RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15995/new-nuclear-threats

At present, exactly zero percent of America’s nuclear platforms are modernized.

Worse, when, in 2017, General Hyten… warned of the Russian threat, a common counter-narrative in the U.S. arms control community – and shared by some members of Congress — was that simply by proposing to modernize a then-rusting nuclear deterrent, the United States was “leading an arms race.”

Even these critics, however, had to know that it takes years to research, develop, test, and then build highly complex nuclear forces, so that no new U.S. nuclear deployments would even be able to start until 2029.

Russia has already completed 87% of its arms race while the US is just putting on its track shoes. The door to an arms race was opened long ago — but by Russia, not the United States.

Without nuclear modernization, unfortunately, the United States cannot keep a credible nuclear deterrent against its nuclear armed enemies — not only Russia but also China, whose nuclear arsenal is scheduled to double in the next decade, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Now that 184 countries are grappling with the medical and economic convulsions of China’s CCP coronavirus that seems to have originated in a bio-warfare laboratory in Wuhan, what other catastrophes might be headed our way, especially ones we have been forewarned about?

What if America’s adversaries might start to believe that because the US has a Covid-19 crisis on its hands, the nation might be distracted and vulnerable, so that now might be a good time to strike? If such adversaries think the US does not have a strong deterrent, does that make it an even more tempting target?

Last month, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu said that by the end of 2020, Russia will have modernized 87% of its nuclear arsenal, up from its current 82%.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16015/sudan-bashir-secret-cash

Sudan’s former dictator reportedly siphoned off “millions of dollars” from one of the world’s poorest nations and sent it to bank accounts in Qatar and Iran.

Sudan’s foreign debt is estimated at $62 billion and the transitional government is desperately trying to locate funds to deal with a worsening economic crisis and treat its nation’s Covid-19 patients. Sudan has long been ranked as one of the world’s poorer nations by United Nations measurements; a quarter of Sudanese live in extreme poverty.

Sudan’s transitional government is doing its best, despite the shortcomings and contradictions, trying to improve human rights, provide greater transparency, and address many of the most odious policies of the previous regime. This fragile yet real reformist approach, coupled with Sudan’s strategic geopolitical position and importance for US national security, needs a stronger and more tangible response, in terms of assistance, from the West and especially the United States.

American pressure on Qatar and other states to seize any Bashir regime funds and return them to the Sudanese people can and should be part of a new pact to promote reform…

The overthrow of Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir in April 2019 brought to an end an almost 30-year regime notable for its brutality, skill in weathering political storms and adapting to be able survive for decades.

Sudan’s former dictator reportedly siphoned off “millions of dollars” from one of the world’s poorest nations and sent it to bank accounts in Qatar and Iran.

Sudan’s foreign debt is estimated at $62 billion and the transitional government is desperately trying to locate funds to deal with a worsening economic crisis and treat its nation’s Covid-19 patients. Sudan has long been ranked as one of the world’s poorer nations by United Nations measurements; a quarter of Sudanese live in extreme poverty.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/sweden/2020-05-12/swedens-coronavirus-strategy-will-soon-be-worlds

China placed 50 million people under quarantine in Wuhan Province in January. Since then, many liberal democracies have taken aggressive authoritarian measures of their own to fight the novel coronavirus. By mid-March, almost all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries had implemented some combination of school, university, workplace, and public transportation closures; restrictions on public events; and limits on domestic and international travel. One country, however, stands out as an exception in the West.

Rather than declare a lockdown or a state of emergency, Sweden asked its citizens to practice social distancing on a mostly voluntary basis. Swedish authorities imposed some restrictions designed to flatten the curve: no public gatherings of more than 50 people, no bar service, distance learning in high schools and universities, and so on. But they eschewed harsh controls, fines, and policing. Swedes have changed their behavior, but not as profoundly as the citizens of other Western democracies. Many restaurants remain open, although they are lightly trafficked; young children are still in school. And in contrast to neighboring Norway (and some Asian countries), Sweden has not introduced location-tracing technologies or apps, thus avoiding threats to privacy and personal autonomy.

Swedish authorities have not officially declared a goal of reaching herd immunity, which most scientists believe is achieved when more than 60 percent of the population has had the virus. But augmenting immunity is no doubt part of the government’s broader strategy—or at least a likely consequence of keeping schools, restaurants, and most businesses open. Anders Tegnell, the chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency, has projected that the city of Stockholm could reach herd immunity as early as this month. Based on updated behavioral assumptions (social-distancing norms are changing how Swedes behave), the Stockholm University mathematician Tom Britton has calculated that 40 percent immunity in the capital could be enough to stop the virus’s spread there and that this could happen by mid-June.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/germany-constitutional-court-accelerates-euro-zones-slide-toward-crisis/

The existential questions that the European Project’s stakeholders have spent decades avoiding can’t be ignored much longer.

 O ne of the reasons that the euro zone has survived for as long as it has is the impressive ability of its leaders to postpone dealing with a series of questions that are as fundamental as they are inconvenient. Is it possible to sustain a monetary union without a fiscal union? (Probably not.) Is it possible to establish a fiscal union without genuine democratic consent? (We may yet find out.) And suddenly pressing: What is the relationship between the EU’s law and Germany’s?

For half a century the conflict hinted at by this last question could mostly be treated as theoretical. Then, last week, the German constitutional court (BVG) challenged the legality of the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP), the $2 trillion-and-counting quantitative-easing scheme first launched by the European Central Bank (the ECB) in 2015 to prop up the euro zone’s faltering economies, and restarted in 2019. The BVG’s ruling does not concern the ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program (PEPP), a new, smaller quantitative-easing regimen under which the ECB will buy up to €750 billion in bonds to help stave off the effects of the mess that COVID-19 has left in its wake. But it may affect how the PEPP is run: Already widely considered inadequate for the task that lies ahead, the program may be hobbled by restrictions flowing from the BVG’s judgment, and that’s before another wave of German litigation tries to bring it down.

To the EU, the BVG’s intervention was both unwelcome and insolent. So far as the EU’s jurisprudence is concerned, EU law is supreme in every member state in a manner approximately analogous to the relationship between federal and state law in the U.S. In an English case from 1974, one of that country’s most distinguished — and quirkily eloquent — judges, Lord Denning, explained that the EEC Treaty (the EEC was a precursor of the EU) was “like an incoming tide. It flows into the estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back.” The treaty, he wrote, was “equal in force to any statute,” and the European Court of Justice (the ECJ) was “the ultimate authority” when it came to interpreting EEC law; even England’s highest court had “to bow down to it.”

https://www.city-journal.org/wuhan-fuels-americas-fentanyl-epidemic?utm_source=Ci

The coronavirus has turned America upside-down. In less than three months, the virus has killed 70,000 Americans and destroyed more than 30 million jobs. According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “enormous evidence” shows that the virus emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China—not in that city’s infamous “wet markets.” But while few question that the virus originates in Wuhan, many don’t know that Wuhan is also the source of another deadly epidemic: America’s fentanyl overdoses.

Fentanyl, a form of synthetic opioid, has quickly become America’s most dangerous drug. In 2018, fentanyl killed 31,897 people in the United States—more than twice the number of any other narcotic. The chemical compound is so lethal, in fact, that just two milligrams—enough to cover Lincoln’s beard on a penny—can prove fatal. In the past five years, fentanyl has devastated hundreds of American communities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, where overdose death rates have skyrocketed.

“Most of the fentanyl and novel synthetic opioids in U.S. street markets—as well as their precursor chemicals—originate in China, where the regulatory system does not effectively police the country’s expansive pharmaceutical and chemical industries,” a recent RAND analysis concludes. Chinese manufacturers export the drug in two ways. First, they send shipments directly to American criminal organizations via the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx, using the “dark web” to process orders. Second, they ship fentanyl and precursor chemicals to drug cartels in Mexico, which then smuggle the final product into American markets.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/497497-saudi-tv-series-speaks-volumes-about-regional-dynamics

During the holy month of Ramadan, now underway, when TV viewership among Muslims traditionally skyrockets, Saudi Arabia’s MBC network is airing a series about Jewish families in a fictional Arab country in the late 1940s – a series that speaks volumes about what’s changing, and what isn’t, across the region.

In the series “Umm Haroun,” which means “mother of Aaron,” Jews, Christians, and Muslims live easily with one another. Jews, for instance, express “mazel tov” (congratulations in Hebrew) to a Muslim man upon his engagement, while families of all three religions cook together before the Jewish Sabbath. Viewers even witness the romantic relationship of a Jewish woman and Muslim man.

Nor is this the only positive depiction of Jews to air on MBC, the Arab world’s largest private broadcaster. Along with “Umm Haroun,” the network is airing “Exit 7,” a comedy in which, in one episode, two characters debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and one of them professes that he’d be happy to do business with the Jewish state.

Not surprisingly, “Umm Haroun” has stoked controversy across the region. That Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, to which MBC must be sensitive, is letting the series air reflects the potential for hugely consequential changes in Saudi-Israeli relations. That, at the same time, Palestinian officials are criticizing Riyadh in outraged terms reflects the futility of ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-abduction-of-western-freedom/

How Silvia Romano, recently released from Al-Shabab captivity, is serving as a vehicle for importing jihadist ideology to Europe.

Silvia Romano, the Italian NGO volunteer who spent 18 months in captivity in Somalia, landed at Rome’s Ciampino airport on Sunday, dressed from head to toe in full Islamic garb. The fact that the 25-year-old woman—who was abducted in November 2018 by Al-Shabab terrorists in Kenya, where she was working on behalf of the Italian charity, Africa Milele, at a local orphanage—returned home in a hijab is cause for alarm, not an expression of freedom of religion.

The radical Islamist world in which the kidnapped Italian girl was indoctrinated during her captivity is antithetical to the Western values on which she was raised. Its mantra boils down to placing death on a higher plane than life, and in subjugating women, non-Muslims and “apostates.”

“I have converted to Islam of my own free will,” Romano said upon disembarking her plane from Mogadishu.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16002/turkey-leftovers-of-the-sword

“Leftover of the sword” (kılıç artığı in Turkish) is a commonly used insult in Turkey that often refers to the survivors of the Christian massacres that mainly targeted Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire and its successor, Turkey.

The use of “leftovers of the sword,” therefore, does not represent a denial of massacres or genocides. On the contrary, it declares the pride of the perpetrators. It means: “Yes, we slaughtered Christians and other non-Muslims because they deserved it!”

During a coronavirus briefing on May 4, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used a most derogatory phrase “the leftovers of the sword”.

“We do not allow terrorist leftovers of the sword in our country,” he said, “to attempt to carry out [terrorist] activities. Their number has decreased a lot but they still exist.”

“Leftover of the sword” (kılıç artığı in Turkish) is a commonly used insult in Turkey that often refers to the survivors of the Christian massacres that mainly targeted Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire and its successor, Turkey.

As the head of state, Erdoğan using the phrase publicly is alarming on many levels. The phrase not only insults the victims and the survivors of the massacres but also endangers the safety of Turkey’s dwindling Christian community, who are often exposed to pressures that include physical attacks.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/understanding_victor_orbns

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is one of the most controversial national leaders in the Western world.  Just over a month ago, his majority Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Alliance) Party pushed through the “unlimited” emergency powers by a two-thirds majority of Parliament on March 30.

Orbán has been harshly criticized by the European Union for his firm stance in keeping (predominantly Muslim) refugees from entering Hungary ever since he closed the borders to them in 2015.  Consequently, Orbán has been accused by the international community of being an Islamophobe, especially after he said: “Islam has never been part of Europe, it came to us.  We in Hungary decide what we want or don’t want. We don’t want that.” 

What Orbán’s critics failed to mention is that Hungary, a country of just under 10 million, was ruled for over a century by the oppressive Islamic Turks and was always on the front line during the many centuries of hostility between Christian Europe and the Muslim Ottoman Empire invaders.  The Hungarian Prime Minster has thus far been able to keep his country safe from Islamic terrorism compared to the United Kingdom, France and Germany, which took in large flows of illegal immigrants.

Yet the focus is Orbán’s emergency powers, now that Hungary is reopening after its lockdown. They entail the suspension of certain Parliamentary Acts, referendums and by-elections, giving Orbán the authority to rule by decree — something France’s Emmanuel Macron is doing unrelated to the coronavirus.  The Act also calls for penal measures to be taken against anyone who “in front of a large audience, [willingly and deliberately] states or disseminates any untrue fact or any misrepresented true fact that is capable of hindering or preventing the efficiency of protection” against the coronavirus.