RUTHFULLY YOURS

John Kerry returns from his latest Russian visit bearing two baskets of potatoes and a t-shirt.

The t-shirt, given to him by Foreign Minister Lavrov, might as well say, “I wasted my time in Russia and all I got was this shirt.”

It’s a diplomatic success only in relation to Kerry’s previous humiliations such as the time that Russia’s adeptly slimy foreign minister kept him waiting for a week before returning his call while the State Department spokeswoman announced to the world that [3] Kerry was “ready to talk whenever Foreign Minister Lavrov can find the time.”

The Putin regime enjoys humiliating the United States, but even it seems to have tired of degrading Kerry who ruins their fun by failing to realize what is going on. Instead Kerry has become a nonentity; a forgotten messenger boy. It’s a fitting purgatory for the formerly tireless leftist activist in the Senate.

For the seventh year in a row, President Obama has proposed defunding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a school-choice program that allows inner-city students in the nation’s capital to escape failing and often dangerous public schools.

As Stephen Moore detailed recently in the Wall Street Journal, the Opportunity Scholarship Program serves nearly 5,000 students, 95 percent of whom are African-American. It funds private-school tuition for poor families, so that their children can attend schools they would otherwise not be able to afford. It accounts for a minuscule 0.0005 percent of the federal budget.

Havana — I’ve visited more than my fair share of dictatorships, but Cuba is the only one where travelers at the airport must pass through a metal detector upon entering, in addition to leaving, the country. Immediately after clearing customs at José Marti International Airport, visitors line up for a security check. Anyone found carrying contraband — counterrevolutionary books, say, or a spare laptop that might be given to a Cuban citizen — could find himself susceptible to deportation.

Contrary to popular conception, traveling to Cuba as an American was not difficult before President Barack Obama’s announcement last December of “the most significant changes in our policy in more than 50 years.” All anyone had to do was transit through a third country and not disclose his visit to Cuba upon reentering through U.S. customs. It was the aura of the embargo that dissuaded Americans. Moreover, there have long been myriad legal exceptions for Americans to travel to Cuba: They merely had to obtain a license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under one of twelve broad, rather vague, permitted categories, such as “educational” and “research.” “Tourism” as such was and remains prohibited. But since January, travelers to Cuba need not obtain any OFAC license at all. This essentially means that any American who wants to venture to Cuba, including those who plan to do nothing but sit on the beach all day and dance salsa all night, are now free to do so.

A document entered into court evidence by Justice Department prosecutors in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history, and later cited affirmatively by the federal judge in the case and cleared by the federal appeals court, would seem an unlikely target for a former journalist to try to spin a conspiratorial tale around, namely slandering others of hawking a racist/”Islamphobic” “Protocols of the Elders of Islam.”

And yet that is what David K. Shipler, a former New York Times reporter and winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, is now trying to do.

Clearly upset that so-called “Islamophobes” have been successful using the document – again, discovered by the FBI, submitted into the evidence by federal prosecutors and approved as genuine by the federal court – to expose the Muslim Brotherhood roots of some of America’s largest Islamic organizations, Shipler wields his “Islamophobia” harpoon like Ahab at his “anti-Islam industry” Moby Dick.

He makes his dubious case in a new book out this week, entitled “Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword” (Alfred A. Knopf), which includes an entire chapter on the subject, and summarizes it in an article published on Tuesday in The New Yorker, “Pamela Geller and the Anti-Islam Movement.” The book received a very lukewarm review in the New York Times this past Sunday.

As Westerners come under fire for drawing cartoons of Muhammad, Bangladeshi bloggers are being killed with hatchets for professing disbelief in the Islamic prophet or simply promoting a secular society.

And as the West is focused on locating ISIS operatives and cells, al-Qaeda’s new chapter in southeast Asia is conducting the assassinations at an alarming rate — three victims in less than three months.

Ananta Bijoy Das, a science writer whose numerous books included one on evolution, was hacked to death by four men wielding machetes and cleavers Tuesday as he went to work in the city of Sylhet.

Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh warned in a May 5 tweet that included photos of Bangladeshi secularist bloggers, “We DON’T forget and InshaAllah We will NOT forget others. Next target is Loading… Stay tuned !!”

The much-damned Dane doesn’t quibble with the contention that humans are raising global temperatures, just that the money spent in name of repairing the atmosphere might be better spent. That heresy has seen him banished from UWA — and the university’s claim to being a serious institution with it
What a bloody disgrace the academics and students at the University of Western Australia have shown themselves to be. Their baseless and unreasoned attack on Bjorn Lomborg and the proposed government-funded centre on climate economics he was to have run has tainted their integrity forever. Lomborg’s only sin is that he rejects the orthodox view on climate-change urgency and that he has proven virtually all mitigation action to date is ‘feel good’ rather than ‘do good’.

Lomborg has never denied global warming or humans’ contribution to this trend or the need for developing alternative energy. What he objects to is wasteful priority-setting which allows billions of dollars to be poured into emission-reduction schemes that will have no significant effect on temperature reduction.

Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus started by asking only one question: ‘Which of the alternative investments available will result in the greatest well-being of humankind?’ After establishing a large panel of Nobel Prize winners for advice, they concluded that spending on food production, water supplies and disease control would produce benefits several orders of magnitude greater than investment in emissions reduction, even in the long term.

Kerry Is So Very Nice to Putin

Easing sanctions if Russia settles for what it’s already grabbed.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned Monday that the Kremlin continues to provide heavy arms and training to its proxy militias in eastern Ukraine—a “blatant violation,” he says, of the Minsk deal Russia signed in February to end the fighting. NATO says Russia is also building forces on both sides of its international border with Ukraine. Civilians in the port of Mariupol, a few miles from the front lines, are bracing for an attack and posting signs to the nearest bomb shelter.

So what better time for John Kerry to attempt to reconcile with Vladimir Putin? The Secretary of State arrived Tuesday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where he met first with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then was granted an audience with the Russian President.

“The Kremlin had let Washington squirm about whether Mr. Kerry would be well-received, only confirming that Mr. Putin would meet with him about an hour before his arrival,” the Journal reported Tuesday, adding that “Mr. Putin was likely pleased by Mr. Kerry’s effort at obeisance” after the secretary paid homage to Russian sacrifices in World War II.

Not everyone gets an hour-long audience with the pope, as Raúl Castro did this past Sunday at the Vatican. But Raúl Castro isn’t everyone. Raúl is the president of Cuba and the heir to his brother’s half-century-old Communist dictatorship. And right now, Raúl is hot.

Raúl Castro is taking meetings with everyone from President Barack Obama in Panama last month to Pope Francis in Rome last weekend. Then he returned to Havana for a meeting with President François Hollande of France, who flew in to see him and Fidel. How good can it get?

Mr. Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (Cambridge Press, 2001) and “Cool It” (Knopf, 2007).

I believe in global warming but also in responsible policies to address it. That can get you in trouble.
Opponents of free debate are celebrating. Last week, under pressure from some climate-change activists, the University of Western Australia canceled its contract to host a planned research center, Australia Consensus, intended to apply economic cost-benefit analysis to development projects—giving policy makers a tool to ensure their aid budgets are spent wisely.

The new center in Perth was to be a collaboration with a think tank I run, Copenhagen Consensus, which for a decade has conducted similar research. Working with more than 100 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, we have produced research that measures the social and economic benefits of a wide range of policies, such as fighting malaria, reducing malnutrition, cutting air pollution, improving education and tackling climate change.

Animal Farm has arisen in Iran. Orwell would be proud.

In the cocooned-safety of Tehran, Persia, the black-turbaned Shiite Wizard-of-Oz Ayatollah Khamenei tweets about his love of children learning to read.

Meanwhile, in the pursuit of his ongoing attempts to effect a Persian genocide of the Jewish and Arab peoples, Khamenei inflames, instigates, and arms any Muslim who wants to kill any Jew, Christian, or adherent of any other sectarian form of Islam. All Arab Islamic extremists, whether they be Shiite, Sunni, Sufi are welcome to Khamenei’s weapons and military advice, although Shiites are preferred.