RUTHFULLY YOURS

CAMP LEMONNIER, Djibouti—Piracy has made a worrisome return to the waters off Somalia after a five-year hiatus, U.S. defense officials said, prompting commercial shippers, the military and others to revisit the issue.

In the past two months, there have been as many as six incidents of piracy, according to Gen. Tom Waldhauser, head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, speaking to reporters here Sunday. They are the first incidents since about 2012, Gen. Waldhauser said. Pirates seized food, oil and other commodities from smaller-size boats, he said.

Gen. Waldhauser appeared with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who is winding up a trip through the Middle East and North Africa. Mr. Mattis stopped in Djibouti on Sunday to meet with Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh. He also met with French troops stationed here and received briefings about U.S. operations at Camp Lemonnier, a sprawling U.S. naval base here with more than 4,000 U.S. personnel.

The base provides support for a number of U.S. activities, including training and advising forces in Somalia and in nearby Yemen, and is home to numerous logistical and tactical aircraft and drones. The senior command, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, is also based here, the only permanent U.S. base on the African continent.

Gen. Waldhauser attributed the return of piracy part to famine and drought in Somalia, adding private security measures should be kept in place to defend against pirates. CONTINUE AT SITE

As global events go, one of the safest predictions is that North Korea would take another American hostage amid growing tensions over its nuclear program. Sure enough, the Kim Jong Un regime on Saturday arrested an American teacher as he waited to board a flight out of the country.

South Korean media identified the new hostage as Kim Sang-duk, who was teaching a class in international finance and management at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. The mere thought of such a class is puzzling since North Korea’s “international finance” is smuggling. But Mr. Kim had taught at a sister school in China near the border with North Korea, and perhaps he thought he could spread some goodwill. Bad mistake.

In addition to Kim Sang-duk, the North is known to hold two other Americans. Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who was on a tour of North Korea, was detained last year for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda poster. He was convicted of subversion and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. He hasn’t been seen since March 2016. American businessman Kim Dong-chul was charged with spying last year and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Hostage politics is a hardy Korean perennial, perhaps because it always seems to yield some political or diplomatic benefit. Pyongyang recently detained Malaysian citizens and traded them to Kuala Lumpur in return for the North Koreans suspected of conspiring to assassinate Kim Jong Un’s brother. The North has also traded Americans over the years for visits by high-ranking U.S. officials, even former Presidents, who offer the regime some legitimacy and sometimes more tangible benefits.

That’s the best reason for the Trump Administration not to engage in hostage negotiations. The U.S. warns Americans not to travel to North Korea, yet some still tempt fate by doing so. The U.S. can ask China to intercede for the imprisoned Americans on humanitarian grounds, but the U.S. also needs China’s help against North Korea’s nuclear missiles.

North Korea is a terrorist government that obeys none of the norms of international behavior. The only solution is regime change. But in the meantime, the U.S. should make clear that Americans who travel to North Korea do so at their own risk.

This sentence “And Ms. Le Pen’s vigorous defense of French civilization against threats real (terrorism) and imagined (Muslim immigrants in general) resonates. Mr. Macron will need credible answers to the terrorist threat—witness Thursday’s attack on the Champs-Élysées—and a growing disconnect between French society and the impoverished immigrant (often Muslim) communities in the banlieues.” The threats of terrorism from Muslim immigrants is not “imagined”…but real indeed! rsk

Sharply divided French voters on Sunday gave themselves Emmanuel Macron as a mainstream alternative to far-right Marine Le Pen in next month’s second round of presidential voting. The French will now decide between two very different visions of French nationalism.

Incomplete tallies as we went to press suggested that the independent former Socialist Mr. Macron would finish first in a crowded field, with about 23% of the vote. Ms. Le Pen of the National Front was close behind. Free-market conservative François Fillon and far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon each won a little under 20%. French voters remain deeply divided about how to jolt their country out of its malaise. But they seem willing, for now and only barely, to give the center another chance.

The most stunning result is the repudiation of the two mainstream parties that have ruled France for decades. Voters rejected the ruling Socialists but also Mr. Fillon of the center-right Republicans. Mr. Fillon might have fared better if not for his personal scandals, but voters also remember the promise and failure of the last Republican President, Nicolas Sarkozy, six years ago.

Socialist President François Hollande started his term in 2012 promising a return to doctrinaire socialism before attempting a shift toward economic reform that never materialized. Unemployment has remained mostly stuck above 10%, with youth unemployment near 25%. Economic growth barely scrapes above 1% in a good year, and France’s educated young flee to London, New York, Hong Kong and other global centers.

Benoît Hamon, representing the ruling Socialist Party, notched a distant fifth place with less than 7%. The other left-wing loser Sunday was Mr. Mélenchon. Though he is personally popular for his authenticity, voters rejected this French Bernie Sanders, rightly doubting that tripling down on statism is the way to revive France’s fortunes.

The French will now have a choice between two very different political “outsiders.” Mr. Macron’s case in next month’s runoff is that to regain its former vitality France must reform and compete better with the world.

North Korea’s menace has been all over the news, including its missiles tests, visible preparations for a sixth nuclear test and its threats to attack a U.S. aircraft carrier and to reduce the U.S. to ashes with a “super-mighty preemptive strike.” Assorted experts, debating how to handle the rogue regime of Kim Jong Un, have been weighing the pros and cons of trying yet more sanctions, new negotiations, tough talk, pressure on China, displays of military might, actual use of military force to take out North Korean missiles or even nuclear facilities, or assorted permutations of all these options and then some.

Amid all the strategizing — much of which envisions somehow continuing to “manage” the North Korea problem — it’s easy to sideline a basic and profoundly important element of the Pyongyang regime, a quality we should take into account quite thoroughly, front and center, before considering any course that might leave the Kim regime in power. The feature I’m talking about is the raw moral obscenity of Kim’s North Korea.

That obscenity might seem so entirely self-evident that it needs no repeated mention. We know that Kim is a tyrant, ruling a country that doubles as a prison for its 25 million people. We know that Kim keeps power by doing horrible things to those who fail to please him, including members of his own family. It was all over the news in 2012 when he swept aside his uncle and purported mentor, Jang Song Thaek, who was abruptly denounced and executed. Kim’s regime appears to have been behind the horrific assassination with VX nerve agent of Kim’s half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, just two months ago, in a Malaysian airport.

We know that Kim runs a state which last year year sentenced a visiting American student, Otto Warmbier, to 15 years at hard labor for the prank of taking down a political propaganda poster from a hotel wall in Pyongyang — thus turning Warmbier into a likely bargaining chip in North Korea’s long-running hostage games (this weekend comes news that North Korea has added another visiting American to its current haul). We also know, as reports over the past dozen years have richly documented, that a native North Korean showing disregard for the totalitarian propaganda of Kim’s regime would risk being executed outright, or possibly exiled incommunicado, along with three generations of his or her family, to the brutal labor camps in which the regime currently holds an estimated 80,000-120,000 political prisoners.

But that scarcely begins to sum up the systematic depravities with which the totalitarian Kim regime has held onto power for three generations, from founder Kim Il Sung, to his son Kong Jong Il, to the current Kim Jong Un (who inherited power upon the death of his father, more than five years ago). For decades, reports of the Kim-family regime’s atrocities have been seeping out of North Korea, including a landmark report in 2003 from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea on North Korea’s prison camps (“The Hidden Gulag”), and another groundbreaking report in 2012 on what amounts to North Korea’s system of political apartheid (“Marked for Life: Songbun, North Korea’s Political Classification System”).

10:44 AM: I feel like my country, the country I’ve lived in for over 44 years, is a patient in intensive care. Tubes and catheters, control panels, IT graphs, pulsing images, flashing lights. We’re waiting with sinking hearts for the specialist to come in and interpret the lab results. Something ineluctable is about to be revealed. But what?

I’m going to the outdoor market. When I get back, maybe I’ll run the vacuum cleaner. To keep my mind fresh. Plans for my visit to Israel in May are shaping up. Then 2 weeks in June in the US. A week in the South of France after that. Life goes on. I’ll walk around and take a look at the polling places. All the candidate posters have been defaced by anarchists and other heavy metal destroy protestors.

3 PM : The hawk is out, a merciless cold wind is slamming our hopes for springtime. The sun is hot and bright. It’s not enough. Anarchists and other looking-for-a-fight protesters at yesterday’s Social 1st Round left their filthy messages all up and down boulevard Beaumarchais. Last night they threw bottles and other hard edged objects at the police. Their graffiti looks like blood, talk about broad brush, they obscure whatever they touch. WAR ON THE RICH here POLICE ASSASSINS there. Can’t someone get them out of our face, out of our hair, out of the national conversation? Their causes are rotten. They grab at anything as an excuse for slopping signs and breaking windows, attacking the police and whatever else they get their hands on.

I’m on edge. Up to now, everything was possible, you grasped it with your rational mind. Now it is happening. People are voting. The verdict will soon fall.

I’m sharply impatient and here they come again with Marine Le Pen. A friend tells me about an article in the Jerusalem Post, CNN is in her stomping grounds at Bénin-Haumont and President Trump thinks she’s the best on frontiers and all that sovereignty, and the only one that’s dealing with that pesky problem. C’mon guys, either find out what’s really happening here or comment on another poker game. You want Marine le Pen for president? Help yourself. But leave us out of it

Oh they’re so sure she’ll get to the 2nd round. I just hope they’re wrong. I’m so tired of her misrepresentation.

An all-female division of an ISIS-affiliated hacking group released a video online claiming to have hacked multiple social media accounts.

The “Al Khansaa Kateeba” (battalion), which claims to be a division of the notorious United Cyber Caliphate (UCC) released the video over the weekend glorifying the recent launch of its all-girl division, threatening anyone exposing information on individuals within the group.

“Shortly after the announcement of the creation of a brigade that consists of female cadres within the ranks of the team, the muwwahidat answered the call and formed a force that disturbs the kuffar and made them sleep deprived,” the video, posted to an encrypted Telegram channel as well as on YouTube, stated.

The women’s division, seemingly formed over the past month, already claims ‘success’ in the form of hacking ‘over 100 Twitter accounts during March.’

The Foreign Desk has not been able to verify the validity of these claims, but upon examination, several of the Twitter accounts listed in the video appear to be discarded accounts that have not been used for several months, sometimes years.

In a stark message addressing anyone trying to expose them, the women warn, “We say to him who claimed that he has our secrets, come forward and face us.”

The video concludes with a stark message “And it’s only the beginning,” listing an encrypted email for potential recruits to get in touch.

The emergence of an ISIS all-female hacking division appears to be a continued response to the Islamic State’s call for so-called ‘media jihad’ issued shortly after the Westminster attack in March.

While the majority of women joining ISIS have been limited to playing support roles such as being wives to ISIS jihadis and raising their children in the caliphate, some have assumed roles within core ISIS ranks, joining the notorious Al-Khansaafemale police brigades and in some cases reportedly being deployed in combat roles.

The Al-Khansaa Brigade is largely made up of foreign jihadist women from North Africa, Europe and other Persian Gulf countries, and 60 of them are believed to be from the United Kingdom.

Earlier this month, the United Cyber Caliphate group issued a video that included a threat against U.S. President Donald Trump as well as a ‘kill list’ that included 8,786 names, many of them individuals located in the U.S. along with a frequently repeated ISIS instruction: “Kill them wherever you find them.”

In March, the group conceded its leader Osed Agha had been killed in an apparent drone strike on the Islamic State’s de-facto capital Raqqa.

Under Agha, the group touted achievements including the hacking of hundreds of social media accounts and several DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, targeting numerous websites and taking them offline.

Following Agha’s death, UCC posted a message eulogizing Agha as a ‘Martyr’ and someone who “would leap with a sword in his hands to cut-off the heads of the kufar. He would attack the apostate’s Web Sites reaping their data and ruining their plans.”

Recently, the UCC published a video urging Muslims hackers in the West to join its ranks and fight a war against the kufar (non-believers) and also posted a video aiming a direct threat against a leading online counter extremism organization.