publication laid out China’s plans to deploy space-based laser weapons systems.[3] China claims that it has developed four different military and portable lasers, one of the hand-held models is designed to be employed against, presumably, U.S. drones.[4]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/north-koreas-missiles-and-nuclear-weapons-everything-you-need-to-know-11610712018?mod=world_major_1_pos1

North Korea sees its nuclear program as essential to regime survival, serving to deter a U.S.-led invasion. Decades of denuclearization talks, economic sanctions and diplomacy have done little to slow Pyongyang’s advance to becoming a self-declared nuclear state.

One of the world’s poorest and most-isolated countries, North Korea has managed to stay high on Washington’s list of foreign-policy priorities for years. It spends more on its military, as a ratio of gross domestic product, than any other of the 170 countries tracked by the U.S. State Department.

Pyongyang developed its weapons program brazenly, flouting sanctions and breaking promises to halt nuclear production. In 2003 it withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the main global commitment to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

At 2018’s Singapore summit with President Trump, Kim Jong Un greatly boosted his global legitimacy by becoming the first North Korean leader to meet a sitting U.S. leader. In 2017 Pyongyang had ratcheted up tensions with the U.S. to their highest level in years by conducting its sixth nuclear test and firing off three intercontinental ballistic missiles—the last of them showing the range to strike anywhere in the U.S.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-tries-michael-kovrig-second-canadian-at-center-of-diplomatic-standoff-11616415654

BEIJING—Chinese authorities opened and closed the espionage trial of the second Canadian at the center of a long-running standoff with both Canada and the U.S. without delivering a verdict.

Michael Kovrig, a researcher on leave from Canada’s diplomatic service, attended the hearing Monday with his lawyer, said Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, adding that it would issue a verdict at a later date. Mr. Kovrig has been charged with “probing into state secrets and intelligence” on behalf of foreign actors.

The trial began three days after a similar hearing for Michael Spavor in the northeastern Chinese city of Dandong, on the border with North Korea. That hearing concluded in a matter of hours, also without a verdict. Mr. Spavor ran a nonprofit that organized academic, tourist and business trips to North Korea.

Jim Nickel, Canada’s deputy chief of mission in China, said outside the Beijing court Monday morning that he had requested entry to the hearing but that he was denied on national security grounds. He cited Mr. Kovrig’s lawyer and a court official in saying the trial had begun.

Flanked by U.S. acting deputy chief of mission, William Klein, and diplomats from more than two dozen countries, many of them European, Mr. Nickel called for Chinese authorities to grant them access. He pointed to the Canada-China consular agreement, which he said guarantees consular access to citizens being tried. Canadian diplomats were also denied consular access to Mr. Spavor’s trial on national security grounds.

“Because the cases involve state secrets, the hearings are not held in open courts,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular briefing Monday. The court also cited national security.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/03/who-virologists-would-say-that/

In August 1967, a viral haemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola hit the quiet university town of Marburg in what was then West Germany. The case fatality rate of over 20 per cent wasn’t quite on a par with the Black Death, but it was bad enough. Luckily, the initial outbreak affected only twenty-five people and was quickly contained, so total cases were limited to thirty-one and total deaths to seven. Germans, it seems, have a healthy aversion to contact with the body fluids of dying relatives, and hospitals were sufficiently well-equipped to safely handle infectious patients oozing their insides out. One laboratory technician did however fall sick after he cut himself during an autopsy on a patient who had died of the disease. Accidents will happen, even to Germans.

The mystery illness came to be known as Marburg Disease, back in the days when it was still socially acceptable to name diseases after the places where they first appeared. Its source was traced to a batch of African green monkeys that had been shipped from Uganda for use in polio research. At the time, it was uncertain whether Marburg Disease had originated in Uganda, or the monkeys had become infected en route. That’s because the monkeys had flown to Germany via Heathrow, and thus their trip was inevitably held up by strike action. During their involuntary two-day layover, they came into contact with animals from around the world, their British handlers, and the local rats, raising the possibility of cross-infection. Consider that the next time you fly through Heathrow.

The Lancet was the first medical journal to publish a paper identifying the cause of Marburg Disease, going to press with an explanation just three months after the first victims fell ill. True to form, they got it wrong, blaming a bacterial agent. Slower, more careful research revealed that the real cause was a virus.

What was known at the time, and has now been known for more than half a century, is that Marburg Disease escaped from a biological laboratory. But you wouldn’t know that from the World Health Organisation website entry for Marburg Disease, or even from the Wikipedia page. The Australian Department of Health is more forthcoming, noting that the laboratory workers had been exposed to tissue samples from monkeys, but draws no particular conclusions from that fact. And why should they? Question the safety of one laboratory, and you question the safety of all.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17196/china-civilizational-war

“Gunpowder” is one of those words Beijing uses when it wants others to know war is on its mind. The term is, more worryingly, also especially emotion-packed, a word Chinese propagandists use when they want to rile mainland Chinese audiences…. China’s Communist Party, therefore, is now trying to whip up nationalist sentiment, rallying the Chinese people, perhaps readying them for war.

More fundamentally, Beijing is… trying to divide the world along racial lines and form a global anti-white coalition….

Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s mostly pragmatic successor, counseled China to “hide capabilities, bide time.” Xi, however, believes China’s time has come in part because, he feels, America is in terminal decline.

Xi is serious. In January, he told his fast-expanding military it must be ready to fight “at any second.” That month, the Party’s Central Military Commission took from the civilian State Council the power to mobilize all of society for war. Militant states rarely prepare for conflict and then back down.

There was a “strong smell of gunpowder” when American and Chinese diplomats met in Anchorage beginning March 18. That’s according to Zhao Lijian of China’s foreign ministry, speaking just hours after the first day of U.S.-China talks concluded.

“Gunpowder” is one of those words Beijing uses when it wants others to know war is on its mind.

The term is, more worryingly, also especially emotion-packed, a word Chinese propagandists use when they want to rile mainland Chinese audiences by reminding them of foreign — British and white — exploitation of China in the Opium War period of the 19th century. China’s Communist Party, therefore, is now trying to whip up nationalist sentiment, rallying the Chinese people, perhaps readying them for war.

More fundamentally, Beijing is, with the gunpowder reference and others, trying to divide the world along racial lines and form a global anti-white coalition.

There was more than just a whiff of gunpowder in Alaska. The foreign ministry’s Zhao blamed the U.S. side for exceeding the agreed time limit for opening remarks from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Blinken and Sullivan overran their allotted four minutes by… 44 seconds.

The Party’s Global Times called the two presentations “seriously overtime.” The foreign ministry’s Zhao said the overrun prompted the Chinese side to launch into its two presentations, which lasted 20 minutes and 23 seconds, well over their allotted four minutes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17194/mozambique-beheading-children

“I was at home with my four children,” one mother told Save the Children. “We tried to escape to the woods, but they took my eldest son and beheaded him. We couldn’t do anything because we would be killed too.” — Telegraph, March 13, 2021.

The jihadists are known in the area as al-Shabaab, but unlike the al-Shabaab that operates in Somalia, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda, the Mozambique group, also known as Ansar al-Sunna, is affiliated with Islamic State (ISIS).

The terrorist insurgency threatens not only Mozambique and its people, in addition to neighboring Tanzania, which is fighting jihadists on the border; some analysts estimate that “the insurgency in Mozambique has the potential to destabilise Southern Africa and embolden Islamists throughout the region.”

Al-Shabaab… made a far more significant breakthrough in August 2020, when the group seized a key port in the province, Mocimboa da Praia, near the country’s burgeoning natural gas field developments…. The gas field developments…. are worth an estimated $60 billion….

Al-Shabaab jihadists leading an insurgency in Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique, are now beheading children as young as 11. Military and humanitarian personnel working in the area reportedly say that they have never seen anything like the brutality that the terrorists have unleashed on the region with people “often hacked to death and mutilated with machetes” as well as “mass Islamic State-style beheadings”.

“That night our village was attacked and houses were burned. When it all started, I was at home with my four children,” one mother told Save the Children. “We tried to escape to the woods, but they took my eldest son and beheaded him. We couldn’t do anything because we would be killed too.”

“After my 11-year-old son was killed, we understood that it was no longer safe to stay in my village,” said another mother, who was forced to flee with her remaining three children. “We fled to my father’s house in another village, but a few days later the attacks started there too.”

“I saw my daughter trying to run to the boat with two other children. The people from al-Shabab chased them. They took my daughter and many others. Then they set fire to our village,” said Fatima Abdul, a 43-year-old woman who fled and is now homeless, living on a beach.