RUTHFULLY YOURS

LONDON—Prime Minister Theresa May, whose office heralded a meeting last week with President Donald Trump as a diplomatic success, is facing pressure at home over her efforts to strengthen ties with the new U.S. administration.

On Monday, Mrs. May said an offer to Mr. Trump for a state visit still stands, despite a petition signed by 1.3 million people calling for its cancellation in the wake of his restrictions on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Hundreds of people later protested Mr. Trump’s clampdown outside Mrs. May’s official Downing Street residence.

“The United States is a close ally of the United Kingdom,” Mrs. May said during a visit to Ireland where she stood by the invitation. “We work together across many areas of mutual interest and we have that special relationship between us.”

The British leader has stood out as the most prominent in Europe to reach out to the U.S. leader, as she seeks new trade opportunities in advance of the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. She has been cheered by supporters who say she is doing what is best for Britain, but opponents have criticized her as cozying up to a leader they see as unsavory.

Mrs. May initially declined to condemn Mr. Trump’s executive order, which was announced Friday just hours after she became the first foreign leader to hold talks with the president in the White House. Her office later said it disagreed with the ban. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON—Iran staged a missile test launch, U.S. officials said Monday, posing a possible violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions and an early challenge to the Trump administration’s campaign pledge to confront Tehran.

U.S. defense officials, who confirmed the test, declined to identify its specific date, location or range. But Israel’s government and U.S. senators demanded Monday that the U.N. impose new financial sanctions on Iran in response.

Iran’s government is believed to have conducted nearly a dozen ballistic-missile tests since a landmark nuclear agreement between world powers and Tehran was implemented a year ago. Although the estimated timing was indefinite, U.S. officials suggested the latest test happened over the weekend.

“Iran again defied #UNSC resolutions with missiles tests,” Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, said in a Twitter message on Monday. “The international community again [must not] bury its head in the sand in the face of Iranian aggression.”

The White House and State Department said they were investigating the alleged Iranian launch and gauging whether it violated international law.

The U.N.’s language prohibiting Tehran from developing ballistic missiles was softened under the nuclear deal, which was completed in mid-2015. The U.N. resolution now says the Security Council is against Iran developing missiles, but no longer explicitly bans it.

“We’re aware of reports that Iran conducted a medium-range ballistic missile test in recent days,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. “We are, however, well aware of and deeply troubled by Iran’s longstanding provocative and irresponsible activities and we call on Iran to cease such provocations.”

A diplomat at Iran’s mission to the U.N. declined to comment on Monday.

President Donald Trump was a sharp critic of the Iran nuclear deal during last year’s campaign and has suggested he may seek to renegotiate its terms. Many of his top national-security aides, including Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, have said they would seek to aggressively constrain Iran’s military operations in the Persian Gulf and in such countries as Syria and Iraq.

Trump administration officials have played down the possibility of unilaterally scrapping the nuclear deal. But Republicans in Congress have been drafting new sanctions against Iran, particularly targeting its elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Doomsday Clock is now at two and a half minutes to midnight. That doesn’t mean that the world will be destroyed in 150 seconds. All it means is that some people who couldn’t find a better way to get on CNN will enact an ancient left-wing ritual that involves pretending to care about a fake clock.

The ritual moves a fake clock closer to midnight summoning hoarse cries of media anguish.

“Scientists: World Closer to Doomsday Than It’s Been Since the 1950s” is a typical media headline. “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the keepers of what is called the Doomsday Clock, took a look at the state of the world today and was expected to move the clock one minute closer to ‘midnight.’”

And it’s all Trump’s fault for not believing in Global Warming. No, seriously.

According to the official statement, “Board Marks 70th Anniversary of Iconic Clock By Expressing Concern About “Unsettling” and “Ill-Considered” Statements of President Trump on Nuclear Weapons and Climate Change.”

It was either that or go out for another round of Jagerbombs while actual nuclear scientists in Iran work to build bombs that will kill millions in Tel Aviv, New York or maybe even back in Chicago.

The heavily hyped announcement of the “Doomsday Clock” being the closest to midnight since 1953 (by no coincidence whatsoever the first year of Eisenhower’s term) bombed. Or maybe it was a dud.

The rollout was introduced by Rachel Bronson, the confused executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Bronson has a degree is in political science and her social media feed is filled with childish anti-Trump rants. She is less of an “atomic scientist” than your Aunt Sally.

Rachel informed attendees that John Mecklin, the Bulletin’s editor in chief, was in the audience. “He is the one who pulled together and helped the board develop this statement that accompanied this important announcement.”

John Mecklin’s qualifications for warning that the world is about to end can be found in his past as editor of High Country and Key West. Key West is “a high-end, monthly city magazine devoted to documenting the rich, quirky stories of the Florida Keys.”

He is not an “atomic scientist”.

Three men sat at the table to the right of Rachel. There was the scowling mug of Thomas Pickering. Pickering is a Hillary pal who played a role in whitewashing her role in Benghazi, a former State Department hack with dubious business interests and Iran deal lobbyist with ties to Boeing.

Pickering is not an “atomic scientist”, but he played a role in helping terrorists go nuclear.

At the rickety table, Pickering lobbied for the Iran nuke sellout. The Bulletin had certainly come a long way from its anti-war roots to seating a Boeing man at the table to argue for Iran’s nukes.

There are now many Catholic commentators who are questioning the Church’s blindness about the danger Europe is facing.

“Islam has every chance massively to strengthen its presence in Europe with the blessing of the Church…. the Church is not only leading Europe to an impasse, it is also shooting itself in the foot.” — Laurent Dandrieu, cultural editor of the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles.

“It is clear that Muslims have an ultimate goal: conquering the world…Islam, through the sharia, their law…allows violence against the infidels, such as Christians….And what is the most important achievement? Rome.” — Cardinal Raymond Burke, interview, Il Giornale.

“[T]hey are not refugees, this is an invasion, they come here with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’, they want to take over.” — Laszlo Kiss Rigo, head of the Catholic Hungarian southern community.

François Fillon published a book entitled, Vanquishing Islamic Totalitarianism, and he rose in the polls by vowing to control Islam and immigration: “We’ve got to reduce immigration to its strict minimum,” Fillon said. “Our country is not a sum of communities, it is an identity!”

Everyone in Italy and the rest of Europe will “soon be Muslim” because of our “stupidity”, warned Monsignor Carlo Liberati, Archbishop Emeritus of Pompei. Liberati claimed that, thanks to the huge number of Muslim migrants alongside the increasing secularism of native Europeans, Islam will soon become the main religion of Europe. “All of this moral and religious decadence favours Islam”, Archbishop Liberati explained.

Décadence is also the title of a new book by the French philosopher Michel Onfray, in which he suggests that the Judeo-Christian era may have come to an end. He compares the West and Islam: “We have nihilism, they have fervor; we are exhausted, they have a great health; we have the past for us; they have the future for them”.

Burak Bekdil, one of Turkey’s leading journalists, was just fired from Turkey’s leading newspaper after 29 years, for writing what was taking place in Turkey for Gatestone. He is a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

What makes Turkey look more like North Korea than a European democracy is the legal authorities’ reflex to launch probes into anyone accused, without evidence, of terrorist activity or insulting the president.

Philipp Schwartz was a Hungarian-born neuropathologist who worked for the Goethe University in Frankfurt for 14 years until he was fired in 1933 for being Jewish. After his — and other scholars’ — dismissal, he convinced the then decade-old modern Turkish Republic to admit persecuted German professors to positions at Turkish universities. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secular founder of the Turkish state, enthusiastically agreed to Schwartz’s proposal. Turkey quickly admitted 150 German Jewish professors. Schwartz was appointed as director of the Department of Pathology at the University of Istanbul. More than seven decades after, a German initiative that bears Schwartz’s name is returning the favor.

In the first week of 2017, another 631 Turkish researchers and professors were dismissed from their universities, adding to thousands who were purged during the second half of 2016. Several Turkish scholars are now reversing Schwartz’s path: In the fall of 2016, the Philipp Schwartz Initiative received more applications from Turkey than war-torn Syria or any other country. Turks now account for 46% of all applicants worldwide. As the Brussels-based European affairs weekly newspaper Politico put it: “Turkey loses its brains.”

Turkey’s problem is bigger than just literally losing its brains. The country apparently is also figuratively losing its brains. News headlines are so confusing that often one cannot decide whether he is reading a real newspaper or the Turkish version of The Onion, reflecting a collective, socio-pathological frenzy — ironically Schwartz’s work of science.

An Islamist and militantly pro-Erdogan newspaper, Yeni Akit, ran the photo of what looks like a main battle tank, claiming that this weapons system had been developed by Aselsan, a state-controlled defense company, and was capable of “even stopping an atomic bomb.” Yeni Akit belongs to an “elite” group of media outlets whose editors often find a seat aboard Erdogan’s private jet when he travels abroad for state visits. What is more worrying than the absurdity of Yeni Akit’s claim is that few Turks would question the story’s authenticity.

The Austrian Military Intelligence Service has predicted that up to 15 million migrants from Africa could arrive in the EU by 2020.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, recently admitted on Austrian television that he had come to “rethink” his approach to the migrant crisis: Instead of accepting all the refugees, aid should be given in the Middle East and Africa, so that migrants could stay there.

“Will there be an Islamic conquest of Europe? Many Muslims want that and say: Europe is at the end.” — Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, Festival of the ‘Holy Name of Mary’, September, 2016.

Cardinal Schönborn subsequently backtracked, saying that his words had been misinterpreted as an attack against Muslims and refugees: “Europe’s Christian legacy is in danger, because we Europeans have squandered it. That has absolutely nothing to do with Islam nor with the refugees. It is clear that many Islamists would like to take advantage of our weakness, but they are not responsible for it. We are.”

In his Christmas sermon, broadcast live on Austria’s ORF and Germany’s ZDF TV channels, Catholic diocesan Bishop Aegidius Zsifkovics of St. Martin’s Cathedral in Eisenstadt, Austria, pontificated that tightening borders is an “erroneous opinion”:

“Barbed wire, fences and walls are now many people’s answer to the refugees [coming into] Europe. The terror of a few, as last seen in Berlin, reinforce many of us in this erroneous opinion”.

Bishop Zsifkovics declared that we cannot let “Cowardly terror attacks, like that in Berlin, succeed in destabilizing our society, making us colder and less solidary. Let us not allow the terrorists this triumph — we will not be ice cold like them!”

Erdogan will effectively consolidate the power of three legislative bodies into one powerful executive office: himself.

Erdogan’s “Turkish-style presidency” is already a presidency with too much power held by one man. If approved at the referendum, the changes will make Erdogan head of government, head of state and head of the ruling party — all at the same time.

It would transfer powers traditionally held by parliament to the presidency, thereby rendering the parliament merely a ceremonial, advisory body.

The opposition looks fragmented and helpless in telling the masses that reforms would concentrate excessive powers in the hands of a leader who has increasingly displayed authoritarian tendencies.

At the moment, Erdogan is effectively the absolute ruler. If he wins the vote he becomes the absolute ruler. If he loses, he remains effectively the absolute ruler until he tries again to become the absolute ruler.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s one-man show goes on; he may soon progress from effectively having absolute authority to actually having absolute authority. He would apparently like to put an official seal on his increasingly autocratic regime. If a simple majority of Turks vote “yes” in a national referendum on proposed constitutional amendments in April, Erdogan will effectively consolidate the power of three legislative bodies into one powerful executive office: himself. He would then be installed as a leader with virtually unlimited authority.

Although the current constitution grants him largely symbolic powers, Erdogan has acted as the effective head of the executive branch since he became Turkey’s first elected president in August 2014. He has explicitly — and, it appears, happily — violated the constitution by acting as an absolute head of government. In May 2016, he forced Ahmet Davutoglu, his own confidant and prime minister, out of office; Erdogan evidently suspected that the man was not working hard enough to push for the absolute executive presidential system Erdogan has evidently been craving. Only seven months ago, Davutoglu had won a parliamentary election with 49.5% of the national vote.

Erdogan replaced Davutoglu with Binali Yildirim, who has proven to be more enthusiastic about terminating the prime minister’s office and transferring all powers to an all-powerful president. As Erdogan’s (and Yildirim’s) ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lacked the parliamentary majority to put any constitutional amendment to public vote, the proposed changes therefore required support from the opposition benches. (A minimum of 330 votes is required in the country’s 550-member assembly, as opposed to 317 seats controlled by the AKP.)

A year ago, that would have looked unimaginable. But a nationalist opposition party, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), made a U-turn from its public pledges of “never letting Erdogan become the executive president,” and decided to support the reform bill. Political observers are still trying to figure out what may have pushed the MHP from one extreme to the other; there is not yet a clear explanation.

Erdogan’s “Turkish-style presidency” is already a presidency with too much power held by one man. If approved in the referendum, the changes will make Erdogan head of government, head of state and head of the ruling party — all at the same time. Erdogan would have the power to appoint cabinet ministers without requiring a confidence vote from parliament, propose budgets and appoint more than half the members of the nation’s highest judicial body. He would also have the power to dissolve parliament, impose states of emergency and issue decrees. Alarmingly, the proposed system lacks the safety mechanisms of checks and balances that exist in other countries such as the United States. It would transfer powers traditionally held by parliament to the presidency, thereby rendering the parliament merely a ceremonial, advisory body.

Nigerian army spokesperson Rabe Abubakar could not confirm that a baby had been used in the attack, and said the woman may have just been disguised to appear as if she was carrying an infant.

The UN children’s agency (UNICEF) said it was the first such incident involving a baby reported in northeast Nigeria. “We are extremely worried about the use of a baby in this callous way,” UNICEF spokesperson Doune Porter told a foreign news agency.

The suicide bombings, which bore the hallmark of militant group Boko Haram, are common in northeast Nigeria, the heart of the militants’ seven-year campaign to create an Islamic state.

The militant group preys on displaced children or young girls it kidnaps and forces them to become bombers, with some unaware they are carrying explosives, aid agencies say.

The use of children as suicide bombers by Boko Haram has surged almost five-fold since 2014, with 19 child bombings, most involving young girls, recorded by UNICEF last year.

Prior to the Madagali bombings, the youngest child used in such an attack was a nine-year-old girl, the UN agency said. The attack in Madagali is one in a series of bombings in Nigeria northeast, mainly Borno state, in recent weeks as Boko Haram steps up attacks with the end of the rainy season facilitating movements in the bush.

However, risk management consultancy Signal Risk’s director Ryan Cummings said Nigeria’s civilian joint task force (CJTF) had stepped up efforts to spot and search suspected bombers. “Several attempted attacks by females bombers have been thwarted (due to the CJTF), limiting casualties,” he said.

Army spokesperson Abubakar said security forces would be extra vigilant and ready to respond to any new strategies used by Boko Haram. The militants’ insurgency has killed about 15,000 people and forced more than two million to flee their homes.http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2017/01/25/with-baby-strapped-to-back-woman-suicide-bomber-strikes-nigerian-market/

In early 2015, the militants controlled an area the size of Belgium but has been pushed out from most of the territory by the Nigerian military with help from neighbouring countries.

Mullahs seem to prefer protecting inhuman laws to protecting humans.

Most full coverings for women are black, which absorbs heat, and are made not of cotton but of non-porous cloth – in the scorching heat.

In a province of Indonesia, Aceh, a woman, accused of being intimate with her boyfriend is caned, in front of a jeering crowd. Later, a photograph of the screaming woman is published as a token of pride for the men who had just exacted this “justice” — on her; no consequence for the boyfriend. It was a lesson to remind women to submit to their place in society.

Turkey last year presented a bill for tackling its widespread child-marriage issue: the Turkish government introduced a bill that pardons a rapist if he marries his victim. The victim is not consulted.

All forms of exploiting women are presented as divine law, sharia, in which women have no say, which they are unable to use in their own defence, and which they are forced to accept as their fate.

These are countries where men are not only permitted, but invited, to consider woman a pet — to be killed, burned with acid, benzene or a weapon of choice supposedly to preserve a family’s “honour”.

These laws, put in place by the governments and the clergy, provide a safe escape for criminals, such as those who kill their women and claim it is in the name of “honour”.

The deeper horror is that all these abuses — child marriage, confinement, FGM, rape, torture, and legal discrimination — have accomplices. These enablers are often well-meaning people from the West, “multiculturalists” who are reluctant to pass judgement on other people’s customs no matter how brutal they might be.

Sadly, they are unable to see that they are actually part of the huge jihadi radicalization machine working under the very nose of even governments in the West.

As the British in India effectively got rid the people of the cultural practice of suttee, in which Hindu widows were required to throw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre, if people would really like to do “good”, they will please help to stop similar crushing practices.

A bitter truth, often glossed over in the name of “tradition,” is the religious teachings and the responsibilities of a Muslim woman. Most glossed over is the violence that men are still allowed to inflict on their women in the name of their religion and culture on such a massive part of the planet.

This brutality not only takes place in ISIS-held territory but across most Muslim societies. All around you, you