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Yemen: Watch the Magician When the president lifted the terror designation, it was not for the benefit of Yemen, but for Iran. Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/10/yemen-magician-bidens-misdir

When the magician tells you to look right, look left, because that’s where the action is.

Unfortunately, Congress looked right.

In a striking bipartisan vote, the Senate voted to keep the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Good move, but not where the action is. Instead, the Biden administration has announced it has a  series of steps planned to restore funds and political status to the Palestinian Authority, including the possibility of reopening the Jerusalem Consulate – understood as the American Embassy to the Palestinians.

The UN, EU, and U.S. all sanctioned Iran at some point since 1980. While effective in some areas, the sanctions did not prevent Iran from cheating on its nuclear and ballistic missile obligations. President Biden has announced an intention to return in some form to the 2015 JCPOA – and from there, to negotiate another, stronger deal. In response, Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said the U.S. must first lift sanctions – most importantly, oil and banking sanctions, which are terrorism-sponsorship-related, not nuclear or missile related. Congress is working to prevent that. Good idea.

But the action on Iran is on the other side.  In Yemen.

The President announced the lifting of the terrorism designation from Houthi rebels in Yemen, couched in diplo-speak: “This decision has nothing to do with our view of the Houthis and their reprehensible conduct, including attacks against civilians and the kidnapping of American citizens. We are committed to helping Saudi Arabia defend its territory against further such attacks.”

So, the Houthis are acknowledged to behave like a terror organization, and their “reprehensible conduct” includes the use of child soldiers, but the Biden administration plans to ignore that. Why?

Look left.

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Sino-forming south of the border Huawei’s development of Mexico’s mobile broadband infrastructure has powered extraordinary growth By David P. Goldman

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/02/sino-forming-south-of-the-border/

Huawei’s development of Mexico’s mobile broadband infrastructure has powered extraordinary growth
Mexico’s retail ecommerce sales growth led the world in 2019.

Sometime in 2015, I sat in the back of a Mexico City taxi, reading instructions from Waze to the driver. We took detours through small residential streets, zigzagged from one major artery to another, and hung risky U-turns – all of which cut half an hour from our travel time. I had to give the directions because the driver didn’t use Waze, because, like most Mexican taxistas in 2015, he couldn’t afford the mobile broadband, which cost more in Mexico than in any other large country.

That was then. By 2020 about a third of Mexico City drivers were using the navigation app. In 2019 Mexico had 77 mobile broadband accounts per 100 people, vs. only 23 accounts in 2013. And Mexico last year had the world’s highest percentage growth in e-commerce.

This transformation had something to do with my taxi ride of 2015, at least tangentially. I had a cabinet-level meeting at Mexico’s Ministry of Telecommunications, in my then capacity as head of Americas for a Hong Kong investment banking boutique. As I reported in my book You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, I introduced top Huawei executives to senior Mexican officials, then debating an overhaul of the country’s woefully inadequate broadband system.

Nothing happened in 2015; later that year Jack Ma acquired the boutique and within a few months fired the Western bankers. But in 2017 Mexico invited Huawei and Nokia to build a “shared network” (red compartida) for mobile broadband. Banned from the United States, Huawei flourished in Mexico, and its broadband base stations provide service for dozens of Mexican cities, including a few that originally were assigned to Nokia. The cost of broadband service plunged and the number of subscribers more than tripled. Waze, a luxury that only a visiting gringo could afford in 2015, now serves 2 million users per day in Mexico City alone, and Mexico has become the app’s number four market globally. Anyone who has tried to negotiate the Mexican capital’s paralytic traffic knows how much that improves quality of life.

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The Re-Election of London’s Sadiq Khan A city screams out in pain. Katie Hopkins

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/re-election-londons-sadiq-khan-

In a little under three months, Sadiq Khan will be re-elected Mayor of London.

It is not guaranteed, of course. Londoners will head to the polls on May 6 to cast their votes in local elections, both for the office of Mayor of London and for members of the Greater London Assembly, a body designed to scrutinize the office.

But it feels horribly like a forgone conclusion.

The Conservatives are putting up about as much fight as Switzerland. Their candidate, Shaun Bailey, feels like a token effort, put up to tick the box but not expected to achieve much.

Others are making a bolder effort. Brian Rose from London Real has acquired a blazing black and red bus bearing his name and is valiantly touring the 32 London boroughs in his attempt to get elected, but faces impossible odds. As I know from personal experience, campaigning alone is hard. The fastest way to learn about the power of the party is to try to run without one. Brian is up against the might of the Labour Party and its vice-like grip on the levers of power in this city.

It is exasperating. Because of Labour and Union support, and Muslim majority in inner city London, it is impossible to still the wrecking ball that is Khan.

London is unrecognizable from the city many Americans once knew and loved. It is screaming out in pain, like a stuck creature desperate to be put out of its misery. This week there were 14 stabbings in one 24-hour period, leaving two dead in the street where they were cut down. And not a word was heard from the gilded cage of the London Mayor.

Stabbings are so often gang-related, confined to certain zip codes and certain segments of the population (young, black, living in sink estates), that it is easy for the Mayor to turn a blind eye.

It is the reason British natives are fleeing the capital in their droves. Burglaries and assaults are so commonplace as not to merit an officer in attendance, while the opportunity to do some politically-correct policing has the boys in blue falling over themselves to be seen. When diversity is the end goal, all else is lost along the way.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: More Corruption as Biden Resumes Financial Aid by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17042/palestinians-corruption-financial-aid

The assumption that renewed financial aid would lead the Palestinian leadership to make “concessions” has proven, over the past three decades, to be completely baseless. Anyone in the Biden administration who thinks that the Palestinian leadership would make real “concessions” to Israel in return for hundreds of millions of dollars is living under an illusion.

Last year, the Palestinians rejected Trump’s $50 billion Middle East economic plan that would create a global investment fund to lift the Palestinian and Arab state economies. The Palestinians dubbed it an “attempted bribe.”

The “innocent Palestinians” the Biden administration is talking about would undoubtedly be happy to receive financial aid from the US or the European Union. These Palestinians, however, are concerned that their leaders will continue to deprive them of the financial aid, and that the money, ever-fungible, would, as usual, just end up in the pockets of Palestinian leaders as well as to incentivizing murder for “pay-for-slay” terrorists.

A recent public opinion poll showed that a majority of Palestinians are still worried about the corruption of their leaders, especially the Palestinian Authority.

The majority of Palestinians believe that corruption is concentrated among senior public sector employees, particularly in the executive public institutions (the ministries, the presidency and the security services). The Palestinians continue to believe that senior employees are the most corrupt individuals among the Palestinians.

All this means that, if and when the general elections take place, Hamas is well on its way to score another easy victory.

The message that the findings send to the Biden administration and other Western donors: The funds you are sending to Palestinian leaders are being stolen. If you want to send money, you must ensure that the money does not end up in the private bank accounts of Palestinian leaders.

If, as the poll shows, a majority of Palestinians continue to see their leaders as corrupt, this means that Abbas’s rivals in Hamas are again likely to win the vote.

Ignoring rampant corruption in the Palestinian Authority (PA), the US administration of President Joe Biden says it is preparing to resume unconditional financial aid to the Palestinians.

“The suspension of aid to the Palestinian people has neither produced political progress nor secured concessions from the Palestinian leadership,” US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said at a press briefing earlier this month. “It has only harmed innocent Palestinians.”

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Cancel Culture Comes for Chaucer “De-colonizing” the curriculum to focus on race and “diversity.” Mark Tapson

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/cancel-culture-comes-chaucer-mark-tapson/

Another week, another Dead White Male toppled off his perch in the classics canon by university administration milquetoasts pandering to the woke, anti-intellectual mob. This time the DWM in question is medieval literary giant Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, courses on whom are being eliminated at the University of Leicester in England because the man often called the Father of English Literature doesn’t match the current “enthusiasms” of students there.

Last month, the University announced its intention to remove courses in The Canterbury Tales and replace them with courses centered on – what else? – sexuality, diversity, race, and ethnicity. “We want to offer courses that match our students’ own interests and enthusiasms, as reflected in their own choices and the feedback we have been hearing,” a university spokesperson explained to MailOnline. Students’ “interests and enthusiasms” apparently now are dominated by an obsession with the power dynamics of skin color and genitalia, and thus Chaucer is no longer relevant.

And not just Chaucer’s works, but anything written prior to the year 1500. Also potentially on the chopping block, reportedly, are courses on: Beowulf, the heroic epic considered to be the earliest work of English literature; John Milton’s magisterial Paradise Lost; the works of poet John Donne and playwright Christopher Marlowe; the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the 15th-century chronicle of the legend of King Arthur.

Leicester University management emailed the English department to notify them of these changes, stating, “The aim of our proposals [is] to offer a suite of undergraduate degrees that provide modules which students expect of an English degree.” Apparently a familiarity with Chaucer and other medieval authors is no longer what students expect of an English degree, but race-mongering identity politics is.

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Another Member of the Equity Squad Joins the Biden Administration Inside the twisted world of Marcia Fudge. Jason Hill

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/another-member-equity-squad-joins-biden-jason-d-hill-0/

Marcia Fudge, the Ohio Congresswoman, and now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development appointed by President Joe Biden, is an unabashed advocate of equity. In her confirmation hearing before the Senate, she explained to Senator Tom Cotton exactly what she meant by “equity” — and she made sure to distinguish the term from equality.

“From my own perspective, the difference is that one just means that you treat everybody the same… Sometimes the same is not equitable.”

Fudge went on to elucidate her points with examples:

You know if you say to me that I’m going to give you five dollars so you’re going to give my friend five dollars, my five dollars is not necessarily going to go as far because my friend already has a mother and father who is wealthy and they’re giving them.

Let’s just do it this way… Homeownership, let’s take it that way. They say let’s make everything equal. But it’s not equal because even though I may meet all of the qualifications to qualify for a loan, you know, I’ve got the right credit scores, et cetera, but I don’t have down payment money because my parents can’t afford to give me down payment money. There is no wealth coming to me.

Equity means making the playing field level… Sometimes it’s not level if you just say, “Let’s just treat everybody the same.”

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The Democrat Precedent for Impeaching Trump Comes From a Racist Senator Who Wanted to Kill All Black People Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/democrat-precedent-impeaching-trump-comes-racist-daniel-greenfield/

Democrats say you can impeach a president after leaving office. Where did they get that idea?

“We are not in favor of giving a vote to the negro, because we believe that he is not fit to enjoy that right,” Senator Thurman once said.

These days, even while Democrats topple the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, two men that Thurman hated, the old dead racist has become the basis for the unconstitutional Democrat campaign to impeach President Trump after leaving office.

Thurman, who was picked by the Democrats as their nominee for Vice President, had played a major role in the sole case of the Senate deciding to impeach a public official after leaving office. The Democrat case for impeaching President Trump rests on that one case.

And on Thurman.

Legal partisans have spent weeks debating whether President Trump can be impeached after leaving office. Every single one of these analyses is heavy on rhetoric and light on precedent.

There’s a very good reason for that.

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As Covid Evolves, Treatments May Prove as Important as Vaccines The FDA has approved only a few therapeutic drugs. Many studies suggest promising options.

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-covid-evolves-treatments-may-prove-as-important-as-vaccines-11613083638?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

New Covid-19 variants are eluding antibody treatments and may render vaccines less effective. To keep up, physicians need a broader arsenal of therapies that the virus can’t easily defeat. But the Food and Drug Administration has authorized precious few treatments for Covid-19, namely Gilead’s antiviral remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly. The National Institutes of Health has prioritized monoclonal antibodies—essentially manufactured copies of human antibodies—which have shown promise against other diseases, including cancer.

The rub is that mutations that alter the shape of the spike protein on the surface of the virus—as variants from the U.K., Brazil and South Africa do—can deform the sites to which antibodies bind before they neutralize the virus. Developing new antibody cocktails that target new variants could become a game of Whac-A-Mole.

The good news is that Gilead says remdesivir appears effective against the new strains. It is the only FDA-approved antiviral for Covid-19, and the five-day infusion treatment is limited to hospital patients. Antivirals, which stop viruses from replicating in human cells, are typically most effective early in an illness. So finding other effective antivirals, especially ones that can be prescribed to outpatients, should be a priority.

Antivirals can gum up virus replication in myriad ways. Remdesivir creates a paper jam in the coronavirus’s copy machine so it can’t distribute copies of its genetic code. Scientists at the University of Texas last month published a study in the journal Molecular Cell in which they identified the key mechanism remdesivir uses to inhibit the virus’s replication. That could lead to the creation of more potent and perhaps ingestible drugs.

“What if you could take just one pill and that was all you needed to do?” as study co-author Kenneth Johnson was quoted in a UT press release. “That would make a huge difference in terms of the here and now.”

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Democrats Present ‘Doctored’ Video of Capitol Riot During Trump Impeachment Trial By Matt Margolis

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/02/09/democrats-present-doctored-video-of-capitol-riot-during-trump-impeachment-trial-n1424341

At the start of the Senate impeachment trial, House impeachment managers presented video “evidence” of the mob that stormed the Capitol. The Hill described it as a “disturbing video documenting the Jan. 6 siege by interweaving Trump’s address to a group of supporters calling on them to march on the Capitol with violent footage of the attack.”

Interweaving? That’s correct, the video presented by the Democrats was not a straight video of Trump’s speech, but rather a collage of selectively edited clips of Trump’s speech mixed with select clips of video from the assault on the Capitol.

I’m sorry but didn’t the media call videos edited like this “doctored” recently?

Why yes, they did!

In May of 2019, Nancy Pelosi stuttered her way through a press conference following a failed meeting with Trump, a compilation was compiled and shown on Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox Business. President Trump retweeted the video. The Hill described the video Trump shared as “edited to make it seem like [Nancy Pelosi] was stuttering,”

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Overwrought Nazi Analogies for Me, but Not for Thee? Josh Hammer

Posted By on February 12th, 2021

https://www.newsweek.com/overwrought-nazi-analogies-me-not-thee-opinion-1568759

EXCERPTS

Earlier this week, Lucasfilm severed ties with “The Mandalorian” actress Gina Carano after a hyperbolic social media post in which she compared current political imperiousness and cancel culture in the United States—and the treatment of “wrong-thinking” Americans who hold views at odds with those of ruling class elites—to the 1930s-era treatment of German Jewry by the then-ascendant Nazi regime. But Carano deleted the post.

Carano’s tale, in isolation, would be bemusing but hardly newsworthy. What makes this story affirmatively galling is how it yet again evinces an ever-widening chasm between ruling class elites and the dissident “deplorables” over whom they deign to rule.

More generally, the American Left has spent large swaths of the past four years hysterically comparing then-President Donald Trump, whose daughter is an Orthodox Jew and who is likely the most aggressively pro-Jewish president in American history, to Adolf Hitler. It would be trite, not to mention impossible, to enumerate all the examples. The armchair sloganeering and rote analogizing were truly ubiquitous across CNN, MSNBC and the other myriad bastions of progressive media or cultural clout. It became old hat to compare Antifa, properly understood as a domestic terror organization, to the valiant American patriots who stormed the beach of Normandy on D-Day—thus equating the Trump administration with the Third Reich.