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Canada: Scandal Involving P.M. Trudeau Linked to Libya The cesspool of romancing Jihad. Christine Douglass-Williams

Posted By on February 22nd, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272952/canada-scandal-involving-pm-trudeau-linked-libya-christine-douglass-williams

Four years ago, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officially leveled corruption and fraud charges against Montreal engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, over alleged criminal acts that occurred while that firm was doing business in Libya. The Globe and Mail broke the biggest scandal since Canada’s Adscam scandal, which cost the Liberals dearly in election year 2006. This latest scandal, also breaking in an election year, has to do with the involvement of Justin Trudeau and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in the SNC-Lavalin case.SNC-Lavalin operates in a variety of sectors globally, including mining and metallurgy, oil and gas, and the fraud and corruption charges against it include nearly $48 million in payments made to Libyan government officials between 2001 and 2011.The case centers around Liberal MP Jody Wilson-Raybould (JWR), who served as Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada from 2015 until January 2019.

She was then demoted in a cabinet shuffle to the position of Minister of Veterans Affairs, and suddenly resigned several days ago (February 12) following the Globe and Mail report, which alleged that the PMO “attempted to press” her to intervene in the corruption and fraud prosecution of SNC-Lavalin in her role as Attorney General, in order to spare the engineering giant — deemed to be a crown jewel in Quebec — from criminal prosecution. The story also indicated that she “came under heavy pressure.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Warren Backs Government Reparations for African Americans By Jack Crowe

Posted By on February 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/warren-backs-government-reparations-for-african-americans/

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) on Thursday followed fellow Democratic presidential contender Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) in calling for the government to pay reparations to African Americans to atone for slavery and subsequent discrimination.Warren’s campaign told the New York Times that she does support some form of government reparations for the descendants of slaves, but did not specify what policy she we would pursue if elected in 2020.Warren’s support for reparations came after Harris came out in support of the idea during a radio interview last week.

“We have to be honest that people in this country do not start from the same place or have access to the same opportunities,” she said. “I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities.”

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Kamala Harris Ignores Questions on Smollett Hoax after Dining with Sharpton By Jack Crowe

Posted By on February 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/jussie-smollett-case-kamala-harris-ignores-questions-on-hoax-after-dining-with-al-sharpton/

Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) on Thursday refused to comment on the hate-crime hoax apparently perpetrated by Empire actor Jussie Smollett, when asked about the case while leaving a Harlem, N.Y. restaurant with Al Sharpton, who famously publicized the fraudulent hate-crime claim made by Tawana Brawley in the late 1980s.Harris, who previously called the allegedly faked hate crime a “modern day lynching,” has refused to retract her initial claim despite the Chicago Police Department’s Thursday morning assertion that Smollett paid two associates to stage the attack.Asked earlier this week about the tweet in which she said Smollett was effectively lynched, Harris seemed unfamiliar with the message and said she could not comment on the case until all the details came to light.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Schiffting to Phase 2 of Collusion Conspiracy theorists look for something new, anticipating a Mueller letdown. Kimberley Strassel

Posted By on February 22nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffting-to-phase-2-of-collusion-11550794762

There’s been no more reliable regurgitator of fantastical Trump-Russia collusion theories than Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. So when the House Intelligence Committee chairman sits down to describe a “new phase” of the Trump investigation, pay attention. These are the fever swamps into which we will descend after Robert Mueller’s probe.

The collusionists need a “new phase” as signs grow that the special counsel won’t help realize their reveries of a Donald Trump takedown. They had said Mr. Mueller would provide all the answers. Now that it seems they won’t like his answers, Democrats and media insist that any report will likely prove “anticlimactic” and “inconclusive.” “This is merely the end of Chapter 1,” said Renato Mariotti, a CNN legal “analyst.”Mr. Schiff turned this week to a dependable scribe—the Washington Post’s David Ignatius—to lay out the next chapter of the penny dreadful. Mr. Ignatius was the original conduit for the leak about former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s conversations with a Russian ambassador, and the far-fetched claims that Mr. Flynn had violated the Logan Act of 1799.

Mr. Schiff has now dictated to Mr. Ignatius a whole new collusion theory. Forget Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos—whoever. The real Trump-Russia canoodling rests in “Trump’s finances.” The future president was “doing business with Russia” and “seeking Kremlin help.”So, no apologies. No acknowledgment that Mr. Schiff & Co. for years have pushed fake stories that accused innocent men and women of being Russian agents. No relieved hope that the country might finally put this behind us. Just a smooth transition—using Russia as a hook—into Mr. Trump’s finances.

Mueller who?What’s mind-boggling is that reporters would continue to take Mr. Schiff seriously, given his extraordinary record of incorrect and misleading pronouncements. This is the man who, on March 22, 2017, helped launch full-blown hysteria when he said on “Meet the Press” that his committee already had the goods on Trump-Russia collusion.CONTINUE AT SITE

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Right from wrong: when bubble-dwellers go too far By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on February 22nd, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-wrong-when-bubble-dwellers-go-too-far-581442

At a press conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Israel Resilience Party leader Benny Gantz made the kind of blooper that only someone living in an insulated bubble is capable of.
Announcing his party’s final list for the April 9 Knesset elections, Gantz launched an attack on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that can best be described as an own goal. The assault was so outrageous that it caused even many of Netanyahu’s harshest critics to flinch at its stupidity, and spurred Israeli public relations powerhouse Rani Rahav to tweet that whoever wrote Gantz’s tirade ought to “resign immediately and take responsibility for the damaging speech that no Israeli wanted to hear.”

Indeed, rather than go after Netanyahu’s policies and performance in office – which is what a contender against an incumbent normally does – the former IDF chief of staff ridiculed the PM for not having illustrious enough military credentials – oh, and for being too American.

“When I lay in the muddy trenches with my soldiers on frozen winter nights,” Gantz said, “you, Benjamin Netanyahu, left Israel to learn English and practice it at luxurious cocktail parties. On the days when I commanded the Shaldag Unit in life-threatening operations in enemy states, you, Benjamin Netanyahu, worked your way bravely and with determination between the makeup rooms of TV studios. While I trained generations of commanders and fighters, you took acting lessons in a New York studio. And during the nights of tension and stress, when I fell asleep in my uniform and boots, you, Benjamin Netanyahu, had world’s most respected tailors taking your measurements, and returned safely to your bed in your prestigious hotel.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Paul Collits : Green Misconceptions

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet

If you believe the Australian Conservation Foundation — always a stretch, admittedly — one woman in three plans to spurn childbearing lest Gaia take offence at the patter of those additional little feet. While the West elevates fashionable inanity, Hungary shows the way.

A LIKELY very biased survey of self-selectors undertaken by the Australian Conservation Foundation has found that a large chunk of women (up to a third) are considering not having children because of climate change. Yes, really.

This finding is, of course, of little surprise on reflection. The ACF, once a serious and benign organisation chaired by that old “radical Tory” Sir Garfield Barwick, has not unexpectedly drifted leftwards and greenwards over time. It is now dripping with post-1989 environmentalism and is inhabited by the virtue-signalling woke types who not only demand “we all do our bit” to save the earth, but lobby actively for transformative social change and diminished freedom for the non-woke. The means used by ACF-type groups to effect social change include tradition-shaming, infiltration of organisations not normally on-side, social media mis-truthing and bullying, infecting young minds through curriculum change, and all the other familiar tools of Left activism.

There are only two surprises with this ACF survey. One, that it has taken them so long to get onto this. And two, that it is only a third of women (members) bent on remaining barren. In view of the left’s now blatant, Margaret Sanger-inspired march towards infanticide in the US and elsewhere (Victoria, Queensland), getting women to merely avoid having children rather than having them killed as they approach birth might be regarded as progress. The particular new front and new ideology under examination here might usefully be termed “fertility change”.

For woke women, taking one for the team in relation to climate change dovetails nicely with the ultimate feminist act of not having children. A win-win, you might say. Green feminism. The defiant act of turning oneself (like men have done for centuries) into a wage slave while creating an entire new industry, viz. outsourced domestic services, naturally supported by both the child-bearing and non-child bearing taxpayer, has taken on an entirely new significance, post the mass discovery of global warming in the 1980s.

BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Survival at the White House By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/03/11/survival-at-the-white-house/

–This essay is adapted from Mr. Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump, which Basic Books will publish in March.

The administrative state took aim at Trump, but it has not been able to destroy him

No one in Washington called Donald J. Trump a “god” (as journalist Evan Thomas in 2009 had suggested of Obama) when he arrived in January 2017. No one felt nerve impulses in his leg when Trump talked, as journalist Chris Matthews once remarked had happened to him after hearing an Obama speech. And no newsman or pundit cared how crisply creased were Trump’s pants, at least in the manner that New York Times columnist David Brooks had once praised Obama’s sartorial preciseness. Instead, Trump was greeted by the Washington media and intellectual establishment as if he were the first beast in the Book of Revelation, who arose “out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”

Besides the Washington press and pundit corps, Donald Trump faced a third and more formidable opponent: the culture of permanent and senior employees of the federal and state governments, and the political appointees in Washington who revolve in and out from business, think tanks, lobbying firms, universities, and the media. Or as the legal scholar of the administrative state Philip Hamburger put it: “Although the United States remains a republic, administrative power creates within it a very different sort of government. The result is a state within the state — an administrative state within the Constitution’s United States.”

Since the U.S. post-war era, the growth of American state and federal government has been enormous. By 2017, there were nearly 3 million civilian federal workers, and another 1.3 million Americans in the uniformed military. Over 22 million local, state, and federal workers had made government the largest employment sector.

The insidious power of the unelected administrative state is easy to understand. After all, it governs the most powerful aspects of modern American life: taxes, surveillance, criminal-justice proceedings, national security, and regulation. The nightmares of any independent trucker or small-business person are being audited by the IRS, having communications surveilled, or being investigated by a government regulator or prosecutor.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A Sublime Christian Masterpiece of a Film By Kyle Smith

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-tree-of-life-masterpiece-film-director-terrence-malick/

Set aside your devices and diversions for two hours, and you’ll see something wonderful.

‘There are two ways through life — the way of nature and the way of grace,” remarks the saintly mother at the outset of The Tree of Life, one of the most awe-inspiring films of the 21st century. She continues:

Grace doesn’t try please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked, accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it. . . . It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things.

I wonder what the TV Guide capsule of Terrence Malick’s inspired, autobiographical meditation on a Christian existence might say. How about: “Three members of a midcentury Texas family deal with an unbearable loss over the course of years. Also, there are dinosaurs.” Malick makes some daring, strange, brilliant choices whose connections reveal themselves only gradually and obliquely.

Starting with an epigraph from Job (“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”), Malick meditates on a family much like his own, shifting among the perspectives of Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), a strict and sometimes brutish disciplinarian; his wife (Jessica Chastain), an angel in a housedress; and Jack, one of their three sons (played by Hunter McCracken as a boy and Sean Penn as an adult). Malick wends his way through the interior monologues of these three as they reflect on their lives together in the 1950s, their responses to a catastrophic event, and the mystery of consciousness.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Indict the ‘ISIS Bride’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

She may not push the citizenship issue if she faces prison time here.

I had a column in the New York Post yesterday morning about the so-called “ISIS bride,” Hoda Muthana, who is detained in a Syrian refugee camp and now pleading to come back home to her family in Alabama. I argued that, despite the fact that she has treasonously waged war against our country, she had a right to be readmitted if she tried to enter because she was — according to the facts available at the time — a natural-born American citizen.

Now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced that Muthana will not be allowed to reenter the U.S. because she is not an American citizen: While born in America, she was the daughter of a diplomat and thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. As the secretary put it in his statement, “Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States. She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States.”

This conclusion is disputed by Muthana’s family and allies, and they may have a case. I would strongly urge the Justice Department to file an indictment against Muthana for treason, material support to terrorism, and any other readily provable offenses. She is less likely to press the issues of citizenship and right to enter if she understands that she faces prosecution and, very likely, lengthy imprisonment if she succeeds in coming here.

But it’s worth taking a closer look at the citizenship question itself. To my mind, the concept of citizenship implies not just the benefits of being a full-fledged member of the body politic, but also a duty of fealty to the nation. In a rational world, then, a citizen who made war against the United States would be stripped of citizenship.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

TAU develops blood test to detect genetic disorders in early pregnancy By Eytan Halon

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Jpost-Tech/Business-and-Innovation/TAU-develops-blood-test-to-detect-genetic-disorders-in-early-pregnancy-581252

The research, led by Prof. Noam Shomron of the university’s Sackler School of Medicine, was published Wednesday in the Genome Research journal.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a new blood test to detect genetic disorders in fetuses as early as 11 weeks into pregnancy.The simple blood test enables doctors to diagnose genetic disorders
caused by minuscule impairments in the fetal genome by sequencing small amounts of DNA in the mother’s and the father’s blood.

A computer algorithm processes the sequencing results to produce a “map” of the fetal genome, identifying countless mutations with atleast 99% accuracy, depending on the mutation type.