RUTHFULLY YOURS

Attempting to upstage President Trump as he travels in Europe, President Obama made an appearance in Germany at the Brandenberg Gate for a rock star welcome. He also appeared with Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a bid to boost her campaign.

Seeking to help Merkel get re-elected (a woman he spied on to much brouhaha at the time, but this is politics), it’s clear that Obama’s new game out of office is to have a cadre of like-minded world leaders to obstruct President Trump as he seeks to work with Europe. (So much for returning to his community organizer roots and helping the black youth or watching Sasha graduate). Obama laid out and advocated the full Eurotrashian platform parade of leftist tax-spend-appease-and-open the borders positions at his events, and the German crowds went wild, quite likely in a way they never would with Merkel alone. Not having had to live with the effects of Obama’s low-growth economy, his corruption of the agencies, or the nightmare of Obamacare up close and personal, the man was easy to cheer.

‘We can’t isolate ourselves. We can’t hide behind a wall,’ he said, to cheers from the audience.

Merkel, who has taken political heat for her open door policy on refugees, including from Trump who called it a ‘catastrophic mistake,’ got reassurance from Obama.

‘In the eyes of God, a child on the other side of the border is no less worthy of love and compassion than my own child,’ Obama said. ‘You can’t distinguish between them in terms of their worth or inherent dignity.’

Here’s the irony of all that scolding about walls, and Obama’s sudden newfound interest in God as a political ally:

Police helicopters patrolled the skies and snipers with balaclavas watched the scene from nearby rooftops.

Get that? Cause. Effect. Obama was surrounded by de facto SWAT teams. Looking for terrorists, rioters and assassins. All of these elements are linked to Germany’s open door on immigration and its failure to assimilate immigrants so that even their offspring have become human bombs, desperate to go from zero to hero as they listen to radical imams, get drunk on Internet chat boards, and join Islamist terrorist groups. The rabid left, of course, helps out with the riots.

Instead of a world of safety for everyone which is the democratic effect of walls keeping out Islamic terrorists, what’s seen here, with the balaclava crowd and the highly trained rooftop snipers keeping guard, is the logical result of Obama’s and Merkel’ open door policy. Walls for elites, zero walls for people. And don’t think this isn’t just what Obama wants. In Obama’s case, he’s knowingly let in MS-13 members to wreak havoc on Long Island and in the skeevier parts of Los Angeles County. Let the little people take the murders. The elites get SWAT team cordons. Who knows how many ISIS members have been let in by Obama’s policy as well? We know Merkel has let them in.

The SWAT teams are evidence of Obama’s howlings about walls: a new normal of constant terrorist vigilance, of a casual willingness to accept losses among the citizenry, even as world leaders merit the finest in protective cordons. The elites get security cordons. The people have to sit there and take it, as leaders like Merkel and Obama virtue-signal about the superiority of having no walls, and the wickedness of building any. They don’t care about miscreants and killers getting in. There are too many political goodies in them. They want votes, Social Security dollars and bureaucrat employment opportunities, particularly in the social welfare sector. Open walls make all that possible.

A suicide bomber who killed 22 people at a Manchester pop concert likely had the help of a terror network, U.K. authorities said, and his brother confessed to a Libyan militia that the two of them belonged to Islamic State.

The allegations came as a portrait emerged of how Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old perpetrator of Britain’s deadliest attack since 2005, grew up straddling middle-class Britain and the tumult of Libya, playing street soccer as a schoolboy before heading off as a teenager to fight alongside his father in their homeland.

Once he returned to Manchester, he nursed a strong sense of anger. Twice, for different reasons, he spoke of wanting revenge. “Whether he got that is between him and God,” his sister, Jomana, said.

The suspected bomber’s brother, Hashem Abedi, is in the custody of Radaa, one of several large militias responsible for security in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. Ahmed Dagdoug, a militia spokesman, said Hashem Abedi confessed that he was in the U.K. during preparations for Monday’s attack and aware of the plans.

Radaa said the younger Abedi was arrested late Tuesday in the city as he picked up a wire transfer of 4,500 Libyan dinar, or about $3,260, sent by his late brother, Salman.

It was impossible to independently confirm Radaa’s claim or to ascertain how such a confession may have been obtained. Libyan militias routinely resort to harsh tactics to extract information from terrorism suspects.

The group’s spokesman, Mr. Dagdoug, said it was also holding Abedi’s father, Ramadan Abedi, to aid in the probe of the attack, which killed 22 people outside a concert by American singer Ariana Grande.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the Libyan group was in contact with British investigators, who on Tuesday in Manchester arrested a man one Western official identified as 23-year-old Ismail Abedi, another brother of the suspect.

British intelligence agencies and police made raids on more properties on Wednesday and are piecing together how Salman Abedi came to use a sophisticated bomb to carry out Monday’s attack.

“I think it’s very clear that this is a network that we are investigating,” said Ian Hopkins, chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police. “There’s extensive investigations going on and activity taking place across Greater Manchester as we speak.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Pictures of dictator Kim Jong Un applauding as another North Korean missile ascends into the sky have become routine. But the Hermit Kingdom’s two most recent launches deserve special attention because they show Pyongyang nearing its goal of deploying a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could destroy American cities.

On May 14 the North launched a new intermediate-range missile it calls the Hwasong-12. The missile traveled fewer than 500 miles, but that’s because it was fired at a very steep angle to avoid flying over neighboring countries. If launched at the optimum angle, it could have a range of 2,800 miles, which means it threatens the U.S. island of Guam. That’s the farthest of North Korea’s missiles so far, not counting the rockets it used to launch satellites.

The Hwasong appears to use a new high-performance engine tested in March that it developed from scratch instead of adapting a Russian or Chinese design. The missile appears to be a single-stage, liquid-fueled rocket that could become the first stage of a new ICBM. That would allow the North to abandon the derivative designs it previously cobbled together to achieve the thrust for longer ranges. In its current form the Hwasong is also road mobile, making it more difficult to find and destroy. The North Koreans further claim the Hwasong can carry a “large, heavy nuclear warhead.”

On Sunday the North successfully tested another relatively new missile, the Pukguksong-2. While its range is shorter at about 1,000 miles, it is solid-fueled and can be moved using a domestically produced transporter, both of which improve survivability.

Based on a submarine-launched missile that may be a modified Chinese design, the Pukguksong’s first test in February was also successful. That suggests the missile will prove reliable, and North Korean media are reporting that Kim has ordered mass production.

The North also took advantage of the steep trajectory of both missiles to work on one of the last remaining obstacles to ICBM deployment—a re-entry vehicle capable of withstanding the heat and vibration of the fall through the atmosphere. The North Koreans say the Hwasong “verified the homing feature of the warhead under the worst re-entry situation,” and that may be more than a boast. The U.S. and South Korea have confirmed that the test warhead survived and transmitted data.

The North still has to overcome obstacles to targeting the U.S., not least designing an ICBM re-entry vehicle. While the Kim regime is believed to have partially miniaturized an atomic weapon, it hasn’t tested a hydrogen bomb. But that is little comfort. On Tuesday when Senators asked Lt. Gen. Vince Stewart, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, how long North Korea needs before it can deploy an ICBM, he answered that it “is on a pathway where this capability is inevitable.”

This month’s tests mean advances in Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs are coming much faster than analysts thought possible. If the U.S. and its allies don’t take steps to stop it now, the world will soon wake up to a nuclear North Korea far more dangerous and disruptive than the one we have today.