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From Raqqa, with a Christian Unit on the Front Lines of the Caliphate War Expulsion of ISIS from the Syrian city looks inevitable, but so does the terror group’s continued existence in virtual reality. By Andrew Doran

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

Raqqa, Syria — The coalition airstrikes lit up the night sky, perhaps a mile and a half away. The blast appears to be near the Old City, where ISIS is making its last stand, as it did in Mosul’s Old City weeks earlier. “Whatever’s there is important,” says Christian. “And you know they’re not getting it or they wouldn’t bomb the same spot every night.”

Christian is an American and a former Marine, short but strong, tattooed on the arms, neck, and head. He’s on the front lines of a war that began when he wasn’t yet a teenager, but for the last ten years he’s been on its front lines. Much of his youth was spent at a reform school for boys in California after he was orphaned in childhood. Since leaving the Marine Corps, he’s served in the French Foreign Legion and most recently with the Syriac Military Council in the fight against ISIS in Northern Syria. “I’m not a soldier of fortune, I’m a soldier of conscience,” he says.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) penetrated the periphery of the Old City just days before. But the front line, at the edge of a no-man’s-land amid the rubble of what were once residential buildings, has moved little in recent weeks. The Syriac Military Council is but a small component of the SDF, but it’s an important symbol for the pluralism that the SDF hopes will follow the war against the ISIS caliphate.

The Syriac Military Council was formed by 13 soldiers a little more than four years ago. Today they number 1,300. Most of the Syriac volunteers are from Syria — from the heavily Christian city of Qamishli, or from Malikiyah or Hasakah, or from villages on the Khabur River, which ISIS overran two years ago, taking hostages. “Christian” (one of his noms de guerre) is one among a handful of Westerners here.

“The U.S. was going to arm us [the Syriac Military Council] in 2015, but they went with the FSA instead,” says one of the Syriac commanders. That the Free Syrian Army turned out to be little more than Islamist militias, and that the U.S.-government program was nothing short of disastrous, is now well documented. The Syrian Democratic Forces, especially units like the Syriac Military Council, are much closer to what the FSA duped gullible Westerners into thinking that it was.

The Syriac unit also has Muslim volunteers, Kurd and Arab. They have fought and bled together to liberate Christian and Kurdish areas from ISIS; now they’re fighting together to drive ISIS out of a predominantly Sunni Arab city. Raqqa is the capital of the geographic “caliphate,” but it is also a symbol. The geographic caliphate in Syria and Iraq is in its final days, but this is not the end — of either the terrorists or the ideology.

Perhaps two miles separate our position in West Raqqa from the SDF forces in East Raqqa. ISIS is surrounded, but the fighting will continue, block by block, floor by floor, room by room. It is as brutal as any urban warfare since World War II. Christian hates ISIS but has no illusions about how tough the enemy is. “They’re always attacking. Always.”

For their part, those fighting for ISIS — Saudis, Chechens, Afghans, French, Turks, Pakistanis, Germans, and Americans, among others — are under no illusions that they are in the last days of the geographical caliphate. The coalition hope was to kill every member of ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa, to prevent them from returning to their countries to carry out attacks. It is certain, however, that many have already escaped. One sees many bearded young men among the caravans of refugees of fleeing Mosul and Raqqa.

The ISIS fighters who don’t blow themselves up in suicide bombings may fight to the death. Or they may try to return to their countries of origin to carry out lone-wolf — or perhaps coordinated — attacks. The latter would be in keeping with the spirit of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the true founder and visionary of ISIS. Zarqawi carried out such attacks with lethal efficiency in Iraq — against defenseless civilians in public places, including houses of worship and even elementary schools. These forms of terrorism have already become somewhat commonplace in the Western world and are certain to increase in the months and years ahead.

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The Revolution Devours Venezuela A textbook example of how to immiserate the masses By Rich Lowry

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

Venezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it can’t be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism.

People are now literally starving — about three-quarters of the population lost weight last year — in what once was the fourth-richest country in the world on a per capita basis. A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution.

The phrase is the coinage of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, succeeded by the current Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. The Western Hemisphere’s answer to Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Maduro has instituted an ongoing self-coup to make his country a one-party state.

The Chávezistas have worked from the typical Communist playbook of romanticizing the masses while immiserating them. Runaway spending, price controls, nationalization of companies, corruption, and the end of the rule of law — it’s been a master class in how to destroy an economy.

The result is a sharp, years-long recession, runaway inflation, and unsustainable debt. The suffering of ordinary people is staggering, while the thieves and killers who are Chávezista officials have made off with hundreds of billions of dollars. At this rate — The Economist calls the country’s economic decline “the steepest in modern Latin American history” — there will be nothing left to steal.

Any government in a democratic country that failed this spectacularly would have been relegated to the dustbin of history long ago. Maduro is getting around this problem by ending Venezuela’s democracy. The Chávezistas slipped up a year or two by allowing real elections for the country’s National Assembly, which were swept by the opposition. They then undertook a war against the assembly, stripping it of its powers and culminating in a rigged vote this week to elect a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.

The goal of Maduro’s alleged constitutional reforms is to no longer have a constitution worthy of the name. All you need to know about the spirit of this exercise is Maduro’s threat to jail the opposition leaders who boycotted the vote (outside observers estimate less than 20 percent of the electorate participated, despite the regime’s absurd claim of a popular wave of support).

Denied the ordinary means of dissent via the press and elections, the opposition has taken to the streets. Already more than 100 people have been killed in clashes over the past several months. Worse is yet to come. Lacking legitimacy and representing only a fraction of the populace, the Maduro regime will rely on the final backstop of violent suppression. It is now the worst crisis in a major country in the Western Hemisphere since the heights of the Colombian civil war in the 1990s and 2000s.

There is no easy remedy to Venezuela’s agony. If meditation were the solution, the country never would have gotten to this pass. Endless negotiations between the government and the opposition have gone nowhere — the organized-crime syndicate that has seized power under the banner of revolution knows it has no option but to retain its hold on power by any means necessary. The U.S. needs to use every economic and diplomatic lever to undermine the regime and build an international coalition against it.

We should impose more sanctions on specific officials and on the state-run oil company; we should advertise what we know about the details of how Chávezistas park their ill-gotten gains abroad; we should nudge our allies to further isolate the Venezuelan government by pulling ambassadors and breaking diplomatic relations. The hope is that with enough pressure, the regime will crack, and high-level officials will break with Maduro, weakening his position and making a negotiated restoration of democratic rule possible.

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Trump — And the Use and Abuse of Madness Fiery and unpredictable rhetoric can be a powerful strategic tool, but only if it’s not habitual. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

Occasionally insanity, real or feigned, has its political advantages —largely because of its ancillary traits of unpredictability and an aura of immunity from appeals to reason, sobriety, and moderation.

Rogues often try to appear as crazy as mad hatters — sometimes defined by issuing threats, throwing temper tantrums, saying outrageous things, dressing weirdly, or acting peculiarly.

In nuclear poker, the House of Kim in North Korea has welded its supposed hereditary madness to nuclear weapons — to achieve both deterrence and periodic shakedowns of massive foreign aid.

Turkish president Recep Erdogan is also a touchy nut. He usually wins an unearned wide berth and political concessions from the West by his offensive habits of saying anything to anyone at any time — in between episodic threats to the West to yank NATO troops out of Turkey, to send along even more Middle Eastern young males from war-torn states into the heart of Europe, or to demagogue Muslim tensions with Israel.

Even democratic leaders occasionally adopt the mask of madness for diplomatic and political advantage.

John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, openly sought advice from the caricatured Strangelovian (but actually authentic hero) General Curtis LeMay. To his advisers and adversaries, the brinksman Kennedy could pose as receiving wisdom from LeMay — who less than two decades earlier had burned down Tokyo — to ponder a chilling solution.

Recall Kennedy’s prior disastrous summit in Vienna, in 1961, with a bullying Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev: “I’ve got a terrible problem if he [Khrushchev] thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.” From that encounter, Kennedy learned that rhetorical gymnastics and judicious predictability earned him only scorn — the brawler from the Stalingrad era assessed him as timid and weak. The Soviet leader, in his own bouts of public buffoonery, was not averse to pounding his fist (or even banging his shoe) on his U.N. delegate’s desk in protest.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sometimes allegedly played the good-cop “voice of reason” to President Richard Nixon’s bad-cop and purportedly “mad bomber” persona. At various times, Kissinger sought to convince the North Vietnamese, Arab dictators, and the Soviet Union to deal diplomatically with a sober American Dr. Jekyll such as himself rather than with an unpredictable Commander in Chief Nixon (sometimes playing the role of Mr. Hyde).

Somebody as sober and judicious as Ronald Reagan on occasion seemed to follow the beat of a different drummer, thereby reminding foreign leaders that he was no cool, collected — and utterly predictable — Jimmy Carter.

Reagan’s hot-mic comic but dangerous nuttery — “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever — we begin bombing in five minutes” — purportedly caused an entire Soviet army to go on alert. And perhaps it reminded the Soviets of the radical new American approach to the Cold War.

And what did Reagan actually mean in a nuclear age of mutually assured destruction when he announced, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win; they lose”?

The answer, apparently, was for the Soviets to figure out.

In contrast, again, as in the case of Jimmy Carter who sermonized constantly on what he would never do, Barack “no drama” Obama seemed to think his predictability and mellifluousness would win empathy and respect (rather than confirmation of frailty) from world leaders — the vast majority of whom came to power through thuggery rather than free elections. The result was a green light for exploitation, not reciprocity for magnanimity, from Russia, China, the entire Middle East, Iran, and radical Islam.

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Israel anti-boycott bill does not violate free speech By Eugene Kontorovich

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act is a minor updating of a venerable statute that has been at the center of the U.S. consensus on Israel policy — the laws designed to counteract Arab states’ boycott of Israel by barring Americans from joining such boycotts.

Now, the American Civil Liberties Union has dropped a bomb: It says the proposed actunconstitutionally abridges free speech. Although the ACLU is only lobbying against the current bill, its argument is against the entire system of federal anti-boycott law, including the anti-boycott provisions of the 1977 Export Administration Act, a consequence that the group seems unwilling to admit (see Eugene Volokh’s post). Indeed, the ACLU’s position would make many U.S. sanctions against foreign countries (Iran, Russia, Cuba, etc.) unconstitutional.

The ACLU’s claims are as weak as they are dramatic. I should note that I have been involved withstate-level “anti-BDS” (boycott, sanctions and divestment) legislation and have advised on some of the federal bills. Although well-crafted measures avoid First Amendment problems, there are ways such laws can get it wrong, and I have been open in calling out measures that go too far. (For example, the application of such laws to prevent a Roger Waters concert is quite problematic.)

Current law prohibits U.S. entities from participating in or cooperating with international boycotts organized by foreign countries. These measures, first adopted in 1977, were explicitly aimed at the Arab states’ boycott of Israel, but its language is far broader, not mentioning any particular countries.

Since then, these laws and the many detailed regulations pursuant to them, have been the basis for a large number of investigations and prosecutions of companies for boycott activity. The laws are administered by a special unit of the Commerce Department, the Office of Antiboycott Compliance.

The existing laws cover not just participation in a boycott, but also facilitating the boycott by answering questions or furnishing information, when done in furtherance of the boycott. For example, telling a Saudi company, “You know, we don’t happen to do business with the Zionist entity” would be prohibited. It is no defense for one who participates in the Arab League boycott to argue that they happen to hate Israel anyway. Nor is it a defense to argue that one loves Israel and is simply being pressured by Arab businesses. It is the conduct that matters, not the ideology.It is easy to invent absurdly broad readings of statutes that would make them unconstitutional. The real question is if the statute would ever be applied and interpreted in that way. With the current bill, one need not wonder how it would be enforced: There are decades of administrative regulations and enforcement policies under the existing law that would apply to the new one. These all confine the prohibition to commercial conduct.

Such updating of the 1977 anti-boycott measures could not be more timely. Several United Nations agencies have initiated secondary boycotts of Israel — that is, boycotting non-Israeli companiesbecause of their connection to the Jewish state. In support of such secondary boycotts, the U.N. Human Rights Council is preparing a blacklist of Israeli-linked companies (using such a broad definition of “supporting settlements” that the blacklist could sweep in any Israeli-linked firm).

The UNHRC’s blacklist of Israeli companies is unprecedented — the organization has never made lists of private companies or entities for any purpose. Indeed, as has been shown in a recent report I authored, the Human Rights Council clearly does not regard businesses “supporting” settlements to be a human rights issue except when Israel is involved.

The blacklist is not a mere research project. It will serve as the basis for economic action against the listed firms. Indeed, the UNHRC has not been coy about its motives; a year after passing the resolution calling for the database, it passed a resolution that in effect calls for a partial boycottagainst Israel. (Existing federal boycott regulations make clear that a regulated boycott call need not be explicit.) It is quite likely that U.N. agencies will begin avoiding business with companies because of those companies’ business with Israel.

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Wasserman Schultz Subverted Democracy By Daniel John Sobieski

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

Democrats from the party that think the Electoral College is undemocratic but that unelected super delegates representing party bosses are just fine forget how former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz tipped the scales for Hillary Clinton over a surging Bernie Sanders. She interfered in the 2016 election in ways that Vladimir Putin couldn’t even dream of and arguably changed at least the Democratic Party results and campaign timeline.

In all the discussions of the Russians or their operatives hacking into the DNC and exposing the emails documenting DNC corruption and collusion with a single candidate, Hillary Clinton, the content of those emails are shoved aside. The emails documenting subversion of our democracy by Democrats, revealed by Wikileaks, were written by Democrats, not Vladimir Putin:

Schultz said she would step down after the convention. She has been forced to step aside after a leak of internal DNC emails showed officials actively favoring Hillary Clinton during the presidential primary and plotting against Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders…

The Sanders campaign has long claimed that the party establishment had its “finger on the scales” during the bitter and surprisingly long primary, but the embarrassing new revelations proved to be the final straw for a figure who had been a lightning rod for tension within the party.

The Russians may or may not have been involved, but in this context perhaps they should be considered whistleblowers and not hackers. It’s like someone breaking into a house only to find a murder scene. They can be accused of burglary but not the murder. Still the Russians were an easy diversion:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has accused Russia of meddling in the 2016 presidential election, saying its hackers stole Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and released them to foment disunity in the party and aid Donald Trump.

Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said on Sunday that “experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, [and are] releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump”….

Emails released by Wikileaks on Friday showed members of the DNC trading ideas for how to undercut the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, who proved a resilient adversary to Clinton in the Democratic primary. In one email, a staffer suggested the DNC spread a negative article about Sanders’ supporters; in another, the DNC’s chief financial officer suggested that questions about Sanders’ faith could undermine his candidacy.

So what the Democrats accused the Russians of doing, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s DNC was actively doing. And considering what we have found out about the Pakistanis, not the Russians, that were brought in to run their IT operation, it makes sense as to why the DNC refused to turn over their servers to FBI forensic investigators, something which may now change. What else where they trying to hide:

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Tony Thomas From Ragged Centre to Flush Left

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

The Australian has largely resisted the smothering green/left orthodoxy that banished all dissenting perspectives from the Fairfax rags and ABC. When age or ailment sees Rupert Murdoch’s guiding hand lifted from his paper’s helm, don’t expect things to stay that way. The Weekend Review is the sad preview.

The Australian is normally a voice for sanity in this country’s political debate. But Editor-in-Chief Paul Whittaker really ought to take a look at what goes into the Review magazine inside The Weekend Australian – editor Michelle Gunn.

On the same day the paper hit the streets on Saturday, July 29, Sydney counter-terror operatives were arresting four Islamists over an alleged plot to bring down a domestic airliner with an explosive device. This alleged plot was the thirteenth thwarted in the past three years. Had it succeeded, hundreds of deaths would have traumatised the country .

Now turn to page 22 of Review (editor Tim Douglas, and Literary Editor Stephen Romei, who staff say selects the book reviewers)), in which fantasy novelist and journalist Claire Corbett reviews three books on counter-terror units, including Sons of God about the Victorian Special Operations Group and two about the US Navy SEALS, The Killing School and The Operator. She writes,

“As historian Yuval Noah Harari points out in his 2015 book Homo Deus terrorists have almost no capacity to threaten a functioning state. The danger comes most from our over-reactions.

‘Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about three million people,’ Harari writes,’ terrorists killed a total of 7697 people across the globe , most of them in developing countries.’[1] He notes that for the average person in the affluent West, soft drinks pose a far deadlier threat than terrorists.” (My emphases).

Thanks for that, Claire Corbett, and thanks for your second-hand imbecility about soft drinks’ deadly threat. But no thanks, Review editors, for allowing Corbett/Harari to trash The Australian’s reputation for intellectual rigor, let alone common sense.

Let’s see what else Harari’s on about (not mentioned by Corbett) besides deadly soft drinks. He’s a history professor of repute and celebrity at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, “probably the most fashionable thinker on the planet right now,” according to the Daily Mail.

Writing only a month ago, after the Manchester slaughter, he claims that Britons need to accept that terrorists may kill a few people a year.

‘The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it. I mean, the terrorist attacks themselves are of course horrific, and I don’t intend to minimise the tragedy of the people who are killed, but if you look at the big picture it’s a puny threat…

For every person who is killed by a terrorist in the UK there are at least 100 who die in car accidents. Nevertheless, terrorism manages to capture our imagination in a way that car accidents don’t. You kill 20 people and you have 60 million people frightened that there is a terrorist behind every tree. That causes them to over-react. To do things like persecute entire communities, invade countries, go to war, change our way of life in terms of human rights and privacy, because of a tiny threat…

We have to give up this idea that we can completely abolish terrorism and that even the tiniest attack is completely unacceptable. You have domestic violence or rape and we don’t say, “Let’s have a curfew: men are not allowed on the street after eight o’clock.” If we could have such an attitude towards terrorism – “OK, every year there are two, three or four incidents of terrorism, a couple of dozen people get killed, it’s terrible, but OK, we get on with our lives” – it will be a far more effective response.’

In 2015, he was saying “Most terrorist attacks kill only a handful of people.”

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David Archibald: Tempting the Dragon

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

China’s grim determination to claim the South China Sea as its private lake needs an incident to demonstrate Beijing’s resolve. The US is problematic, given its undoubted willingness to respond, but the British warships Boris Johnson is dispatching, well they will make the perfect targets.

Bhutan is considered by some to be the world’s happiest country. Recently Chinese troops entered that happy country to construct a road and are currently in a face-off with Indian troops sent to stop them. It appears that it all has to do with internal Chinese politics.

There is to be a 19th Party Congress in China in 2017. The year is more than half over but no date has yet been set for it. The Congress is supposed to be in autumn, so thousands of high level Chinese officials will have their schedules disrupted at short notice. It seems that President Xi needs to shore up his position and, with the failure of the Henry Kissinger-aided effort to sell Taiwan down the river, military antics at the other end of the Middle Kingdom are being used to demonstrate what a tough guy President Xi is. Perhaps we will know if China’s military adventurism has been deemed successful when a date is set for the 19th Party Congress.

The UK has entered the fray with an undertaking made by Boris Johnson, the British Foreign Secretary, that the UK’s two new aircraft carriers will undertake a freedom-of-navigation exercise in the South China Sea. The first of these, HMS Queen Elizabeth, has started sea trials. The second carrier isn’t expected to enter service until 2020. So the UK has plenty of time to change its mind about sending under-armed warships into the South China Sea without air cover. The last time the UK tried that did ended badly. In December, 1941, the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse were sent north from Singapore to interdict the Japanese fleet. The Japanese sunk both almost effortlessly.

There is another parallel from earlier in the 20th century. In February, 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur. Russia responded by sending part of its Baltic fleet to Vladivostok. After setting off in October 1904, the Russian fleet sailed 25,000 km and reached the Straits of Tsushima in late May 1905, where most of it was sunk by the Japanese in a two day battle.

The modern UK sacrificial offerings to Mars may be aircraft carriers but they will be carrying the F-35B (perhaps) and be facing Chinese shored-based anti-ship missiles at point blank range. The UK is operating under the assumption that China won’t sink their shiny new ships, but China might. Consider that when Australia made similar noises last year about conducting freedom-of-navigation exercises, China concluded that Australia would “be an ideal target for China to warn and strike” — as it would from the Chinese perspective because it would demonstrate resolve and not necessarily lead to a war. The result would be to reinforce China’s position. The same would be true of the UK losing a few warships. The Chinese population is continually reminded of the Century of Humiliation which started with the Opium Wars instigated by the UK. There would be trade sanctions for a while if British warships were sunk but President Xi’s position would be reinforced and become unassailable.

If China attacked ships, aircraft or bases of Vietnam, the United States and Japan then the result would be a war in which all parties became involved. The opportunity to sink anybody else’s ships would be welcomed by China because President Xi would see off any challengers to the throne.

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Rising Tides And Higher Stakes. Cybersecurity Thought-Leader Chuck Brooks In Interview

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

What are the new Cybersecurity stakes – what are the vulnerabilities and risks?https://highperformancecounsel.com/new-cybersecurity-stakes-interview-cybersecurity-thought-leader-chuck-brooks/

We live in world of algorithms; x’s and o’s. Our digital world is ripe for access and compromise by those who want do harm from just a laptop and server. A myriad of recent breaches have demonstrated that as consumers we are becoming more and more dependent upon digital commerce. Our banking accounts, credit cards, and financial daily activities are interconnected. We are all increasingly vulnerable from hackers, phishers, and malware proliferating across all commercial verticals.

In the past year, the employment of ransomware has become a method of cyber-attack choice by hackers. This is because many networks (especially hospitals, utilities, universities, and small businesses) are comprised of different systems, devices and often lack required patching and updating necessary to thwart attacks. The recent Wannacry, and Petya attacks were certainly wake up calls to the disruptive implications of ransomware. We can expect to see more such attacks because of the ease of infection and because the vulnerabilities to networks still remain.

Ransomware is not a new threat, it has been around for at least 15 years, but it has become a trending one. Experts estimate that there are now 124 separate families of ransomware and hackers have become very adept at hiding malicious code. Success for hackers does not always depend on using the newest and most sophisticated malware. It is relatively easy for a hacker to do. In most cases, they rely on the most opportune target of vulnerability, especially with the ease of online attacks.

More ominous are the Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS). Tech Target provides a succinct definition of A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attack in which multiple compromised computer systems attack a target, such as a server, website or other network resource, and cause a denial of service for users of the targeted resource. The flood of incoming messages, connection requests or malformed packets to the target system forces it to slow down or even crash and shut down, thereby denying service to legitimate users or systems. The connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its billions of connected devices is conducive for DDoS activities. In 2016 a DDoS attacks were launched against a Domain Name System (DNS) called Dyn. The attack directed a variety of IoT connected devices to overload and take out internet platforms and services.

Consider the dire and eye opening facts: Hackers attack every 39 seconds and around one billion accounts and records were compromised worldwide last year. There are estimates that global Cybercrime damage costs will reach $6 trillion annually by 2021. Cybercrime is growing exponentially and so are the risks.

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World Pence Delivers Tough Speech on ‘Unpredictable’ Russia He tells audience in Estonia that impending U.S. sanctions won’t be lifted until Moscow changes its ways By Peter Nicholas

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

TALLINN, Estonia—Vice President Mike Pence issued one of the Trump administration’s toughest attacks to date on Russia, coming to a nation on Russia’s border to warn against aggression from the “unpredictable neighbor to the east.”

Mr. Pence said Monday that President Donald Trump would sign a bill passed by Congress that imposes new sanctions on Russia, despite earlier reservations from the White House and a promise from Moscow to expel hundreds of U.S. diplomats in return.

Mr. Pence said the Russia must be held accountable for its actions, saying the U.S. wouldn’t lift sanctions until it sees as a reversal of “the actions that caused the sanctions in the first place.”

“At this very moment, Russia continues to seek to redraw international borders by force, undermine the democracies of sovereign nations, and divide the free nations of Europe one against another,” he said.

Mr. Pence is in the midst of a three-day overseas trip that includes stops in two other countries that Moscow has seen as its traditional sphere of influence: the former Soviet state of Georgia and the Balkan state of Montenegro. His repeated message is that the U.S. won’t abandon allies living in Russia’s shadow.

The vice president delivered his remarks outside Estonia’s defense headquarters, surrounded by symbols of military resolve. Flanking him were armored tanks and standing in front of the stage were hundreds of U.S., British, French and Estonian troops, hands clasped behind their backs.

Moscow has accused the U.S. of threatening Russia by pushing for the expansion of NATO up to its borders through the admittance of the Baltic states and the inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia.

Before the speech, Mr. Pence and the presidents of the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, received a private military briefing that opened with an officer referencing the “eastern flank of NATO.”

Mr. Pence praised Estonia for being one of just five in the NATO alliance to devote 2% of its gross domestic product to defense. The country of 1.3 million has pushed for more U.S. air cover for the region, but NATO officials say its 183-mile border with Russia would be hard to defend against a determined Russian assault. A Rand Corp. study last year showed that Russia could beat back NATO forces reach the outskirts of Tallinn, the capital, in just a few days.

In his 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump often spoke of more cooperative dealings with Russia, and described NATO as obsolete. But he has since toughened his line on Russia, and Mr. Pence’s remarks signaled again that the U.S. supported NATO’s common-defense provision, known as Article 5.

“The United States rejects any attempt to use force, threats, intimidation or malign influence in the Baltic States or against any of our treaty allies—and under President Donald Trump, the United States of America will stand firmly behind our (NATO) Article 5 pledge of mutual defense—and the presence of U.S. Armed Forces here today proves it,” Mr. Pence said. CONTINUE AT SITE

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14 Dead After Suicide Bombing in Northeastern Nigeria Bombing blamed on the Boko Haram extremist group

Posted By on August 1st, 2017

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—Authorities in northeastern Nigeria say at least 14 people are dead after a suicide bombing blamed on the Boko Haram extremist group.

Bello Dambatta, head of the rapid response team for the State Emergency Agency SEMA, said a female suicide bomber sneaked into a building late Friday in Dikwa, east of the city of Maiduguri, and detonated her explosives.

Volunteers said at least two dozen others were wounded and had to wait until Saturday morning to be evacuated because of safety concerns and the lack of phone service.

Meanwhile, three geologists abducted in an ambush attack Tuesday by Boko Haram insurgents have appeared in new video calling on the Nigerian government to negotiate the workers’ release. Authorities say at least 48 people were killed in that attack near Lake Chad.