RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14356/trump-north-korea-policy

China is rarely called to task in Washington by US leaders for its role in proliferating nuclear-weapons programs in some of the world’s most notorious rogue states. Pressure is rarely placed on Beijing even by US arms-control groups.

The Chinese government made a deliberate choice in 1982 — in violation of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 — to disperse nuclear-weapons technology to its allies in the Third World. Through the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network in Pakistan, China was able to help produce nuclear weapons in Pakistan and North Korea, and start nuclear programs of varying significance in Iran, Libya and Iraq, and later in Syria.

The Trump administration is doing more than its predecessors to meet the challenges and threats posed by North Korea, and therefore should be encouraged to continue the policy of employing a mixture of tough measures and diplomacy.

At a recent event on Capitol Hill — hosted by the Washington-based Mitchell Institute — the former China Country Director at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Joe Bosco, defended U.S. President Donald Trump’s North Korea policy against critics who were accusing the White House either of leaning too far in the direction of diplomacy with Pyongyang, or too bent on imposing maximum economic and military pressure on it.

The criticism, according to Bosco, stems from two false narratives — emanating from Pyongyang and Beijing — which have been governing the debate.

The first is that North Korea is justified in having nuclear weapons, due to America’s long-standing “hostile policy” towards the regime in Pyongyang. The second is that China has had virtually no role in the establishment of North Korea’s nuclear program — and that Beijing seeks “denuclearization” and “stability” on the Korean peninsula.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/massive-crowds-take-to-streets-in-last-fight-for-hong-kong-11560075915?mod=trending_now_1

HONG KONG—Demonstrators staged the biggest rally challenging China’s authority over the city since Britain ceded control in 1997, marching through streets for hours to protest a proposed law that would let Beijing take people across the border to stand trial in the mainland.

Organizers estimated more than a million people—almost one for every seven residents in the city—took to the streets to demand the city’s leaders and their political masters in Beijing shelve the law. Police estimated 240,000 protesters took part at the peak of Sunday’s march.A snaking crowd that included young families, students, professionals and the elderly streamed through the city, reflecting unprecedented and widespread opposition to the latest move by Beijing to bring the former colony to heel. Critics say the proposed law could be abused to target political dissidents and would expose citizens to the mainland’s more opaque legal system, where detainees could be unfairly jailed and abused.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/09/germanys-greens-oust-merkels-christian-democrats-popular-party/

Germany was once a nation of major scientists who won Nobel prizes 107 times. So what has become of their science establishment when junk science “climate change” and its various permutations are more relevant to German voters than economic portents and bad immigration policies which threaten the nation’s culture and sovereignty? rsk

“The environmentalist party’s success has came as concern about climate change, biodiversity and plastic waste surged to the forefront of political debate over the last year.”

Angela Merkel’s successor as leader of Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) party is under growing pressure after polls showed the Green party has forced it into second place in the polls.

Three polls published in three days this week showed the Greens pulling ahead of the CDU, making them Germany’s most popular party for the first time since they were founded.

The last poll, published on Saturday, put the Greens four points ahead of the CDU on 27 percent, marking a historical low for the traditional governing party of German politics.

Germany’s Greens have been enjoying a surge in popularity recently and overtook the Social Democrats, their main left-wing rivals, earlier this year.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/09/hundreds-thousands-protesters-march-hong-kong-against-china/

Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Hong Kong to demonstrate against a controversial extradition law that would allow suspects to be sent to mainland China.

Protesters carrying banners denouncing the law and demanding the resignation of Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s defied thirty degree heat to march two miles to the city’s Legislative Council on Sunday.

Organisers estimated more than a million people attended the march, which flooded the city’s public transport network and led to widespread congestion. Police said the crowd reached 240,000 at its peak.

The proposed law would enable the Beijing government to extradite fugitives in Hong Kong to mainland China. Hong Kong currently limits extraditions to jurisdictions with which it has existing extradition agreements or to others on an individual basis under a law passed before 1997.

China was excluded because of concerns over its record on legal independence and human rights. Ms Lam is billing the law as closing legal ‘“loopholes’’, visible in a recent murder case when a Hong Kong man murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan before fleeing back to his home country.

Her government plans to bring the contentious bill to the full legislature this week, bypassing the committee process in a bid to win approval by the end of the month.  

https://creativedestructionmedia.com/news/asia/2019/06/08/china-is-a-paper-tiger/ 

Last month China declared war on the United States. Strangely, the White House did not respond, the Pentagon did not raise readiness to Defcon 1, and global media did not take much notice. Did the world simply ignore China’s proclamation or were all eyes elsewhere?

A few eyes, however, did notice the production aired on May 25thby the Communist Chinese Party’s video outlet, Watermelon Video. The video quoted articles and editorials in the Global Times, a Chinese government news service, calling for a “people’s war” that targets the U.S. with “precision,” that China must not make any concessions, and adding, “Fortune favors the bold, all imperialists are paper tigers!”

And all the eyes in Hollywood wept when they saw China television ban the broadcasting of every Hollywood production as well as any Chinese-made films containing scenes shot in the United States. As Martha Bayles wrote in The American Interest, “Like most private-sector industries in the West, America’s film studios have long dealt with China in a way that places economic self-interest above all other considerations, from domestic prosperity to human rights to national security.” That slavish devotion to Chinese money now has Hollywood’s accountants burning the midnight oil, mourning the lost profits in the huge Chinese film market.

But Wall Street eyes don’t watch China’s movies. Instead they monitor their lucrative investments in Chinese companies on their stock tracking screens. First they saw Baoshang Bank in Mongolia fail, necessitating a $62 billion cash injection by Beijing. Then they read the MarketWatchreport on Hikvision, China’s giant closed circuit camera manufacturer. With a market cap of $33 billion, the company is a darling of investors like Aberdeen Standard Investmentsand Comgest.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14353/europe-will-not-be-europe

In the United Kingdom, the Brexit Party victory at 31.6% of the vote was a remarkable achievement that showed the persistent willingness of millions of Britons to leave the European Union. The “populist” positions — the defense of national sovereignty and European civilization, refusal of uncontrolled immigration and diktats of Brussels technocrats — have gained ground.

The parties that have ruled Europe for decades obtained weak results, but, with rare exceptions, did not collapse — and will continue to dominate the European Union.

The Greens may gain more influence – along with its consequences. To anyone who read the Greens’ programs, it is evident that they are essentially leftists with an environmental green mask. They support unrestricted immigration and multiculturalism. They are…resolutely hostile to any defense of Western civilization, to free enterprise and free markets. They are often in favor of zero growth. Most of them support an apocalyptic vision of climate change and say that the survival of humanity will be at stake around the corner if Europe does not take drastic measures to “save the planet”. All of them are in favor of authoritarian decisions imposed from Brussels to all of Europe.

A European parliament placed under the influence of the Greens will almost certainly accelerate the slide towards more power given to the unelected members of the European Commission, and a phasing out of nuclear energy and fossil fuels. Policies favorable to still more immigration already are in preparation.

On the evening of May 26, Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini commented on the results of the European elections, “A new Europe is born.” The party he leads, the League, had just won with 34.3% of the vote. Other parties defined in Europe as “populist” also won: in Hungary, the Fidesz-KDNP alliance (Hungarian Civic Alliance and the Christian Democratic People’s Party) received 52.3% of the vote. In Poland, the PiS (Law and Justice) party won 45.4% of the vote. Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) won 34.6% of the vote and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), his ally, was awarded 17.2%, despite a recent scandal that led to the resignation of Heinz-Christian Strache, chairma of the FPO, from his post as Vice-Chancellor of Austria (the Kurtz government fell on May 27). In the United Kingdom, the Brexit Party victory — at 31.6% of the vote — was a remarkable achievement that signaled the persistent willingness of millions of Britons to leave the European Union. There, the “populist” positions — the defense of national sovereignty and European civilization, refusal of uncontrolled immigration and diktats of Brussels technocrats — gained ground.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14352/iran-america-forbidden-fruit

An Iran that is friendly with the US and is inspired by “American values” such as freedom of expression and the rule of law would not long tolerate the despotic and lawless system created by the ayatollah.

Here we have a delicious irony: Khomeinists and their Iranian apologists in the West love the American way of life, but only for themselves and their children. The trick is to deny the mass of Iranians, who have no enmity towards the US, a taste of that forbidden fruit.

Khomeinists must be anti-American to remain in power while they and their children benefit from the best that America offers, including the possibility of eventually settling in California. Their message to America is: I must appear to hate you in order to love you secretly!

The interesting thing here is that many US scholars and policymakers still pursue the dream of helping “moderates” secure unchallenged dominance in Tehran. This is why successive US administrations never pushed beyond the Khomeinist regime’s “threshold of pain”.

“Why do they hate us?” This is a question frequently put to me by Americans when discussing the rabid anti-Americanism professed by the Khomeinist ruling clique in the Islamic Republic.

The puzzlement implied in the question is understandable. For the United States is the only major power to have a decades-long history of close friendly ties with Iran. From the first decades of the 19th century, Iran found itself caught in an “Imperialist” pincer with Tsarist Russia and Great Britain providing its two arms. The Russians invaded Iran three times and snatched large chunks of Iranian territory in Caucasus and Central Asia. The British carved off large chunks of Iranian territory to add to their Indian Empire or to expand the newly created Afghan state they protected.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-says-us-has-reached-deal-with-mexico-on-immigration?utm_source=breaking_\

President Trump said Friday evening the U.S. had reached a deal with Mexico and he “indefinitely suspended” impending tariffs on imports.

Trump said Mexico agreed to implement “strong measures” to decrease migration through Mexico to the United States’ southern border.

“This is being done to greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States,” he said in a tweet.

Those measures included Mexico deploying its national guard to its southern border, according to a joint declaration released by the State Department. The agreement allows the U.S. to “rapidly” return asylum seekers to Mexico, where they will be offered jobs, healthcare, and education while their asylum claims are being processed. The U.S. said it would work to accelerate the processing of asylum claims.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14351/britain-blasphemy-law

The long-running dispute revolves — most recently — around an effort by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, a cross-party formation of around two-dozen MPs in the British Parliament, to institutionalize the definition of Islamophobia in racial rather than religious terms.

The proposed definition has been opposed by many Britons, including British Muslims, who warn that it would effectively shield Islam from scrutiny and valid criticism.

“We have here a clash between two very different ways of viewing a society: broadly individualism and collectivism…. In a collectivist society the aim is for the rulers to determine how individuals should behave … those in power lay down a detailed code and threaten punishment for non-compliance. And they do not welcome criticism as a device for mutual learning and holding power to account.” — David Green, The Spectator.

“We are concerned that allegations of Islamophobia will be, indeed already are being, used to effectively shield Islamic beliefs and even extremists from criticism, and that formalizing this definition will result in it being employed effectively as something of a backdoor blasphemy law.” — Open letter signed by 40 British academics, writers and public officials to Home Secretary Sajid Javid.

Days after the British government rejected its preferred official definition of Islamophobia, the Muslim Council of Britain, the biggest Islamic organization in Britain, called for the ruling Conservative Party to be officially investigated for Islamophobia.

The dispute revolves around an effort by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, a cross-party formation of around two-dozen MPs in the British Parliament, to institutionalize the definition of Islamophobia in racial rather than religious terms.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/chinas_food_supply_imperiled_.html

China’s food supply is being imperiled as new reports warn that up to 50 percent of China’s 440 million pigs are now at risk from African Swine Fever infection.

The South China Morning Post reported that Chairman Chan Kin Yip of the Federation of Hong Kong Agricultural Associations claimed that Chinese mainland pig farmers told him African Swine Fever has spread to 30 percent of mainland pigs, while another Hong Kong pig farmer based in China told Yip the exposure rate is as high as 50 percent.

With $23.8 billion of agricultural imports from the U.S. in 2017, retaliatory tariffs directly aimed at President Trump’s rural voter base was expected to be China’s hammer to bludgeon the U.S. into abandoning its Trade War. Accounting for 17 percent of U.S. agricultural exports, Chinese customers were number one in soybeans; number two in pork and hay; number three in dairy and poultry; number four in beef, and number five in wheat. 

First detected in August 2018, the raging pandemic of highly communicable African Swine Fever has spread to every mainland province and Hong Kong. The virus causes blackened lesions, diarrhea, abortion, respiratory illness, and then death in 7 to 10 days.

With production declines of -35 percent and prices spiking +40 percent, the disease is wreaking havoc on the China’s $128 billion a year pork industry. Although Beijing has encouraged the provinces to provide financial support to large-scale pig farms, the loss of sales and cost to cull up to 220 million infected pigs is a huge burden on the people.