ISRAELI DEVICE LETS PARALIZED PEOPLE WALK AGAIN!
WATCH: FDA Approves Israeli Device that Lets Paralyzed People Walk Again! | United with Israel
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-fda-approves-israeli-device-that-lets-paralyzed-people-walk-again/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/the-lessons-of-the-mueller-probe/
Our government must make transparent, good-faith efforts to police itself, or risk losing legitimacy in the public’s eyes.
Editor’s Note: The following is the written testimony submitted by Mr. McCarthy in connection with a hearing earlier today before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on the Mueller Report (specifically, the first volume of the report, which addresses Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, as to which Special Counsel Mueller found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin). The hearing was broadcast on C-SPAN, here.
Chairman Schiff, Ranking Member Nunes, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to this morning’s hearing.
I served as a federal prosecutor for nearly 20 years, almost all at the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, from which I retired in 2003 as the chief assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Southern District’s satellite office in White Plains. I’ve also done a short stint working on an independent-counsel probe, and for several months in 2004, I was a consultant to the deputy secretary of defense while the Pentagon was grappling with various legal issues after the onset of post-9/11 military operations. During my years as a prosecutor, I was honored to receive the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award in 1988 and the Attorney General’s Exceptional Service Award in 1996 for my work on international-organized-crime and international-terrorism cases.
Since leaving government service, I have been a writer and commentator. I am appearing this morning in my personal capacity as a former government official who cares deeply about our national security and the rule of law.
For most of my first several years as a prosecutor, my work focused on international organized crime. After the World Trade Center was bombed on February 26, 1993, I spent much of the last decade of my tenure working on national-security investigations. I am proud to have led the successful prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven other jihadists for conspiring to wage a war of urban terrorism against the United States, which included the Trade Center attack, a plot to bomb New York City landmarks, and other plots to carry out political assassinations and terrorist strikes against civilian populations. In that effort, I was privileged to work alongside a superb team of federal prosecutors, support staff, and investigators assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/12/bidens_balancing_act_
In poker, it’s known as a “tell.” It’s an inadvertent signal — perhaps rapid blinking or a raised eyebrow — that tells other players you have a good hand or bad one. Last week, when Joe Biden rolled out his new policy positions, he virtually shouted one out in the high-stakes game of presidential campaigning.
Biden’s first tell came on the issue of abortion; a second, lesser one came on environmental policy. Predictably, he moved to the left on both. That tells us something about Biden, the primary process, and the 21st century Democratic Party.
First, it says that Biden expects hard slogging to win the nomination. Publicly, the former vice president is positioning himself as the inevitable nominee, the obvious successor to Barack Obama. The key words are “obvious” and “inevitable.” The national polls, like those in Iowa, where he campaigned Tuesday, paint a different picture. They show Biden ahead, but hardly inevitable. About one-quarter of Iowa Democrats currently favor Biden, compared to roughly 15% each for three more progressive candidates: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg. That’s a strong lead, but the Iowa battle is just getting started, and it’s still wide open. The same is true in New Hampshire, the site of the first real primary.
To win in either place, Biden must stay abreast of the party’s leftward lurch. That’s what his “tell” is all about. But it’s a slow, awkward dance, weighed down by his years of moderate (and quite sensible) policy positions — all on video, all recorded in his Senate votes. His new policies won’t win over the party’s most ardent feminist and environmentalist factions, but he does hope to blunt their opposition and prevent them from coalescing around an alternative candidate.
https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-sky-high-stakes-in-hong-kong/
In Hong Kong’s huge protest over a proposed law that would allow extradition from the territory to mainland China, there is far more at stake than “confidence” in the integrity of Hong Kong’s legal system, or the health of Hong Kong’s economy — important though those both are. The real showdown going on in Hong Kong has long been between despotism and democracy, between tyranny and the Free World. And whether we, the free people of America, and our allies, choose to think of it this way or not, the reality is that the showdown now taking place in Hong Kong will shape our future as well.
For two reasons, the people of Hong Kong — in their efforts to stop this ruinous extradition law — deserve the strongest support we can muster. One reason is quite simply that it is the right thing to do, though in international politics that is often a backseat priority. The other reason– perhaps more compelling to those inclined to think of Hong Kong as a faraway foreign place and none of our business — is that it is a high-risk precedent for the Free World to abandon its own. It invites aggression by the likes of China (and Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc.) against us and our allies. Which is what it will boil down to, if the U.S., the U.K. and other democratic powers do not find some way to buttress the demands of Hong Kong’s demonstrators. It is vital that Washington persuade Beijing and its satrap in Hong Kong, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, that it would be wise to scrap this proposed law, and moronic –or at least astoundingly expensive — to push it through.
Please, make no mistake. Officially Hong Kong these days may be a “Special Autonomous Region” of the “People’s Republic” of China, destined under treaty to fall entirely under Beijing’s jackboot in 2047. But in spirit, in character, in history, in the inheritance of British rule of law, and for another full 28 years according to China’s promise of “One Country, Two Systems,” Hong Kong is one of our own, still part of the Free World. If we do not stand up for its people, China’s rulers will all too likely read that abandonment as one more sign of Western weakness, one more invitation to commit the next act of aggression.
There has been substantial pushback across the Israeli and American Jewish media (including in Haaretz) against the New York Times in the last two days, for what has been called the “disgraceful” misrepresentation of U.S. Ambassador David Friedman’s remarks in an interview with New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger.
Both Halbfinger and his editors and headline writers at the Times are being criticized for badly misleading readers in a piece of “fake news” that has, in turn, been picked up and copied from the Times in hundreds of other publications across the world.
Halbfinger’s headline and article began: “Israel has a right to annex at least some, but ‘unlikely all,’ of the West Bank, the United States ambassador, David M. Friedman, said in an interview, opening the door to American acceptance of what would be an enormously provocative act.”
Yes, as is pointed out in the articles attached below from Haaretz and other publications, Friedman never said the word “annexation.” Nor did he say anything different from long-standing international policy to try and solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As the articles below point out, what Friedman said was consistent with the policy of US presidents dating back to Lyndon Johnson in 1967. It is consistent with the policy of the Soviet Union/Russia and much of the rest of the world which supported the key UN 1967 Security Council Resolution 242 that envisaged border adjustments in order to bring about lasting peace and security. It is consistent with the words of the president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
It is consistent with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ acknowledgement that land swaps will be necessary in any final agreement and that Israel has the right to keep Jerusalem’s Western Wall and other parts of terroritory beyond the 1948 armistice lines.
No serious observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could imagine sustainable peace existing along the exact 1948 armistice lines. Hence resolution 242.
The leading left-wing Israeli paper Haaretz has now acknowledged that it also misrepresented the US’s ambassador’s remarks (after it first rushed to follow the New York Times’s lead). Will the New York Times have the integrity also to do so?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-marx-brother-11560363050
Having parted ways with some non-Marxists who managed to infiltrate his 2016 presidential campaign, Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders will attempt to clarify this afternoon that he is not like other candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in 2020. Edward-Isaac Dovere notes in the Atlantic that Mr. Sanders will be speaking in Washington this afternoon on “How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat Oligarchy and Authoritarianism.” Mr. Dovere reports that the speech topic is sparking laughter among Democratic rivals as Mr. Sanders “leans into socialism.” Adds Mr. Dovere:
Aides say the D.C. setting is an attempt to convey his seriousness on the subject. They want this to be a major signpost in his 2020 campaign, an opportunity for Sanders to lay out why he’s running with an argument no one else can or would make as forcefully, and to dare the rest of the field to oppose him. They believe this speech has the potential to re-center the dynamics of the race around him, and that the other candidates will regret any of their laughter and questioning…
Many readers may find it laughable that Mr. Sanders would attempt to position himself even further to the left than he did in 2016. But as a Journal editorial noted in April, there’s nothing funny about the extreme commentary from people who are now members of the Sanders 2020 operation. For example, current Sanders speechwriter David Sirota once wrote an op-ed titled “Hugo Chávez’s Economic Miracle”. And Mr. Sirota isn’t the only Sandernista who has lauded the Chavistas. Assessing the current Sanders team, the Journal observed:
Voters need to understand that they don’t merely admire Venezuela. By their own words, they want America to emulate it.
US Ambassador David Friedman’s June 8 interview in the NY Times was inconsistent with the worldview of the State Department establishment, but quite consistent with Middle East reality and US national security interests.
Ambassador Friedman stated: “The absolute last thing the world needs is a failed Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan…. Israel retaining security control in the West Bank should not be an impediment…. Certainly, Israel is entitled to retain some portion of it [the West Bank]…. I think Israel has the right to retain some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank….”
While the State Department establishment (except for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton) rejects Friedman’s assessments, its own track record in the Middle East has been systematically flawed. For example:
*During 1947-48, the State Department opposed the reestablishment of the Jewish State, contending that it would be a pro-Soviet entity, militarily overrun by the Arabs, while undermining US ties with the Arabs. In 2019, Israel is the most effective, unconditional ally of the US, whose ties with all pro-US Arab countries are unprecedented in scope and expanding.
*In the 1950s, the State Department establishment considered the radical, pro-Soviet President Nasser of Egypt – who attempted to aggressively topple every pro-US Arab regime – a potential ally of the US.
