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WORLD NEWS

Gunman Kills 16 in Rampage, Deadliest in Canadian History

https://www.theepochtimes.com/gunman-in-canadas-deadliest-mass-shooting-identified-16-dead_3318461.html

TORONTO—A man disguised as a police officer went on a shooting rampage in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, killing 16 people Sunday, in the deadliest such attack in the country’s history. Officials said the suspected shooter was also dead.

A police officer was among those killed. Several bodies were found inside and outside one home in the small, rural town of Portapique, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of Halifax—what police called the first scene. Bodies were also found at other locations.

Overnight, police began advising residents of the town—already on lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic—to lock their doors and stay in their basements. Several homes in the area were set on fire as well.

Police identified the man believed to be the shooter as Gabriel Wortman, 51, who was thought to live part-time in Portapique. Authorities said he wore a police uniform at one point and made his car look like a Royal Canadian Mounted Police cruiser. Authorities believe he may have targeted his first victims but then began attacking randomly.

Police first announced that they had arrested Wortman at a gas station in Enfield, outside Halifax, but later said he had died. It was not clear how, and they did not explain further.

“This is one of the most senseless acts of violence in our province’s history,” said Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil.

A Visit to Europe’s Front With Russia Ukraine has held the line with separatists for six years. By Bernard-Henri Lévy

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-visit-to-europes-front-with-russia-11587166080?mod=opinion_major_pos4

Mariupol, Ukraine

The huge troop-transport helicopter dates from the Soviet era. It flies just above the tree line, nose down, to avoid Russian radar. After two hours of flying over smooth ground, frozen lakes and ruined villages in the dark winter night, we arrive here at the headquarters of the Navy Guard, where we meet the officers who for six years have led the fight against pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region.

I didn’t wait for the briefing. The nearly deserted fish market in the center of town told the story. So did the empty shops on Lenin Avenue and the enormous blast furnaces of the Azovstal factory, running at half power and emitting thin clouds of dirty black smoke. This shutdown of a key industrial city wasn’t caused by a pandemic. The separatists, unable to take control of the city, imposed a blockade.

In Shyrokyne, a seaside resort half an hour’s drive east, all that remains of its 2,000 residents are a couple, Maxime and Tatiana, former innkeepers who’ve come in under the protection of a national guard unit to lay flowers at his father’s grave. The elegant houses that lined Shapotika and Pushkin streets are reduced to piles of rubble. Lt. Martha Shturma, our interpreter, says this was an ordinary resort with no strategic importance. Its remains to tell a story of gratuitous destruction: the church with the collapsed roof; the clinic reduced to concrete pillars and mined; the school pulverized by heavy artillery, where we find a section of blackboard, half-burned notebooks and a backpack, miraculously spared.

Falling into the Iranian Regime’s Coronavirus Trap by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15908/iran-coronavirus-trap

How on earth it is in the US “national interest” to allow a regime that is kidnapping and killing Americans and their allies, and planning to attack US diplomatic facilities, to receive billions of dollars in aid?

An additional problem, based on a pattern for which Iran has only itself to blame, is that there is no evidence that Iran has the slightest intention of using these funds to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic or to help Iran’s people. The Trump administration already offered to send medical help to Iran, but Iran has continued to turn it down. “Possibly,” Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei said, “your medicine is a way to spread the virus more.”

Moreover, there have also been suggestions that a secret Iranian fund of reportedly $200 billion, controlled by Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei, could perfectly well help Iran to fund its crisis.

While the Iranian regime has been killing Americans during the coronavirus crisis and planning to kill more, a group of American politicians are urging US President Donald J. Trump to loosen sanctions on Tehran regime and refrain from blocking the mullahs’ request for $5 billion in aid.

The former vice president and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, for instance, recently called on the Trump administration to loosen sanctions on Iran.

He pointed out that it is “bad enough that the Trump administration abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in favor of a strategy of ‘maximum pressure;” he added that “it makes no sense, in a global health crisis, to compound that failure with cruelty by inhibiting access to needed humanitarian assistance. Whatever our profound differences with the Iranian government, we should support the Iranian people.”

The Palestinian Virus: Abbas’s Role Models by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15906/palestinian-virus-role-models

Abu Jihad was not assassinated by Israel because of any political activities or ideology. His assassination stopped him from masterminding more attacks and killing more Israelis.

Abbas and his Fatah officials, nonetheless, believe that Abu Jihad and other Palestinian terrorists are honorable and decent men who were fighting for the sake of their people. What contribution did these terrorists make to Palestinian society? Did they build a school or a hospital for their people?

When Abbas describes terrorists as heroes, he is actually telling young Palestinians that those who plan and carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis should serve as role models. Abbas evidently wants all Palestinians to be like Abu Jihad and the terrorists in Israeli prisons. For Abbas and other Palestinian leaders, the glorification of terrorists seems to be more important than the fight against a deadly virus.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has not been seen in public since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the region last month. His absence, however, has not stopped Abbas from doing what he does best: praising and glorifying Palestinians who kill Jews.

On April 16, Palestinians marked the anniversary of the assassination of Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), a PLO leader and co-founder of the Palestinian ruling faction Fatah, which is today headed by Abbas. Before Abu Jihad was assassinated by Israeli commandos at his home in Tunis in 1988, he had planned several terror attacks inside Israel against both civilian and military targets.

Last week, Abbas, who is supposed to be busy helping his people curb the spread of the coronavirus, found the time to publish a statement describing Abu Jihad as “one of the historic leaders” of the Palestinians who “played an important role during an “historic, difficult and dangerous phase.”

Thinking Beyond The Current Pandemic… by Gerald A. Honigman

At some point, hopefully not long from now  the current nightmare will end. Things may never be quite the same again, but we will move forward.

The world’s obsession with creating a 22nd—if not 23rd—Arab state will once again return to the front burner of international politics and forums.

And the effects the above would have on the sole, minuscule, resurrected nation of the Jews will be of little concern to most people.

While scholars and rabble will both once again vilify and practice the double standard supreme regarding the national liberation of the Jewish people—Zionism—they will still ignore the plight of scores of millions of  truly stateless and largely Arab and other Arabized (from one degree or another) Muslim-oppressed peoples in the region.

One of the main issues surely to resurface in the Arab-Israeli debate will involve the settlements. With so much ignorance–innocent or otherwise–on the actual facts regarding this discussion, it’s thus useful, especially for the younger generation often subjected to higher indoctrination instead of education, to reexamine, in depth and detail, this important topic. So, let’s begin–yet again …

As I noted years earlier, when the subject of settlements comes up, most people associate the word these days with Jews wanting to return to lands–beyond Israel’s 1949 UN-imposed, 9 to 15 mile wide armistice line existence–which they have called home, lived on, and owned property in for millennia, but which much of the world declares must once again become Judenrein.

American Foreign and Defense Policy: Between Scylla and Charybdis By Mark Helprin

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/04/american-foreign-and-defense-policy-between-scylla-and-charybdis/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm

Rather than react, we must chart a course

Fifteen years before the coronavirus pandemic, I wrote a speech for a world-renowned physician who was coincidentally the majority leader of the United States Senate, and thus not without influence. He went, wholeheartedly, all-in, delivering it in the Senate, at Harvard Medical School’s most important annual lecture, at Davos, at the Bohemian Grove (where the only Bohemian to enthuse sufficiently to request a copy was Henry Kissinger), and elsewhere.

And, of course, Senator Bill Frist took it to the White House. He presented a strong — one might even say urgent — case for establishing joint research and vaccine-and-curative manufacturing centers judiciously spaced throughout the country; the doubling of medical- and nursing-school outputs; incentives for commercial pharmaceutical and medical-device research and production; increasing the number of hospital beds; providing for the stocks, structures, and reserve personnel for large-scale emergency field hospitals; and laying up stores of necessaries such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and, specifically, ventilators. Given that the laws of economics were not repealed, the ancillary effect of the supply surge in some of these medical goods — such as doctors, nurses, and hospital capacity — would have lowered their cost or at least slowed its rise. He asked for $100 billion per year. Had spending kept up at that level, which it need not have to assure adequate preparation, it would have amounted to only one-quarter of the monies shoveled into the furnace of COVID-19 in the last few weeks alone. He got a total of $2.4 billion over four years for the Strategic National Stockpile that of late has proved wholly inadequate.

The European Union is Dead but Does Not Yet Know It by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15894/european-union-dead

The truth is that there is no “Union”.

The coronavirus now has put the European Union and its comfort zone face-to-face with all its weaknesses, decadence and cowardice.

Another merciless battle Italy fought with the EU was for protective face-masks. France adopted a policy of requisitioning them; Germany banned their export. Those unilateral decisions undermined a much-touted EU principle: the free movement of goods in the single market.

As L’Express exposed, France seized four million masks belonging to a Swedish company and that had been intended, in part, for Italy and Spain.

When Italy and Greece were overwhelmed by migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the EU countries refused to take their “share” of migrants. Lacking a policy to stop the flow of mass immigration, Europe decided to leave the southern countries to their fate.

The new coronavirus appears to be tearing apart the fragile framework of the European Union.

“Europe” said the former Commission chief and a EU godfather, Jacques Delors, “is in “mortal danger”.

If citizens feel themselves abandoned at the heart of the pandemic, said Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, the EU could “collapse”.

Iran May Need an ‘America Free’ Day by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15905/iran-america-free-day

With the exception of this year, since 1989 Tehran has hosted an annual “End of America” conference attended by anti-Americans from across the globe.

The “end of America” dream has not been, and may never be, realized, for at least two reasons…. America, perhaps above all, is an idea that, even if formulated as a myth, as most great ideas are, continues to appeal to a large segment of mankind across cultural, racial, and socio-economic borders.

Rather than bombarding Iranians with America-bashing discourse, Khamenei and his associates might be better off designating an “America free” day every month, a day in which the very word “America” is not spoken, written, or heard anywhere in Iran.

On that day, Iranians could devote their intellectual energies to pondering the question: Apart from further digging, is there something that we can do to creep out of the hole we have dug for ourselves?

The United States is on the verge of losing its position as the global superpower. Even worse, it may be heading for disintegration as a nation, with its most populous state California seeking secession while the African-American minority set up an independent black state, probably in Mississippi. One thing is certain: by 2025 the US will no longer be the world’s biggest economic power.

Democracy, Gangnam Style Escapees from North Korea offer a lesson in democracy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-gangnam-style-11587164416?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

While Kim Jong Un was busy testing missiles this week, another North Korean was making news in the South. Thae Yong-ho, one of the highest-ranking defectors from the totalitarian state, was elected to a seat in South Korea’s National Assembly. Mr. Thae is the new member from Seoul’s fashionable Gangnam district. If that name rings a bell, you may be one of the 3.5 billion people who have watched the music video “Gangnam Style” on YouTube.

Mr. Thae was the No. 2 diplomat at North Korea’s embassy in London when he defected in 2016, saying that he wanted his two sons to grow up in freedom. He has since traveled the world as a critic of the Kim regime and what he sees as the world’s tepid response to its provocations. Pyongyang returns the compliment by calling him “human scum.” He lives under 24-7 guard to protect against assassination by North Korean agents.

Mr. Thae is the first North Korean to be directly elected by South Korea voters as their representative. Another escapee, Ji Seong-ho, won a seat in the National Assembly this week as a proportional representative. Mr. Ji, a human-rights activist and amputee, is best known in the U.S. for raising his crutches in a triumphant gesture at the 2018 State of the Union address.

Medical Students in Europe and U.S. Graduate Early to Join Coronavirus Front-Lines ‘It’s best to have as many hands as possible, even if they’re relatively unskilled hands like mine’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/medical-students-in-europe-and-u-s-graduate-early-to-join-coronavirus-front-lines-11587233541

Young students just finishing medical schools across the U.S. and Europe are being rushed into hospitals overwhelmed by the new coronavirus to combat a global health catastrophe.

Many are forgoing final elective classes, logging onto Zoom or Webex to recite the Hippocratic oath and donning protective gear to begin their careers, often in areas far from the specialties they plan to pursue.

“We finished exams in March, and two days later we were asked if we would volunteer to work in hospitals. We didn’t even have our results then,” said Caroline Olabisi, 29, who trained in London. Some of her final exams were canceled because of safety concerns.

“They just sent us an email saying we’d been awarded the degree on the same day as we got our results.” She started work in a London hospital three weeks ago.

“Now, we just have to learn on the job,” Dr. Olabisi said. “This week, I’ve had to do two 12-hour nursing shifts and have been putting IV lines in under supervision from consultants. Things that I wouldn’t usually be doing.”

Julia Probert says she has ‘a waxing and waning course of nervousness’ as she reckons with the possibility of contracting Covid-19.

Julia Probert, 31, is heading to a residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in July. But until then, she is reporting for duty at Bellevue Hospital in New York, having signed up for early graduation from New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.