RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/peter-hitchens-selective-outrage-bruce-bawer/

Many decades ago, a British couple named Eric and Yvonne Hitchens had two children, both of whom grew up to be prominent journalists and political commentators with strong contrarian streaks. The older son, Christopher, who died in 2011 at age 62, was a lifelong Trotskyite and atheist; the younger, Peter, now 68, went through a period of youthful leftism and unbelief before moving to the right (although he still calls himself a social democrat) and becoming an Anglo-Catholic. There’s one other important difference between the two brothers, and it goes beyond political orientation: while Christopher was a bon vivant of the first water, famous for his wit and charm, who enjoyed cocktails, liqueurs, and a few bottles of wine over dinner and had a glittering circle of friends from all over the political map, Peter is a notorious curmudgeon, wet blanket, moral scold, and full-time blowhard who, on TV or radio or podcasts, seems incapable of making a point succinctly. Also, he has an upper-crust accent that makes Jacob Rees-Mogg sound like Ernest Borgnine in Marty – an accent that, fairly or not, makes him comes off as an unbearable snob. (In fact, his English sometimes ascends to glorious heights of aristocratic mumbling that many a mere American may, at times, struggle to make sense of.)

But let’s come to the point. In recent weeks, Peter Hitchens has been by far the most high-profile critic of the measures instituted in Britain to limit the spread of the coronavirus. In a March 21 column for the Sunday Mail, he asked: “How long before we need passes to go out in the streets, as in any other banana republic?” He accused his government of assuming “grotesque, bullying powers” and of employing “the crudest weapons of despotism,” and charged that his fellow Brits “seem to despise our ancient hard-bought freedom and actually want to rush into the warm, firm arms of Big Brother.” The following Sunday, March 28, he returned to the same topic with equal passion and hyperbole: “As I watched the Prime Minister order mass house arrest on Monday night, I felt revulsion, anger and grief – as anyone brought up when this was a free and well-governed country would.” Calling Britain under lockdown a “Stasi society,” Hitchens said that he wondered “whether there might also be restrictions on what can be said and published.” Humberside police, he noted with horror, were “already advertising a ‘portal’ for citizens to inform on their neighbours for breaking the ‘social distancing’ rules.” On the third Sunday, April 5, he was back with more of the same. 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/indonesia-reports-biggest-jump-in-covid-19-deaths-as-malaysia-trend-improves_3306402.html#

JAKARTA—Indonesia reported its biggest daily jump in COVID-19 deaths on Thursday, April 9, bringing the total confirmed number to 280 in the world’s fourth most populous country, the highest death toll in Asia outside China where the virus first emerged.

Indonesia confirmed 40 more deaths from the “CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus.” Its death toll accounts for nearly half of the more than 590 across Southeast Asia. More than 16,500 cases have been reported across the region.

Indonesian health ministry official Achmad Yurianto said the country had registered 337 new infections, also a new daily high, taking the total to 3,293.

Health experts say Indonesia faces a surge in cases after a slow government response masked the scale of the outbreak in Southeast Asia’s biggest country.

Indonesia has brought in “large-scale social restrictions.” Still, President Joko Widodo has resisted bringing in the type of tough lockdowns imposed by neighbors and only moved to allow areas like Jakarta, where there has been a spike in cases, more powers to tackle the crisis.

Researchers at the University of Indonesia have predicted there could be 140,000 deaths and 1.5 million cases by May without more stringent curbs on movement and gathering.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/japan-to-pay-companies-to-move-production-out-of-china/?utm_source=

Japan will devote more than $2.2 billion of its coronavirus economic stimulus package to incentivize its manufacturers to move their production out of China as relations fray between the neighboring countries in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The record stimulus plan provides $2 billion for manufacturers to transfer production to Japan and over $216 million to help companies move production to other countries. Imports from China, Japan’s biggest trading partner, were down by nearly 50 percent in February as facilities in China closed while the coronavirus ripped through the country.

A state visit to Japan by Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month — the first such visit in about a decade — was postponed indefinitely last month amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“We are doing our best to resume economic development,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday of Japan’s decision during a press conference in Beijing.“In this process, we hope other countries will act like China and take proper measures to ensure the world economy will be impacted as little as possible and to ensure that supply chains are impacted as little as possible.”

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/uns-irrelevance-in-corona-crisis-invites/91088/

“If there were no United Nations we’d have to invent one” is an overused Turtle Bay cliche worth examining now, as the UN is MIA in the face of the worst global crisis since its founding 75 years ago.

As a pandemic threatens the globe with loss of life on a biblical scale and economic collapse, a behemoth that fancies itself as “the world body” is nowhere to be seen.

Start with the Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who immediately sprang to “action,” vaingloriously calling for a global ceasefire to enable the world to focus on the pandemic. No major combatant heeded his call. So, next, he asked member states to fund a $2 billion UN-based initiative for a global humanitarian response. That fund is yet to materialize.

The Security Council, the UN’s most prestigious body charged with ensuring global peace and security, is also yet to respond. It failed to unite behind Mr. Guterres’ global ceasefire and couldn’t even muster a generic statement on the pandemic: China opposes any reference to the origin of an outbreak that America insists calling the “Wuhan virus.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/who-is-who-director-tedros-adhanom-ghebreyesus/

As calls mount demanding the Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) resign, one might be forgiven for asking: Who is the head of the WHO? Where did Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus come from, and what qualifies him to lead the WHO?

As WHO continues to respond to the global coronavirus pandemic that originated in Wuhan, China, the agency has faced increased criticism for its coddling of the communist Xi Xinpeng regime. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has had particularly harsh criticism for WHO:

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also joined the chorus, retweeting President Trump’s speculation that the U.S. should reexamine its funding of the WHO:

Many have questioned why the WHO has repeatedly praised China’s response to the pandemic it caused. The director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has come under increased scrutiny not only for his questionable response to the pandemic itself, but also for his background, which could go a long way toward explaining why he seems so sympathetic to communist China.

Summary

Based on documents in the Iran Nuclear Archive, seized by Israel in early 2018, Iran’s Amad Plan created the Shahid Mahallati Uranium Metals Workshop near Tehran to research and develop uranium metallurgy related to building nuclear weapons. Figure 1 shows this site as it looked in 2002 and 2003, when an existing workshop was renovated and brought into operation. The facility was intended as a pilot plant, aimed at developing and making uranium components for nuclear weapons, in particular components from weapon-grade uranium, the key nuclear explosive material in Iranian nuclear weapon cores. The site was meant to be temporary, until the production-scale Shahid Boroujerdi facility at Parchin was completed.1 However, the Shahid Mahallati facility was capable of making the first cores of weapon-grade uranium, in case Shahid Boroujerdi was unfinished when weapon-grade uranium would have had become available.

The sidebar shows the Amad Plan’s pathway to nuclear weapons, based on information in the Nuclear Archive. Highlighted is the role of Shahid Mahallati in that process of making nuclear weapons.

The Amad Plan was downsized in late 2003 before this plant processed any weapon-grade uranium, although it did process a considerable amount of a non-uranium surrogate material into weapon components. The use of a surrogate material allowed Iran’s nuclear weapons program to learn and practice the fabrication of key nuclear weapon components.

Analysis of commercial satellite imagery confirms the location of the Shahid Mahallati site based on comparison with exterior ground photos, and a chronology of the site’s status is included in this report. The key building of the site, the uranium metals workshop, was apparently gutted and abandoned between late 2010 and early 2011. This action may have been triggered by the Western discovery and exposure in late 2009 of the secret, deeply buried Fordow enrichment plant, formerly called the Al Ghadir project under the Amad Plan (see sidebar).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15857/poland-hungary-czech-republic-sovereignty

The ruling effectively removes the sovereignty of EU member states to make their own decisions regarding the keeping of public law, order and national security in the case of EU migration policies, if those decisions conflict with EU obligations.

In addition, the ruling of the court goes against evidence that migration flows into Europe do indeed constitute a real security danger that has cost European lives.

How national authorities are supposed to distinguish between actual “war refugees” and terrorists impersonating war refugees is not suggested by the Court, which appears curiously uninterested in dealing with the reality of migration.

The Court’s ruling does not only contradict facts and common sense. It sends the distinct signal to foreign regimes, such as that of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that sending migrants to the continent for whatever purpose, even political blackmail, will be successful, because European institutions, such as the EU Court of Justice, will do their utmost to ensure that even the most rebellious EU member states, such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, will be forced to receive them.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic broke EU law when they refused to take in migrants under the European Union’s September 2015 relocation agreement. During the 2015 migrant crisis, EU leaders agreed to relocate 160,000 migrants and refugees EU-wide, assigning each EU member state a fixed quota from the camps in Italy and Greece, where migrants and refugees were arriving in record numbers. However, the Czech Republic accepted only 12 of the 2,000 refugees assigned it, while Hungary and Poland took in none.

In 2017, the EU took Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) over that refusal to take migrants. On April 2, 2020, the CJEU ruled against the three countries. The ruling followed the October 2019 recommendation by the Court’s Advocate General, legal advisor to the Court, which said that EU law must be followed and that the EU’s principle of solidarity “necessarily sometimes implies accepting burden-sharing”.

In its judgment, the Court dismissed the three countries’ argument that they were entitled to refuse the relocation scheme based on concerns for the maintenance of law and order and the safeguarding of internal security. The Court agreed that those concerns constituted legitimate reasons to derogate from obligations of EU law[1]. However, the Court ruled that EU member states refusing to take in migrants under the relocation scheme could only legitimately do so if they proved, “following a case-by-case investigation, on consistent, objective and specific evidence that provides grounds for suspecting that the applicant in question represents an actual or potential danger”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15867/china-russia-relations

Russia, nevertheless, has had to pay for the Chinese support. Virtually every analysis of the relationship concedes that China is the rider and Russia the horse, to use Bismarck’s metaphor for alliances.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that, “the main struggle, which is now underway, is that for global leadership and we are not going to contest China on this.”

Consequently, Russia’s greatest gain is China’ support — both material and otherwise — for Russia’s economic and military probes against the U.S. and its allies. In this manner, Russian hopes to gain Western acceptance of Russia as a great global power and to have it negotiate with Russia as an equal.

However, the coronavirus crisis ends, one can expect that Russia, with China’s support, will continue to behave as aggressively as it can against the U.S. its allies, its values, and its interests. It will be doing so not only for its own benefit but for China’s benefit.

To confront that threat we need to see this alliance between Russia and China for what it is—a unique but so far durable — alliance that will continue into the foreseeable future seriously to threaten the United States, the Free World and the West.

The Trump Administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy predicted an approaching power rivalry. A key finding of the report was that China was America’s greatest adversary with Russia right behind it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/the-twin-contagions-facing-latin-america/

Central and South America must contend not with just coronavirus, but also with the resurgent temptations of socialism and Communism.

Latin America is facing the simultaneous onslaught of two potent viruses: one biological, the other ideological. Many Latin-American nations lack efficient health-care systems and preventive measures to fight the former: coronavirus. The latter virus, totalitarianism, is not new to the region, but equally menacing.

The economic consequences of the worldwide economic stoppage will be especially harmful to a region that depends, in many cases, on tourism, services, and primary-product exports.  Nevertheless, the region can learn from democracies with a relatively low death rate to date from coronavirus: In Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan, the unity between the public and private sectors, clear and transparent information, social distancing, and other measures adopted by the populations and enforced by the government have so far prevented widespread deaths from the virus.

Latin American democracies concurrently face the resurgence of a familiar, yet lethal, virus.  Across the region, the ideological disease of collectivist totalitarianism still infects the unprepared or those looking for simple solutions. With the regional epicenter of the ideological contagion in Cuba, the influence of totalitarian tendencies is felt throughout the region.

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2020/04/08/venezuelas-navy-battles-a-cruise-ship-and-loses

The sailors had guns, but the unarmed pleasure boat had a thick hull

IT WAS, ON the face of it, a mismatched contest. The ANBV Naiguatá, a Venezuelan patrol vessel, was armed with a 76mm naval gun, a German-built anti-aircraft system that sprays a cloud of tungsten bullets and a pair of deck-mounted machine guns, among other weaponry. The RCGS Resolute, a Portuguese-flagged cruise ship with an 80-seat theatre, had the top speed of an oil tanker. But in the early hours of March 30th it was Venezuela’s Bolivarian navy whose ship ended up on the seabed—in the first decisive naval skirmish in the Caribbean for 75 years.

The Resolute, en route to Curaçao, a Dutch island in the Caribbean, had been drifting for a day in international waters near La Tortuga, a Venezuelan island, as it tinkered with its starboard engine. At midnight it was approached by the Naiguatá and ordered to come into port. As the Resolute contacted its head office for instructions, the Naiguatá opened fire—a video released by the Venezuelan navy shows a sailor firing an AK-47 in the howling wind and darkness with Rambo-like enthusiasm—and rammed the cruise ship, according to its parent company.

Unfortunately for the Naiguatá, the Resolute’s placid appearance belies the fact that its strengthened hull, built for polar cruising, can smash through metre-thick ice—and, it turns out, puny patrol boats. The Resolute brushed off the collision with “minor damages”, whereas the Naiguatá rapidly took on water and sank, leaving 44 sheepish sailors to be rescued.