RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pakistans-emergency-order-prevents-release-of-men-convicted-of-murdering-wsj-reporter-daniel-pearl/

Pakistani authorities on Thursday issued an emergency order preventing the release of four prisoners convicted in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, a day after their convictions were overturned.

British national Omar Saeed Sheikh was convicted in 2002 for the murder of Pearl earlier that year, but his death sentences for abduction, murder, and terrorism were reduced to seven years for one charge of kidnapping. The convictions of three Pakistani men as accomplices to Sheikh were thrown out completely.

The appeals court in Karachi ruled earlier this week that there was a lack of evidence against Sheikh and his alleged accomplices and rejected computer evidence that the men sent ransom notes after Pearl was kidnapped.

The Sindh government used the Maintenance of Public Order law to detain the four men for another 90 days, arguing that they could threaten law and order in the province if released.

“I am shocked at the decision, especially its timing,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi remarked of the appeals court decision, saying the ruling harms Pakistan’s recent anti-terrorist efforts, for which he said they have sacrificed greatly.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/yes-hungarys-emergency-law-is-flawed/

The lack of a sunset clause is worrisome. But pace Anne Applebaum, it doesn’t herald a “dictatorship.”

In a tweet that has now been followed by more than 100 tweeters, Anne Applebaum says she’s “looking forward to the justifications” for the Hungarian government’s state of emergency law responding to the COVID-19 crisis from Rod Dreher, from “so many others,” and from me. She also speculates on what our justifications might be. Will it be “justified by circumstances”? Or “the people support it”? Or some “whataboutism”?

As Ms. Applebaum has pointed out in The Atlantic magazine, the Danube Institute, of which I’m president, has received funding from the Batthyanyi Foundation, which itself gets money from the Hungarian government. I invite those who think my opinions tainted by this to visit our website, on which we post all our events, to judge if that is so. Ms. Applebaum presumably doesn’t think so because she has just asked me, rather than Viktor Orban, for my opinion. And my response is an eirenic one:

I don’t justify the emergency law as it stands.

As an old classical liberal of a conservative disposition, I accept there will be occasions when a crisis is so severe that a government needs emergency powers to deal with it outside the regular law. The coronavirus threat is plainly such a challenge. If a law granting emergency powers to the government to deal with it is proposed, however, I would submit it to certain tests before supporting it.

The tests are those most people would impose. First, is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/soft-authoritarianism-comes-to-hungary/

But Hungarian democracy is not a lost cause.

The trouble with crying wolf is that sometimes the wolf shows up at your door. For years, critics have said that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban is a tin-pot dictator, Central Europe’s answer to Vladimir Putin. The flaws in Hungary’s democracy and Orban’s own no-holds-barred approach to electioneering were held up as the decisive factors behind his political success, while other explanations—the advantages of incumbency, the pre-pandemic strength of the Hungarian economy, the divided state of the opposition—were downplayed or ignored. For those committed to the ideological project of ever-closer European integration, Orban’s outspoken nationalism, his Euroscepticism, and his strident opposition to immigration made him a particularly inviting target.

Now, however, the Hungarian government’s heavy-handed response to the coronavirus threatens to vindicate Orban’s critics. On March 30, the Hungarian Parliament passed emergency legislation that allows Orban to indefinitely govern by decree and threatens jail time for anyone spreading false or misleading information about the pandemic. Technically, Parliament can revoke this extraordinary grant of power with another vote, but Orban’s Fidesz party controls an overwhelming legislative majority.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/2/hydroxychloroquine-rated-most-effective-therapy-do/

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.

The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave chloroquine and its next-generation derivative, hydroxychloroquine, emergency-use authorization Monday for treating the novel coronavirus, although the drug was already being used off-label by some doctors and hospitals for COVID-19 patients.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/coronavirus-another-typical-milestone-communist-don-feder/

The Coronavirus: Brought to you by those wonderful folks who gave China the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square.

Wuhan is nothing new for a regime that’s been sacrificing innocents to its demented ideology for over 70 years.Politically, nothing has changed since the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on October 1, 1949.

The PRC is still a totalitarian state where dissent is brutally crushed, the Party is all powerful and human life is cheap.

Less than a year after the PRC was established, Mao sent his “volunteer” army of 3 million across the Yalu River to intervene in the Korean War, prolonging the conflict by almost three years and resulting in tens of thousands of Chinese, American and Korean casualties.

Then came the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) in which 45 million died in a famine caused by Mao’s insane ambition to match Britain in iron and steel production, and setting fantastic targets for agricultural output. Much of the latter was used to repay debts to the Soviet Union or donated to Third World countries to buy influence.

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/notre-dame-fix/?mod=article_inline&mod=hp_lead_pos10

Almost a year after last April’s devastating fire, Notre Dame is still in a fragile state. Workers had been racing to stabilize the 800-year-old structure before the effort was suspended indefinitely last month due to the coronavirus pandemic, putting the project in even greater jeopardy.

The fire destroyed a section of the cathedral that acted as the linchpin of its medieval design: its roof and central spire. Like a ballast, the spire and roof pushed downward and outward on Notre Dame’s limestone walls, countering the inward pressure generated by the cathedral’s flying buttresses and massive facade. 

Without the spire and roof in place, the limestone walls of Notre Dame’s nave are at risk of tilting inward and its vaulted ceiling can buckle. Already, about 15% of the ceiling collapsed during the fire and over the summer. Notre Dame’s famous flying buttresses are still pushing against the walls, but without the counterweight of the roof and spire, they are at risk of collapsing if the vaults give way. The gables are also at risk because they are no longer supported by the roof. The north gable nearly collapsed during the fire. 

Water used to douse the flames created fissures in the massive stones that arc above Notre Dame’s nave, and seeped into the joints and mortar, leading to crumbling. Some of that water may have frozen over the winter, potentially weakening the structure further. The cathedral is covered in lead that melted from the roof and spire, which were made of several hundred tons of the toxic metal. Workers doing cleanup wear hazmat suits to prevent lead contamination and shower each time they leave the site. Back outside, charred scaffolding looms at the cathedral’s most vulnerable point, where the spire once rose. It had been erected for restoration efforts before the fire. Now distorted and highly unstable, it has been swaying in the wind and rain. Its collapse would be catastrophic. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15840/china-defective-medical-equipment

In Spain, the Ministry of Health revealed that 640,000 coronavirus tests that it had purchased from a Chinese supplier were defective. In addition, a further million coronavirus tests delivered to Spain on March 30 by another Chinese manufacturer were also defective.

The Czech news site iRozhlas reported that 300,000 coronavirus test kits delivered by China had an error rate of 80%. The Czech Ministry of Interior had paid $2.1 million for the kits.

A spokesperson for a hospital in Dutch city of Eindhoven said that Chinese suppliers were selling “a lot of junk… at high prices.”

“No. 10 [the residence of the British prime minister] believes China is seeking to build its economic power during the pandemic with ‘predatory offers of help’ to countries around the world.” — The Daily Mail, March 28, 2020.

“The brutal truth is that China seems to flout the normal rules of behavior in every area of life — from healthcare to trade and from currency manipulation to internal repression. For too long, nations have lamely kowtowed to China in the desperate hope of winning trade deals. But once we get clear of this terrible pandemic, it is imperative that we all rethink that relationship and put it on a much more balanced and honest basis.” — Former UK Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith.

As the coronavirus rages across Europe, a growing number of countries are reporting that millions of pieces of medical equipment donated by, or purchased from, China to defeat the pandemic are defective and unusable.

The revelations are fueling distrust of a public relations effort by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party to portray China as the world’s new humanitarian superpower.

On March 28, the Netherlands was forced to recall 1.3 million face masks produced in China because they did not meet the minimum safety standards for medical personnel. The so-called KN95 masks are a less expensive Chinese alternative to the American-standard N95 mask, which currently is in short supply around the world. The KN95 does not fit on the face as tightly as the N95, thus potentially exposing medical personnel to the coronavirus.

https://spectator.us/deceived-covid-stats-less-numbers-suggest/

There is a concept at least as old as computing itself — Charles Babbage, the father of the field, expressed the sentiment, if not the words themselves — ‘garbage in, garbage out’. The idea is not a complicated one: no matter how advanced the calculation machine, no matter how good the statistical model, no matter how intricate the formulae, if the data on the way in isn’t reliable, the calculation that comes out will be suspect at best — and is liable to be outright wrong. We are regularly told that figures for economic growth were wrong and have to be dramatically revised. So what hope do we have of predicting coronavirus?

There is no reason to doubt either the skill or the dedication of the academics working to produce figures and forecasts to shape the response to the virus. But we do risk being misled by bad data. The daily influx of statistics, of infections, of deaths etc starts to build for most of us a false impression. It suggests to us that coronavirus is knowable, that we understand what is happening, that we have a plan. This impression begins to erode the second we examine the bedrock upon which it is built. Even the most reliable-looking of the figures we see tells us far less than it should.

It only takes a second of thinking about numbers of new cases to know they cannot be comparable across countries: how can they, if the death rate for the same disease is supposed to be 10 times higher in Italy than in Germany? The infection numbers will only ever be the tip of an iceberg. In the UK, officially only those being considered for admission to hospital are eligible for coronavirus testing — with even National Health Service front-line workers unable to get tested before that stage, even if certain celebrities, politicians and others seem to get tests without much struggle.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/evil_pakistani_court_overturns_murder_conviction_of_daniel_pearls_killers.html

A Pakistani court covered itself with glory by announcing that the al-Qaeda beasts who kidnapped and savagely killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl shortly after 9/11 now get their murder convictions overturned and will go free to walk among us again.

Somehow, after all these years, they got it wrong.  The murder never happened, at least not by the slimy hands of these Islamist creeps.  And it was a very bad murder — Pearl was a bright light at the Journal with wonderful parents (we have since learned) who was kidnapped, blindfolded, forced to recite that he was a Jew to his Jew-hating hostage takers, and then beheaded for a despicable al-Qaeda propaganda movie, the better to recruit scumbags who get excited about this stuff.  This dirtbag, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who’s still eating his Froot Loops on Gitmo (why is he even still alive?), is the one who actually did it, but the Pakistani creeps released were the confederates who made it happen. 

Look at how bad it is, according to the Washington Post:

“As per the court’s judgment, Omar Saeed Sheikh has been found guilty of kidnapping and not of murder. The accused was in jail for 20 years,” the defendants’ lawyer Khawaja Naveed told The Washington Post.

Saeed had been sentenced to death for Pearl’s murder but now with just a seven-year sentence for kidnapping, he could be released for the 18 years he has already served.