RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17080/biden-afghanistan-taliban

Under the terms of that agreement with the US, the Taliban agreed to negotiate a peaceful resolution of this benighted country’s long-running civil war in return for Washington agreeing to withdraw all its remaining forces. In addition, they agreed to cut their ties with Islamist terrorist organisations such as Al-Qaeda.

While Mr Trump kept his side of the bargain, reducing US forces from around 13,000 at the time the deal was signed last February to just 2,500 when he left office, there has been little evidence of the Taliban fulfilling their commitments under the terms of the agreement.

Consequently, Afghanistan finds itself in the midst of a major security crisis, with militants concentrating their attacks on a broad cross-section of Afghan society, with judges, activists, journalists, moderate clerics, students and other professionals all being targeted.

Afghan officials believe the Taliban never had any intention of fulfilling their side of the deal, and just drew out the negotiations with the Trump administration so that they could secure the release of the estimated 5,000 militants being held by Afghan security forces, who were eventually released by the Afghan authorities last autumn.

“The only thing the Taliban have taken out of this agreement is to get their prisoners, then launch an offensive against the Afghan forces and government. That was, it seems, their plan from the beginning.” — Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan’s National Security Advisor, The Times, February 17, 2021.

Of major concern is the prospect that, if the Taliban are allowed to seize control of the country they governed prior to the September 11 attacks, they will once again allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, which will then use the country as a base to launch devastating attacks against the West.

Thus, in making his decision about the future of American forces in Afghanistan, Mr Biden needs to take care that he is not responsible for causing a new wave of terror attacks against the US and its allies.

With former US President Donald J. Trump no longer able to dictate US policy on Afghanistan, the Taliban are exploiting the opportunity to increase their efforts to seize control of the country in spite of the peace accord they signed with the Trump administration last year.

Under the terms of that agreement with the US, the Taliban agreed to negotiate a peaceful resolution of this benighted country’s long-running civil war in return for Washington agreeing to withdraw all its remaining forces. In addition, they agreed to cut their ties with Islamist terrorist organisations such as Al-Qaeda.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/formerly-happy-brits-now-sit-alone-their-cars-katie-hopkins/

My mother looked a bit flustered as I walked through her front door.

Do you know, a lady my age just stabbed her husband to death in their kitchen? They were a lovely couple, according to the neighbors. Always together, always working in their garden, always on holidays. Well, she stabbed him to death. Four times! In the kitchen!

Ok I told her I did not know that. Though, I assumed she stabbed him four times and not that he died in quadruple. I was also caught off guard by my mother’s repeated insistence that this had all happened IN THE KITCHEN as if that was some sacred place in the home where these things never happen. Unlike the study or the bedroom, for example, where Cluedo has taught us all sorts of maleficence can occur.

My mother was not done yet.

Well, quite frankly, I quite understand how she must have been feeling. Your father is doing my head in.

My mother is not alone in how she feels. Not that every married wife of 50-year standing is poised in their kitchens, bread knife in hand, ready to end their beloved in a row over an iPad charger. But endless lockdown in the UK is making Brits who were perfectly happy before, question the point of going on.

“On my drive to work, I seriously thought about driving my car into a wall” comments one follower on my Instagram feed. “I sat alone in my car from 5-6.30pm yesterday, just to have some time on my own away from my family. This is not life.” This, shared openly, by another.

We just aren’t supposed to be trapped indoors with other people for this long. I know marriage is about sharing your life, but part of that is that you are sharing the most mundane bits of you that others don’t get to see — amongst all the noise and chaos of others.

Turned off from all external stimuli, the mundane stuff we are recycling at home feels terminal, like an air-conditioning unit returning polluted air. We are all set on repeat, scratching about for something interesting to think, or some different way to feel.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/china-betrays-its-deal-with-the-vatican/

Having secured the papacy’s help in weakening the Chinese Catholic underground, Xi Jinping’s regime is reneging on the commitments it made in return.

Beijing has quietly indicated that it will soon abrogate its “breakthrough” 2018 agreement with the Vatican, which was meant to settle a decades-long dispute over the appointment of bishops in China.

In November, shortly after exchanging diplomatic notes verbales with Rome to renew the deal for another two years, China thoroughly negated it in a dry public posting by the state bureaucracy. Order No. 15, on new administrative rules for religious affairs, includes an article on establishing a process for the selection of Catholic bishops in China after May 1. The document makes no provision for any papal role in the process, not even a papal right to approve or veto episcopal appointments in China, which was supposed to be the single substantive concession to the Vatican in the agreement. It’s as if the deal never happened.

Reneging on a deal with Pope Francis may not be as consequential as overturning the “one country, two systems” agreement that was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong’s autonomy after the city’s return from the United Kingdom to China, but it does reveal the peril of international partnerships with Beijing.

In October, when the two-year renewal of the deal was announced, the Vatican reported that the “results achieved” until then under the agreement were the appointments of two new bishops who had papal approval. Its press statement praised the appointments as “a good start.” “Thanks to the implementation of the Agreement, there will be no illegitimate ordinations,” the statement said, before expressing joy that the Chinese Church would experience “unity” once again. Order No. 15 now casts serious doubt on these claims.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/edition/china-insider-7-2_3694788/3690286

As the Chinese regime continues to intimidate Taiwan by repeatedly breaching the island’s airspace and escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait, it is developing an advanced fighter jet aircraft in secret.

The Epoch Times recently obtained a military document from a trusted source which unveiled details of a concept fighter jet project, driven by China’s “military-civil fusion” strategy. It also reveals that the Chinese military is developing the new generation fighter jets for attacking Taiwan and competing with the United States.

Several countries around the world are developing a “sixth-generation fighter” aircraft that is more advanced than the fifth-generation fighter aircraft currently in service, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Sweden, India, Japan, Taiwan, and Russia.

The Chinese regime is also developing its own version of a sixth-generation fighter. The Epoch Times recently obtained a document issued by China’s Ministry of National Defense in 2017, in accordance with Beijing’s 13th Five-Year Plan. The document revealed the CCP’s pre-research plan for sixth-generation fighter aircrafts, with a focus on developing an unmanned combat system.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/canadas-covid-vaccine-failure-11613772230?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

If you’re impatient with the pace of Covid-19 vaccine distribution in the U.S., count your blessings. At least you don’t live in Canada. As of Wednesday, my country had administered only 3.52 vaccine doses per 100 people, according to the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data website. The U.S., at 17.00, was doing almost five times as well. The figures were 80.07 in Israel, 25.04 in the U.K. and 5.40 in the European Union.

Why is Canada such a laggard among developed nations? The government of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t negotiate contracts with established drug companies. Rather, it quietly approved a working relationship between Canadian researchers and a Chinese vaccine maker, CanSino Biologics Inc. CanSino abandoned its project in August after multiple failures. Ottawa then had to rush through agreements with Pfizer, Moderna and other companies. “I would not have put all our eggs in the basket of China,” Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole told reporters.

When Canada and other countries experienced a significant spike in Covid-19 cases last month (which has now subsided), Pfizer reduced its shipment to my country by more than two-thirds for several weeks. Moderna announced that only three-quarters of its vaccines would arrive in Canada during early February.

https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2021/02/16/accidental-blast-bomb-making-class-kills-

At least 30 Taliban members died after an explosive device detonated during a bomb-making tutorial in Afghanistan’s northern Balkh province over the weekend, the Defense Post reported on Tuesday.

A group of Taliban jihadists gathered at a mosque in the village of Qultaq on February 13 to receive training on how to assemble bombs and improvised explosive devices (IED). An explosive device accidentally detonated, killing at least “30 Taliban fighters including six foreign nationals who were expert mine makers,” according to the Afghan Army’s 209th Shaheen Corps, which confirmed the deadly blast in a statement released Saturday. The bodies of the six Taliban-affiliated foreign nationals were rendered unidentifiable by the blast, according to the statement.

The Taliban has not commented on the incident. Such accidental explosions are fairly common in war-torn Afghanistan. A similar blast occurred at a mosque in Balkh’s Chahabar Bolak district in August.

“A group of eight Taliban IED experts were busy manufacturing a bomb inside a mosque in Sikandar Khel Village [when a] … premature explosion caused by [the] IED killed four Taliban militants and wounded at least four others,” Afghanistan’s Khaama Press reported at the time, citing a statement by Afghanistan’s Shaheen Corps.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17053/iran-pursuit-nuclear-weapons

The IAEA at first did not take these reports of a secret Iranian atomic warehouse seriously. This should not be surprising: the IAEA has a long history of misreporting the Iranian regime’s compliance with the deal and declining to follow up on credible reports about Iran’s illicit nuclear activities.

Iran’s nuclear deal has dangerous fundamental flaws, specifically the ability to enrich uranium in the first place — as the preeminent US nuclear negotiator Ambassador John R. Bolton wrote a few years ago, without it, no bomb — and the deal’s notorious sunset clauses that remove restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program after the deal soon expires.

After a significant amount of pressure was imposed on the IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog, inspecting the suspected site that the Israeli Prime Minister referred to was implemented two years later, in the fall 2020. Even then, although Iran’s leaders certainly had enough time to clean up the facility, the IAEA’s inspectors nevertheless reported that traces of radioactive uranium had been detected by examining remaining samples.

It should also not come as surprise that the ruling mullahs of Iran are declining to answer the IAEA’s questions.

It is also important to point out that one of the most basic requirements of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a party, as well as one of the terms of the 2015 “nuclear deal,” was that the Iranian regime is required to reveal its nuclear activities to the IAEA — a condition with which it also failed to comply.

The detection of radioactive particles in Turquz Abad not only points to the high probability that Tehran has been undertaking work on nuclear weapons in secret; it also points to the high probability that Iran’s ruling mullahs have most likely been violating the nuclear deal since it was reached in 2015.

In spite of the Iranian leaders’ claim that their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, evidence reveals that the Iranian regime has long sought to acquire nuclear weapons.

A recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency pointed out that “Samples taken from two sites during inspections in the fall by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) contained traces of radioactive material”.

This case was first brought to the world’s attention in 2018 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano to inspect an “atomic warehouse” in Iran. Netanyahu pointed out in his speech to the UN General Assembly that the Iranian government had a “secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material from Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.” In addition, in 2018, two non-partisan organizations based in Washington, DC — the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) — released detailed reports about Iran’s undeclared clandestine nuclear facilities, as well. Iran’s leaders claimed that the warehouse, in a village, Turquz Abad, in the suburbs of Tehran, was simply a place where carpets were cleaned.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/as_germans_freeze_leading_newspaper_calls_green_energy_strategy_a_dangerous_miscalculation.html

The very green Germans have major concerns regarding their dependence on renewables:

‘Die Welt’ Commentary: “Europe Can’t Bail Out The German Power Supply”…Calls Strategy “A Dangerous Miscalculation”
Germany has seriously overestimated how much its neighboring countries are able to help out in the event wind and solar energy fail to deliver, thus putting its power supply at risk.
By P. Gosselin on 11 September 2018

Little attention is paid to the question of just how much “climate change” is a result of human activity — i.e., CO2 emissions into the atmosphere resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.  Does anyone have a handle on this?

A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions

ABSTRACT:We examine tropospheric temperature trends of 67runs from 22 ‘Climate of the 20th Century’ model simulations and try to reconcile them with the best available updated observations (in the tropics during the satellite era). Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs. These conclusions contrast strongly with those of recent publications based on essentially the same data. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/02/17/parliament-in-france-passes-anti-islamist-bill-n1426249

The lower house of the French parliament passed a hotly debated law that would not only heavily scrutinized Muslim mosques, schools, and sports clubs for Islamist influences but also promote respect for French values like free speech.

The bill passed 347-151, with 65 abstentions. French President Macron is being accused of promoting the bill to attract far-right anti-immigrant voters in the lead-up to the presidential vote next year.

Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally Party finished second to Macron in the 2017 elections, failing to win a runoff. Immigration was a huge issue during the campaign and Macron appears to be trying to protect his right flank with this bill.

Associated Press:

The bill gained added urgency after a teacher was beheaded outside Paris in October and three people were killed during a knife attack at a Nice basilica the same month.

A section that makes it a crime to knowingly endanger the life of a person by providing details of their private life and location is known as the ’’Paty law.” It was named for Samuel Paty, the teacher who was killed outside his school after information about where he taught was posted online in a video.

The bill bolsters other French efforts to fight extremism, mainly security-based.

The argument of opponents is that it unfairly targets a single group and that most of the crimes are covered by other laws. Muslims fear the law will be used injudiciously and could be an instrument of oppression.

But France’s largest Muslim group, the French Council for Muslim Faith, gave its blessing to the bill as did other religious groups. The bill never mentions “Muslims” or “Islam” by name, which was criticized by National Rally as a “half-measure.”