RUTHFULLY YOURS

Theresa May has confirmed she will announce a date for her departure next month – regardless of whether she has delivered Brexit or not.

The Prime Minister has agreed to meet with the executive of the 1922 committee, the powerful backbench committee of Tory MPs, at the beginning of June, when they will “agree a timetable for the election of a new leader”.

In a joint statement issued this afternoon, the committee and Mrs May announced that they will meet again in the week beginning 3 June, following the second reading of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill in the House of Commons.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/05/16/brexit-latest-news-theresa-may-set-showdown-meeting-senior-tories/

It comes after Mrs May was told last night that she would face a vote of no confidence unless she agreed to set out a clear timetable for her departure.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/the-justice-system-and-cardinal-pell/

While recently away in the UK I read the “best-selling” book The Secret Barrister (2018) authored by, well, a secret barrister. The barrister in question is apparently a junior barrister specialising in criminal law in England and Wales. I figure it’s a man (and will use ‘he’ where applicable) but the forward blurb disguises this by disconcertingly using the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’ for a singular person. Most annoying. Why not use the awkward ‘he or she’ rather than butcher the language? Just asking.

The book is a damning indictment of the British criminal justice system, at least as it applies in England and Wales. From amateur magistrates to sloppy gathering of evidence to missing evidence to poorly-funded legal aid and much, much more, the secret barrister provides an alarming picture of the law gone wrong and justice at grave risk. The Observer described the account of the justice sytem as “terrifying.”

My impression is that the situation simply can’t be as shambolic as described. Nevertheless, if you were falsely accused of a criminal offence (providing, perhaps, it is not child abuse) it might be best to be in Australia rather than in Britain; I hope anyway. On the other hand, the guilty might have a better chance of the incriminating evidence being mislaid in Britain. So, it evens out in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14235/iran-hatred-america

It was Iran, not the US, that breached international law by carrying out the US Embassy takeover in Tehran…. It was also Iran, not the US, that immediately began using its proxies, such as Hezbollah, to commit terrorism and incite antagonism towards America.

Should the mullahs be appeased for killing thousands of Americans? For continually taking Americans as hostages? For being the leading executioner of children in the world? For ranking the first in the world per capita when it comes to executing people? For being the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism? For making every possible effort to damage US national security and scuttle US foreign policy objectives?

The Iranian government’s hatred towards the US often seems the most important reason for its existence. As long as the ruling mullahs remain in power, the Islamic Republic will continue its acts of terror and deep antagonism against Americans, their Sunni neighbors, the lands they try to control — such as Iraq, Syria, Yemen, parts of Gaza and Venezuela, Lebanon — and the West.

The argument that the US must take an apologetic stance towards the theocratic establishment of Iran is being repeatedly made without the evidence of any effectiveness to back it up.

Former President Barack Obama created this policy, and insisted that it would be successful. Even as Iran flaunted its disregard for the American government, as well as human life, President Obama would continually apologize to the Iranian leaders. He made it sound as if America was to blame for initiating the hatred that the Iranian government projects toward the United States.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273705/socialism-leaves-south-africa-dark-daniel-greenfield

Nearly 150 years after electricity came to South Africa, the country is in the dark. The blackouts can strike at any time and then lights, hot water and even major industries vanish into the darkness.

Storing perishable food in the fridge has become a gamble. The meat you buy today may be inedible tomorrow if the rolling blackout arrives and lasts long enough to destroy all the food you cooked.

With rolling blackouts that can last for as long as twelve hours, South Africans have grown used to eating by candlelight and heating water the old-fashioned way. Those who can afford it have been stocking up on generators. But the demand is so high that it can take a month to even obtain a generator.

It’s not just homes and small businesses. Factories and mines are struggling to maintain the country’s industrial base when power can vanish for the entire workday. Traffic lights run off the same power grid and when it goes into ‘load-shedding’ mode, the roads become a snarled maze of honking cars.

South Africa is out of power. The load-shedding blackouts are a last-ditch effort to avert a national blackout that will send the entire country spiraling into a deeper and more enduring darkness.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/263184

Police in Denmark have arrested a man suspected in the stabbing attack on a Jewish woman in Sweden.

Swedish authorities had released a warrant for the man’s arrest Tuesday, after a Jewish woman was stabbed nine times in the city of Helsingborg, roughly 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) northwest of Malmo.

The victim, a woman in her 60s who is the wife of the leader of the local Jewish community, was on her way to work Tuesday morning when she was attacked.

The assailant stabbed the woman nine times, then fled the scene, eventually escaping to Denmark.

Authorities identified the suspect as a Muslim man known to local police.

On Wednesday, Danish police announced that the suspect had been taken into custody. He is expected to be extradited to Sweden for prosecution.

https://worldisraelnews.com/saudi-arabia-reports-

An oil pipeline that runs across Saudi Arabia was hit Tuesday by drones, the Saudi energy minister said, as regional tensions flared just days after what the kingdom called an attack on two of its oil tankers near the Persian Gulf.

While both President Donald Trump and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said they were not planning for conflict, the volatility was felt in oil markets with benchmark Brent crude trading over $71 a barrel, up more than $1 on the day.

The pipeline that runs from the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province to a Red Sea port was shut down, but Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih Al-Falih vowed that the production and export of Saudi oil would not be interrupted.

The Houthis, who are at war with Saudi Arabia, said earlier Tuesday they launched seven drones targeting vital Saudi installations, without elaborating. They later claimed responsibility for the pipeline attack in comments broadcast by Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Sari.

In a statement carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency, al-Falih called the pipeline attack “cowardly,” saying recent acts of sabotage against the kingdom were targeting not only Saudi Arabia but also the safety of the world’s energy supply and global economy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/china-strategy-build-economic-military-technological-superiority/

Slowly but steadily they build up their economic, military, and technological superiority at our expense

The Chinese Communist government does not have so much a strategy to translate its economic ascendance into global hegemony as several strategies. All of them are brilliantly insidious.

On matters of trade, China is always flexible in responding to critics of its asymmetrical, 30-year mercantilism. In the initial stages of Westernization, China was exempted from criticism over serial copyright and patent infringement, dumping, and espionage. Western elites assumed that these improprieties were just speed bumps on the eventual Chinese freeway to liberalism. Supposedly the richer China got, the more progressive it would become. Huge trade deficits or military technological appropriation were small prices to pay for an evolving billion-person Palo Alto or Upper West Side.

After a time, the now-worrisome huge trade deficits and Chinese cheating were further contextualized as “our fault.” The Tom Friedman school of journalism chided our clumsy republican government as lacking Chinese authoritarian efficiency that could by fiat connect new planned utopias by high-speed rail and power them with solar-panel farms. The Wall Street–investor version of this school saw flabby, pampered Americans getting their just deserts as more productive and deserving Chinese workers outhustled and outproduced us. In such tough-love sermonizing, the more Michigan or Pennsylvania rusted, the quicker culpable Americans would either emulate China or die. China of course again agreed.