FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Congress Launches Bipartisan Bill to Give Refugee Status to Certain Hong Kong Residents New bill is aimed at Hong Kongers at risk of persecution under Chinese territory’s new national-security law by Kate O’Keefe

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/congress-launches-bipartisan-bill-to-give-refugee-status-to-certain-hong-kong-residents-11593553499

Lawmakers of both parties launched a bill to give refugee status to Hong Kong residents at risk of persecution under the Chinese territory’s new national-security law, which local rights activists and many Western countries have decried as a tool for Beijing to suppress civil liberties in the semiautonomous city-state.

The bill, introduced hours after the text of the new security law was released, is being led by Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) in the Senate and John Curtis (R., Utah) and Joaquin Castro (D., Texas) in the House of Representatives, along with around a dozen co-sponsors from both chambers.

The legislation would require the State Department to designate as refugees of special humanitarian concern Hong Kong residents who suffered persecution, or have a well-founded fear of it, due to their expression of political opinions or peaceful participation in political activities. The privileges would extend to those individuals’ spouses, children and parents, provided the parents are Chinese citizens, the text says.

The paperwork could be completed in Hong Kong or in a third country, and refugees would then be able to apply for permanent residency and citizenship. The opportunity, which wouldn’t be restricted by the current U.S. cap on refugees, would be valid for five years from the date of the bill’s passage.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

DANIEL PEARL’S MURDERER HEADED FOR RELEASE- CATHERINE SMITH

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/30/wall-street-journal-reporter-daniel-pearls-murderer-headed-for-release/

The New York Post reports that a British-born man sentenced to death for kidnapping and beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl could walk free.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was found guilty of masterminding Pearl’s murder, and sentenced to death in 2002. He has been in jail ever since awaiting the outcome of a series of appeals and legal arguments. His death sentence was overturned in April after Pakistani prosecutors failed to prove he was the killer, The Guardian reported at the time.

“The court has commuted Omar’s death sentence to a seven-year sentence. The murder charges were not proven, so he was given seven years for the kidnapping. Omar has already served 18 years, so his release orders will be issued sometime today. He will be out in a few days,” defense lawyer Khawaja Naveed told Reuters back in April, according to The Guardian.

Pearl’s family, the U.S. Government and media rights groups were outraged over the decision and appeals were filed to reverse the ruling, the outlet reported.

In response, Saeed Sheikh was instead held on a 90-day detention order, expiring Thursday, under a public ordinance that allows defendants to be held in custody longer if their release could lead to violence and chaos, the outlet reported.

However, Pakistan’s supreme court refused a government request to suspend the lower court’s decision to release Saeed Sheikh on Monday and refused to promptly hear an appeal on the ruling, which is now scheduled for Sept. 25, the outlet said.

Pakistan’s prosecutor, Faiz Shah, declined to say whether they will seek an order extending Saeed Sheikh’s detention, meaning the man could be walking free as early as Thursday, the outlet reported.

“The prosecution’s cases are won or lost not on the basis of emotion, they are won or lost on the basis of evidence and in this case the prosecution did a woeful job,” Mahmood Sheikh, Saeed Sheikh’s lawyer, no relation, told The Guardian.

“If Daniel Pearl’s parents have any grievance or complaint it should be against the Pakistani authorities for the prosecution’s failings.”

In January 2002, Pearl was an intrepid journalist investigating Islamic militants in Karachi when he was kidnapped by Saeed Sheikh. He was eventually beheaded in a filmed execution that was shared around the world, according to The New York Post.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Don Feder 10 Things for Which I’ll Never Apologize A memo to the legion of the chronically aggrieved.

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/10-things-which-ill-never-apologize-don-feder/

There are people who live to be offended. They’re called progressives. They are offended by Confederate statues, by monuments that they say celebrate white supremacy and colonialism, by Trump supporters, by Trump himself, and by those who refuse to get on their knees and grovel before Black Lives Matter.

Well, I’ve got news for them.

An Open Letter to the Legion of Lamentation:

I don’t give a rodent’s rear end if you’re offended by the following:

1. I’m white – I don’t feel guilty about slavery, segregation, the Trail of Tears or the treatment of Chinese railroad workers – because (now get this) I didn’t have anything to do with any of this. I’m no more responsible for these injustices than the Indian of today is responsible for the Black Hole of Calcutta. The idea of racial guilt is absurd. White privilege is a myth. Where is the White Miss America Contest, White History Month and White Entertainment Television? Where are the quotas and set-asides for Caucasians?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Has This Present Moment Set Black Americans Back a Half-Century? The damage the Left is perpetrating may be mortal. Dennis Prager

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/present-moment-has-set-blacks-back-half-century-dennis-prager/

The “protesters” who destroy and loot think their victim status allows them to destroy and loot. The man identified as the president of the greater New York Black Lives Matter, Hawk Newsome, recently told Fox News: “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking … figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation.”

In a report yesterday on a police shooting of a robber who resisted arrest and reached for an object in his waistband, the San Diego Union-Tribune quoted a protest organizer: “If this young man was robbing, that means his state and his government failed to provide him with the resources he needs.” When you feel you are a victim, you are allowed to rob.

Take the constant, often absurd, charges of racism at the most benign comments. If you say, for example, that you see nothing wrong with the picture of Uncle Ben on a box of rice, you will be accused of racism. As a result, most whites understand they can no longer speak truthfully or from the heart in the presence of a black American. It is hard to imagine a worse recipe for genuine relationships between the races. Whereas the great majority of whites, and even most blacks, thought white-black relations were good and improving when Barack Obama assumed office, a minority of both groups think so today.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Universities Commit to Racism By Philip Carl Salzman

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2020/06/30/universities-commit-to-racism-n587609

One of the famed universities in the world, Cambridge University, knows which side it is on. When one of its lecturers tweeted, “White lives don’t matter,” and then “Abolish whiteness,” the university defended her, and then promoted her to the rank of professor. When another instructor tweeted “White lives matter,” his contract was terminated. The anti-white lecturer was a female of color, while the instructor who thinks white lives matter was a white male. White males, as woke “social justice” activists tell us, are wrong, they are oppressors, and inherently toxic racists. Females, especially females of color, are deemed to be victims of white male oppression, and are always right. 

Is there a word for thinking about people of different races differently? Ratism, raverism, ragusism? What about for treating people of different races differently? Discresionism, depressionism, deterentism? Whatever you want to call them, Cambridge University has them down pat, and so does every other university in North America and Western Europe. Racism has become official policy in every university, policed by the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars who command thought and re-educate or exile dissidents, and by the woke politicians who give them their marching orders. And discrimination in favor of preferred categories of people is the new standard of “justice.”

Professors and administrators who speak out against woke orthodoxy are attacked and hounded out of their jobs by “social justice” warriors. The Michigan State University Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation was summarily fired for daring to question the benefits of diversity and the costs of canceling merit in science. Anyone today daring to recommend “colorblind” admissions and hiring, or saying “all lives matter,” is immediately labeled a RACIST! and fired. Only “correct” speech is acceptable to woke academics and cowardly administrators. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Flowers for Teddy R By Marion DS Dreyfus

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/flowers_for_teddy_r.html

As the wacko Evangelical guy across the street from our Defend Teddy Roosevelt rally Sunday afternoon loudspeakered: “It ain’t the color of your skin, it’s the color of your sin,” a clever assonance-rich meme that sounds good and means not that much, except to say that in his considered religious consideration, we were “worshiping a graven image” (!) and had better repent.

Something finally roused the conservatives from their  pandemic poufs and couches. The media were there, certainly, interviewing such firebrands as Gavin Wax, whose NY Young Republicans blast emails  say they spearheaded the rally. Ages were everything from teenagers to hoary-headed, bushy-bearded elders. All ethnicities were represented.

And thanks to social media and  high-temperature-stoked choler, hundreds showed up in the hottest day, at the hottest hour, without a cloverleaf of shade, in front of the revered (until now) American Museum of Natural History, whose high-salaried pooh-bahs had decided, without permission or notification of the city — on whose land the museum has long stood — to remove the equestrian statue of our most popular president, who died 21 years before the statue made its iconic appearance on the noble plinth greeting millions from all corners of the world.

The president of AMNH, Ellen Futter, has become as toxic as a thrice-used face mask.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Let Trump Be Trump The same tired critics and polls from 2016 resurface. by Jeffrey Lord *****

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://spectator.org/let-trump-be-trump-reelection-gop-establishment-reagan/

It was June 2013.

Learning that a piece titled “Can’t We All Just Agree to Ignore Donald Trump?” had been published, I responded with an article titled,

Never Ignore Donald Trump

After making the case for then-private citizen Trump as a presidential candidate three years hence, I said this, bold print now supplied for emphasis:

The real point is that Donald Trump is a man who gets up every single day and fights. He creates. He goes about his life each and every day and routinely makes contributions to American life. Some of those contributions are well known, huge and visible; countless others, one bets, are small, unknown and invisible. And in the case of his famous television show, he is more than capable of entertaining along the way. Donald Trump is no apprentice — he’s the real thing.

In this corner — and I suspect many, many corners — he is both respected and admired for what he does. Even if you don’t like Donald Trump, and I am most certainly not in that category, it is a huge mistake to ignore him. He made of his life a great and interesting — and very American — story.

We use to have a saying in the Reagan White House: Let Reagan be Reagan.

Donald Trump, like Ronald Reagan, is an American Original. Let Donald Trump be Donald Trump.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard Reverses Blacklist of Single-Sex Student Organizations Following Bostock Ruling By Zachary Evans

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-reverses-ban-on-single-sex-student-organizations-following-bostock-ruling/

Harvard has announced it will lift a blacklist on unrecognized single-sex student organizations, including fraternities and sororities, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County.

That ruling decided that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay or transgender employees from discrimination due to their sexual orientation. Harvard in 2016 instituted a blacklist of some single-sex student organizations by denying scholarships and other opportunities to members of those organizations.

The blacklist “was adopted for the purpose of counteracting overt discrimination on the basis of sex—specifically, the exclusion of Harvard College students from social organizations because of their gender,” Bacow wrote in a statement on Monday. However, fraternities and sororities subsequently brought a lawsuit against the university in the U.S. District Court in Boston.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FCC Designates Chinese Tech Giants Huawei and ZTE as National-Security Threats By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fcc-designates-huawei-zte-national-security-threats/

The Federal Communications Commission has formally designated two technology giants closely connected to the Chinese Communist regime as national-security threats to the integrity of telecommunications networks and the communications supply chain.

The designation applies to Huawei Technologies Company and ZTE Corporation.

FCC chairman Ajit Pai announced that, after a full investigation, the commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (PSHSB) concluded that “[b]oth companies have close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and China’s military apparatus, and both companies are broadly subject to Chinese law obligating them to cooperate with the country’s intelligence services.” Consequently, the companies pose “national security risks to America’s communications networks — and our 5G future.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. Consumer Confidence Posts Biggest Increase Since Late 2011 By Olivia Rockeman

Posted By on July 1st, 2020

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-30/u-s-consumer-confidence-posts-biggest-increase-since-late-2011

U.S. consumer confidence rose in June by more than forecast as optimism increased amid business reopenings, though sentiment remained well below pre-pandemic levels.

The Conference Board’s index jumped by 12.2 points to 98.1, the biggest one-month gain since late 2011, according to a report Tuesday. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists had called for a reading of 91.5.