Australia has been conducting a strong push against terrorism, which began months ago with some general comments from officials who knew they had a problem, and it quickly developed into effective action. Part of the program involves preventing would-be jihadis, including teenagers, from fleeing the country and signing up with ISIS and other ugly crews in Iraq and Syria.
Al-Monitor delivers one of the most sobering assessments of the bloody mess in Syria to date, as author Edward Dark returns to his hometown of Aleppo for a look at the plight of the dwindling Christian community, and finds them turning to dictator Bashar al-Assad for protection from the jihadis fighting to overthrow him.
Engadget’s description of the new Ford S-Max car and its Intelligent Speed Limiter technology is both fascinating and creepy as hell: “A camera mounted on the windshield scans the road signs on the sides of the highway and, when the vehicle enters a 20mph zone, the system reduces the top speed to match. Rather than controlling the speed with automatic braking, the car limits its own velocity by adjusting the amount of fuel being pushed to the engine.”
Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani gave an hour-long address to Congress on Wednesday, in which he mused that his country’s longstanding position as the graveyard of empires is quite exhausting to the Afghan people. Having established their reputation as fierce, stubborn fighters, they would really like to move on to a more productive future. “‘Ordinary’ is what has escaped us, and what we’d really like is to lead totally ordinary lives,” he said.
In what many will interpret as an astonishing snub to NATO in the face of Russian aggression, President Obama has refused to meet with the new head of the treaty group, who is currently visiting Washington, D.C.
There’s nothing ironic about Ted Cruz and his family enrolling in ObamaCare — it’s the law. And complying with laws you oppose is a universal American experience. Even Barack Obama had to comply with a few laws he opposed, until he seized dictatorial powers to rewrite them, and he hasn’t rewritten all of them yet.
Things are going so well in Barack Obama’s big foreign-policy “success,” Libya, that people are literally dying to get out. Vice News recently posted a 27-minute documentary video on the hideous conditions in Libya’s “migrant prisons”—internment camps where refugees are left to rot after their attempts to flee the country across the Mediterranean fail.
The Associated Press reports that Jordan has announced plans to help train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State. “The training is part of a regional effort also involving Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar as hosts of training sites. The U.S. Congress has passed legislation providing $500 million for training about 5,000 rebels over the next year,” writes the AP.
It has long been feared that ISIS could ally with Somali terror group al-Shabaab, which has been tied to al-Qaeda. As Osama bin Laden’s gang fades and the Islamic State rises, ISIS might look like a better partner for the Somalian militants. ISIS recently accepted an oath of fealty from Boko Haram in Nigeria.
If we don’t acknowledge an authority higher than politics and bureaucracy, we’ll never have an inclusive, tolerant, fair nation, because those virtues will always be subject to the flawed and fickle judgment of imperfect men and women, who are always influenced by personal passions and ambitions, no matter how loud their claims to the contrary.
In a youth conference in Tehran, Iran’s top military commanders assured the crowd that Jordan would soon be controlled by the mullahs, as they have already spread their malevolent influence into Iraq and Lebanon with terrorist forces, Haaretz reports.
While the media endlessly feeds us messages about how racism is worse than ever, the number of hate groups declined considerably. That sounds like encouraging news. Although hatred, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder, and those who have a vested interest in sussing out “hate” are likely to behold plenty of it.
According to Veryan Khan of the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, the great under-the-radar terror threat comes from an expanse of the Sahara Desert in Mauritania, where ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram are working together to train Western recruits for jihad, including terror attacks in Europe and North America. “The situation in Mauritania is a powder keg very few people are talking about,” Khan told Fox News.
It’s looking more and more as if destroying America’s relationship with Israel isn’t just an unfortunate, unintended consequence of Obama’s mad dash to set up a new Persian Empire with nuclear weapons and declare Peace In Our Time. In fact, messing up that special relationship with Israel seems to be an Obama objective.
The voter ID argument is over. and conservatives won. All that remains is to square away a few details, and ensure each new state law meets the standards approved by the Supreme Court in a landmark Indiana case.
There was speculation that the United States might stop boycotting the anti-Israel human rights theater at the United Nations this year, as part a larger White House reaction to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection, but the Jerusalem Post happily reports that the U.S. once again refused to participate in the notorious Agenda Item 7 debate.
As even the New York Times explores the Hillary Clinton email scandal, the American people ought to be getting sick and tired of lectures from our disconnected, above-the-law Ruling Class about how the peons need to take their word for everything – as if winning an election, or being appointed by someone who won an election, is the only credibility bar they’ll ever need to clear.
The Associated Press reports that a Syrian military helicopter has crashed following an equipment malfunction, resulting in the capture and killing of its crew by “insurgents” of the al-Nusra Front.
The latest online threat from ISIS is a list of one hundred U.S. military personnel, with instructions for “our brothers residing in America” to hunt them down and “deal” with them. The listings include names, photographs, and other information.
A flurry of biographical films were announce shortly after Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, with the first to reach theaters starring Ashton Kutcher as the Apple visionary. Alex Gibney, creator of the upcoming Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine, told Variety that he thought Kutcher looked good in the part, but his movie was “silly,” and its flattering take on Jobs “wasn’t interesting to me.”
Reuters reports that the Tunisian government has arrested over 20 suspected militants in the wake of the deadly Bardo Museum attack, about half of them directly involved in planning and executing the massacre, which killed twenty foreign tourists and three Tunisians.
A new ISIS propaganda video shows three Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, evidently captured in the Nineveh province of Iraq, beheaded with knives before a large crowd of onlookers, some of them small children.
A horrible story from Radio Free Europe tells of a woman in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, beaten to death by an angry mob for allegedly burning a Koran near the Shah-e Doh Shamshira shrine on Thursday.
AFP reports that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is expected to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress in April, making him the first prime minister of Japan to deliver such an address. The event is to come at the end of a visit in April focused on “deepening trade and military ties,” although there is speculation he will also cover the “evils and horrors” of Japan’s history, as he did during a speech to the Australian Parliament last July.
Voting is one important component of freedom, but it’s not a substitute for freedom. Even when the vote isn’t rigged, it’s still incredibly dangerous to accept the notion of voting – of politics – as a sufficient limit on power. That’s the “national conversation” we’re having in the United States as the Age of Obama winds down, to the point where even the comical corruption of Hillary Clinton’s secret e-mail server is dismissed as something that shouldn’t inconvenience Her Majesty unless the voters get really angry about it.
