Immigration debates are heavily infused with this politicized notion of selfishness. It’s built into the common smear of “nativist” directed at anyone who wants border security and citizenship laws taken seriously. A “nativist” is a selfish person who wants to lock the deserving poor of other nations on the other side of a border fence, instead of “sharing the wealth” of his own prosperous society. “Compassion” demands open borders and mass migration from impoverished countries into rich ones.
by John Hayward21 Sep 2015, 8:48 AM PST0
Sky News reported last week that Iran has released five senior al-Qaeda operatives, including several possible successors to Ayman al-Zawahiri as head of the organization, in exchange for an Iranian diplomat who was kidnapped in Yemen earlier this year.
by John Hayward21 Sep 2015, 8:16 AM PST0
Turkey’s escalating crackdown on journalism has gone well beyond incarcerating the odd foreign journalist for covering stories the government wanted to ignore.
by John Hayward18 Sep 2015, 10:01 PM PST0
Anyone watching the debate over Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s drive to change the laws governing his nation’s self-defense force and permit overseas military deployments knows it is a highly contentious issue.
by John Hayward18 Sep 2015, 8:59 PM PST0
China’s state-run news service, Xinhua, lays it on pretty thick in an editorial titled “Xi’s Epic Bid for Better U.S. Ties Bolsters Asian Peace, Prosperity.”
by John Hayward18 Sep 2015, 7:18 PM PST0
The hunt for the perpetrators of the Erawan Shrine bombing in Bangkok continues, and the long-rumored Uighur connection seems to be firming up.
by John Hayward18 Sep 2015, 6:27 PM PST0
The existing escalation of Syrian refugees is but an entrée, a taste of things to come. The ten thousand President Obama announced recently, on top of 1,500 already accepted this year, is the beginning of the migration, not the end.
by John Hayward18 Sep 2015, 2:51 PM PST0
Misfortune struck in Mecca during the annual Islamic pilgrimage again on Thursday, but this time there were no fatalities reported, and only two injuries. A hotel in the Saudi city caught fire, requiring the evacuation of over 1,000 people.
by John Hayward18 Sep 2015, 2:11 PM PST0
Even the most energetic free-trade enthusiast can find a few things to be queasy about in Bloomberg Businessweek’s announcement of a major joint venture to build a Chinese bullet train connecting Los Angeles with Las Vegas.
by John Hayward18 Sep 2015, 8:55 AM PST0
The oil-rich Gulf states are growing sensitive to the criticism that they aren’t taking in any Syrian refugees, and they’re responding by telling the Western world to accept more of them.
by John Hayward17 Sep 2015, 9:01 PM PST0
The moment of truth is nearly at hand for a bill that would revise Japanese defense policy to let its troops fight abroad, a dramatic change from its postwar military posture.
by John Hayward17 Sep 2015, 5:26 PM PST0
The underpopulated “undercard” GOP debate – featuring George Pataki, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, and Rick Santorum – might have been the last such event of this primary, according to RNC communications director Sean Spicer.
by John Hayward17 Sep 2015, 1:49 PM PST0
Army General Lloyd Austin, in charge of the anti-ISIS war effort from the U.S. Central Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that only “four or five” members of the U.S.-trained moderate rebel force are still fighting the Islamic State in Syria.
by John Hayward17 Sep 2015, 10:14 AM PST0
Conventional wisdom holds that the early front-runner in a wide-open primary, especially a crowded one, rarely turns out to be the nominee. It’s probably one of those “rules” that will be true until it isn’t, but at the moment there is ample evidence from past contests to back it up. Carly Fiorina is banking on that, gaining strength as the campaign unwinds.
by John Hayward17 Sep 2015, 7:54 AM PST0
You might call it old-school hacking—the kind of hacking you do with an axe. California police are dealing with a rash of attacks on Internet fiber optic cables. An incident Monday night brought the total number of attacks to 15 since last summer.
by John Hayward16 Sep 2015, 9:07 PM PST0
The Saudi Binladin Group is a huge company that has, until now, been the Saudi government’s “favorite contractor for important or sensitive work, including defense and security projects,” as Reuters puts it.
by John Hayward16 Sep 2015, 8:18 PM PST0
“North Korea said it restarted its main plant for producing nuclear bombs, backing experts’ assessments that satellite imagery shows the facility to have been at least partly active for about two years,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
by John Hayward16 Sep 2015, 3:01 PM PST0
Donald Trump is currently involved in a vicious argument with the Club for Growth over tax policy. The Club for Growth is running ads against Trump in Iowa accusing him of several offenses against growth-oriented conservatism, including a proposal to raise taxes. They added a bare-knuckle punch proclaiming Trump to be more liberal than Hillary Clinton, or even Bernie Sanders, and called him “the worst kind of politician.”
by John Hayward16 Sep 2015, 11:06 AM PST0
The Dalai Lama, who has been exiled from his own country of Tibet for over half a century, offered some thoughts on the Syrian refugee crisis during the dedication of his Center for Compassion at Oxford, as related by the UK Telegraph.
by John Hayward16 Sep 2015, 9:50 AM PST0
The big Gulf oil kingdoms refuse to take any Syrian refugees, even though they are much closer to the war zone than Europe, and passage to the Gulf would be far less hazardous than risking death in overcrowded boats on the Mediterranean.
by John Hayward16 Sep 2015, 9:50 AM PST0
The number of routers affected doesn’t give a true picture of how serious this hack is, because each of those routers provided Internet traffic to numerous companies and government agencies, and the virus has reportedly been in place for more than a year. The volume of potentially compromised traffic is staggering.
by John Hayward16 Sep 2015, 8:08 AM PST0
Officials from the oil nations of the Gulf have refused to accept Syrian refugees because, as one Kuwaiti official put it, their nations are “too valuable” to risk waves of migrants resettling there.
by John Hayward15 Sep 2015, 10:01 PM PST0
Temple University physics professor Xiaoxing Xi is understandably angry with the FBI for filing espionage charges against him, without bothering to consult with duly credentialed experts to understand exactly what he had done.
by John Hayward15 Sep 2015, 8:09 PM PST0
ISIS has released a video to commemorate–and celebrate–the 9/11 attacks. “We are back in America,” the terrorist nation declares, warning that Americans can expect another attack on the scale of what their godfathers in al-Qaeda pulled off on September 11, 2001, and promising to deliver “cars full of explosives and suicide bombers.”
by John Hayward15 Sep 2015, 9:28 AM PST0
Malaysian authorities on Monday announced the arrest of three suspects—two Malaysians and a Pakistani national—in connection with the August 17 terrorist bombing of the Erewan shrine in Bangkok, in which 20 people were killed.
by John Hayward14 Sep 2015, 7:37 PM PST0
