RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13432/pakistan-country-particular-concern

“Occupations deemed as ‘dirty’ and ‘shameful’ are reserved for Christians, and many believers are victims of bonded labor. Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws target religious minorities but affect Christians the most…”. — Open Doors.

“Christians continue to be killed for accusations of blasphemy, as well as for their low status in society. In June 2017, a Christian sewage worker died in a hospital because three Muslim doctors refused to touch him, thereby making themselves unclean, during their Ramadan fast.” — Open Doors .

“Abusive enforcement of the country’s strict blasphemy laws resulted in the suppression of rights for non-Muslims, Shi’a Muslims, and Ahmadis.” — United States Commission on International Freedom.

Pakistan was among the nations recently designated by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as “Countries of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 for having engaged in or tolerated ‘systematic, ongoing, [and] egregious violations of religious freedom.'”

Islamabad promptly issued an angry response, which reads, in part:

“Pakistan rejects the US State Department’s unilateral and politically motivated pronouncement… Besides the clear biases reflected from these designations, there are serious questions on the credentials and impartiality of the self-proclaimed jury involved in this unwarranted exercise.

“Around 4 percent of our total population comprises citizens belonging to Christian, Hindu, Budhists [sic] and Sikh faiths. Ensuring equal treatment of minorities and their enjoyment of human rights without any discrimination is the cardinal principle of the Constitution of Pakistan…”

“As a party to seven out of the nine core human rights treaties, Pakistan has been submitting compliance reports on its obligations with regard to fundamental freedoms. The government of Pakistan has devised well-establishment legal and administrative mechanisms to safeguard the rights of its citizens. Pakistan does not need counsel by any individual country on how to protect the rights of its minorities.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bomb-explosion-in-athens-fuels-fear-of-new-generation-of-terror-11545907002

Two people were injured after a bomb exploded outside a church in central Athens on Thursday, fueling concerns of a resurgence of urban-guerrilla violence in Greece.

The growing number of recent attacks has sparked fears of the emergence of a new generation of terrorist groups rooted in far-left organizations that target the conservative establishment.

Thursday’s blast occurred just after 7 a.m. local time outside an Orthodox Church in the upscale neighborhood of Kolonaki, before it was due to open for service. A police officer and the church caretaker were wounded and rushed to hospital, the officials said. There was no warning call to authorities or claim of responsibility.

“The church caretaker spotted a box outside the entrance of the church, moved it and called the police,” a police official said. “It exploded a few minutes later when the police arrived; the blast was not powerful.” The two were slightly injured and were receiving treatment at local hospitals, officials said.

Earlier this month a powerful bomb exploded outside a big Greek media group, in what officials called an attack on free speech and democracy. In mid-November, a bomb was placed outside the house of senior Greek judge in central Athens. No one was wounded as there were warning calls for the attacks.

Last year, former Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos was wounded and hospitalized for several weeks after he opened a letter bomb while riding in his car. In March 2017 Greek politicians and European Union officials were targeted in the same manner. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-bumbling-police-state-11545869066

Barely a day goes by without a story about China’s ambition to use new technologies for nefarious means, and Human Rights Watch has amassed evidence that President Xi Jinping is building a “digital totalitarian state.” But Beijing’s aspirations to control people’s everyday lives are not so easily realized. Supporters of human rights have plenty of opportunities to limit the damage.

The recent headlines are chilling: “In China, your car could be talking to the government.” “China’s brightest children are being recruited to develop AI ‘killer bots.’ ” The country’s “social credit” system restricts the freedoms of citizens the state considers to have behaved badly. The government is pushing for national DNA and voice-recognition databases and for big-data “predictive policing” programs aimed at picking out political threats—all without any effective protections for privacy. The brutal crackdown on Muslims in the northwestern Xinjiang region of China involves both high- and low-tech surveillance.

Yet the Chinese government’s mass-surveillance capabilities are more fearsome in theory than in practice. “While big data has become a sizzling hot concept, there is so much more speculation than actual application,” laments one researcher working for the Chinese police, who adds that police leaders are frustrated they may be “sitting on” a “data gold mine” that they are unable to exploit properly. Authorities’ mass-surveillance ambitions are bedeviled by unreliable and incomplete basic data, as well as incompatible datasets and systems developed by different companies, among other problems.

Plus, citizens across China find ingenious ways to evade surveillance. Blacklisted by the social-credit system? Use documents other than ID cards to get around the restrictions. Concerned your calls are being monitored? Activists have learned creative ways to make police lose track of them.

Beijing has devoted enormous efforts to perfecting mass surveillance during the “Strike Hard” crackdown in Xinjiang, which began in late 2016. One element—the “Becoming Family” program, in which officials are dispatched to live with Muslim families, monitor and indoctrinate them—requires mobilizing 1.1 million government officials to keep tabs on a population of 13 million Muslims.

These programs depend on meticulous data input, which may prove unsustainable. Local officials report logging grueling hours—early morning until midnight, with hardly any vacation—to maintain a constant stream of “dynamic” data necessary for mass surveillance and other repressive measures. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-long-hong-kong-chinas-

HONG KONG—In the years leading up to the city’s 1997 return to Chinese rule, Hong Kong citizens headed overseas by the hundreds of thousands, spooked by Beijing’s crushing of student protests in Tiananmen Square and fearful their freedoms would be trampled.

They moved to Canada, the U.S., Australia and elsewhere to start new lives, or obtain second passports as an insurance policy should they wish to flee. Many native Hong Kongers returned, as the transfer of sovereignty came and went with few signs that Beijing was flexing its muscles.

Now, there are early signals a new tide of migration could be looming, as concerns rise about civil liberties, living standards and quality of life. Since Beijing in 2014 faced down protesters calling for greater democracy in Hong Kong, the city’s leaders have stifled opposition in the former British colony. For all but the most ardent activists, resistance has come to feel futile.

The actual number leaving is difficult to track because so many residents obtained foreign passports two decades or more ago. But in a survey last year by a local university, a third of respondents—including close to half of college-educated participants and young people aged 18 to 30—said they would emigrate if they got the chance. Of those, 13% had made actual preparations to leave.

Immigration to Canada has doubled over the past decade. Relocation consultants report an uptick in business in the past few years. Dozens of YouTube videos are being circulated by Hong Kong emigrants touting closer, more affordable places to live, such as Malaysia and Taiwan, where migration has also doubled in the past year. Facebook groups on these topics have also proliferated.

“Before 1997 people were worried about the uncertainty before the handover. Now they are leaving because of the certainty,” said Paul Yip, an academic at the University of Hong Kong, who specializes in population studies. He said emigrants are feeling hopeless about an economic boom that has passed many by or frustrated with the city’s changing political climate.

China’s growing presence is everywhere. Bookstores are increasing

https://quillette.com/2018/12/25/feast-and-drink-for-our-
Earlier this year, for the first time in history, the government of Britain appointed a minister for loneliness. Although not a medical condition, loneliness is starting to be described in such language, with descriptors such as “epidemic” and “public health crisis” bracketing the term. Large-scale studies have found that around ten percent of adults in Western nations experience chronic loneliness.

In a letter published this year in The Lancet, two neurologists from the University of Chicago asked readers to “imagine a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed, and self-centred, and is associated with a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality.” They went on to explain that it is not a condition that only affects those with poor social skills, or those who are highly sheltered or introverted. Loneliness is not necessarily about being alone, either—we can feel isolated when surrounded by other people. Somewhat counter-intuitively, social skills training, social support and social contact have all been found to be ineffective as interventions for social disconnection.

* * *

Drawing on the work of Durkheim, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt theorises that religious practices are best understood not as the outcome of a set of propositional beliefs (i.e. that “God exists” or “there is an afterlife”) but as the means by which our species creates cohesive moral communities. From a Durkheimian perspective, the individual comes into “moral harmony” with those with whom he shares religious customs. This harmony then provides us with a “perpetual sustenance of our moral nature.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13474/league-of-democracies

“Ours are not western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit. Anywhere and anytime, ordinary people when given the choice, the choice is the same: freedom not tyranny, democracy, not dictatorship, the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.” — Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, 2003.

A League of Democracies might also serve as a vehicle to increase the numbers of democracies in the world: it could have as its overriding objective the expansion of democracy throughout the planet.

During a recent interview, Ambassador Ron Dermer, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, suggested that a “League of Democracies” would help freedom-loving states survive the challenge to democratic values presented by authoritarian states and extremist ideologies.

According to Dermer, the league could be made up of a consortium of “Free World” nations unlimited by territorial region, race or culture. The alliance could be global in scope, not confined, as is NATO to a North Atlantic community of nation-states. Nor would the league be exclusively military in nature. Dermer proffered that it could include India, the world’s most populous democracy; Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, and Japan, an Asian democracy.

Such a league might also serve as a vehicle to increase the numbers of democracies in the world: a League of Democracies could have as its overriding objective the expansion of democracy throughout the planet. This goal was previously suggested by Dermer and the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky in their book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. In it, the authors underscore this sentiment by quoting from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s address to a Joint Session of the United States Congress in 2003:

“Ours are not western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit. Anywhere and anytime, ordinary people when given the choice, the choice is the same: freedom not tyranny, democracy, not dictatorship, the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.”

https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Suspicious-Iranian-cargo-plane-left-Damascus-minutes-before-airstrike-575441
According to the site Flightradar24.com, the Boeing 747-281F left Damascus and flew due east towards Tehran, climbing to 30,000 feet and then crossing into Iraq after ten in the evening.

Two suspicious Iranian planes left Damascus on Tuesday night just prior to reports of airstrikes.

Details from flight monitoring sites show that a Fars Air Qeshm 747 cargo plane left Damascus International Airport at 9:28 in the evening, just half an hour before reports emerged of air strikes in Syria on Tuesday night.
According to the site Flightradar24.com, the Boeing 747-281F left Damascus and flew due east towards Tehran, climbing to 30,000 feet and then crossing into Iraq after ten in the evening.
By midnight it had entered Iranian airspace and began a beeline for Tehran. A second Tehran bound flight, Maham Air took off at 10:04 in the evening and flew precisely the same route. The Far Air Qeshm flight has been in the news in the past in relation to alleged smuggling of arms to Syria and also to Damascus. Al-Arabiya claimed that it transferred weapons to Hezbollah in early December. In October, FoxNews carried a similar report.

Similarly Mahan Air has been targeted by the US Treasury Department for links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, making its departure right after the Fars Air Qeshm suspicions. Although the Fars Air Qeshm flight appears to have left before the airstrikes began, the Mahan Air flight seems to have left around the same time.

In the past reports have indicated that airstrikes targeted Damascus after suspicious flights landed and allegedly disembarked cargo for arms smuggling to Hezbollah factions.