In Turkey, this Cover Page of the Charlie Hebdo publication would be a crime because Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is afraid of ridicule (the headline caption translates as “In private, he’s very funny”). In France and much of the West, it’s a matter of free speech and free press. Here, too.
The joke is on Erdoğan. Or he is the joke. You pick ’em.
…as outlined in Just the News.
There are at least three instances where there is now public evidence that Joe Biden met with foreigners his son was courting for business.
The first occurred in 2011 when Obama White House entry logs show several Chinese businessmen involved with Hunter Biden checked in to meet the vice president.
The second occurred in 2013, when Hunter Biden rode aboard Air Force II with his father and then introduced the vice president in Beijing to a Chinese businessman that was helping him start an investment fund.
The third, alleged in an email purportedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s old laptop, indicates Hunter Biden arranged for an official from Burisma to meet his father in April 2015. …the Biden campaign now acknowledges the encounter may have happened though insists it was fleeting.
These predate the People’s Republic of China National Intelligence Law, enacted in June 2017, that requires all PRC companies to answer PRC intelligence community requests for information. Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden still has not repudiated, or even terminated, these ties. That they may appear to have died on the vine on their own, may be just that: appearance.
Biden needs to positively repudiate these connections.
And this:
At least two pieces of evidence have emerged in the last two weeks that suggest Hunter Biden believed his father was getting a cut of his business. The first, which remains uncorroborated by Just the News, is an email found on the purported Hunter Biden laptop in which the vice president’s son suggests he shared half of his income with his father.
The second piece of evidence, now authenticated by Just the News, is a proposal in May 2017 for a joint venture between a Chinese energy firm and a Hunter Biden-tied company called Sinohawk Holdings that stated that 10% of the venture’s equity was being reserved for the “big guy.” Sinohawk’s CEO Tony Bobulinski has confirmed the reference to the “big guy” is Joe Biden, and that the then-former vice president was supposed to be a silent investor in the venture.
The “purported Hunter Biden laptop” itself has been confirmed to be his; although its provenance once it left the repair shop’s hands remains unclear. The joint venture proposal was made just before the PRC’s intelligence law was enacted. It seems unlikely that the Bidens would not have known the law was imminent, but it seems likely the PRC’s energy firm—CEFC—would have known, especially given the connections between Ye Jianming, CEFC’s Chairman and controlling shareholder (through his Shanghai Energy Fund Investment Ltd company) and the Communist Party of China.
Biden has yet to positively repudiate any of this, also.
There’s more at the link.
PLO Secretary General and head of the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department, Saeb Erekat is infected with the Wuhan Virus. He had been handling his treatment from his West Bank home, but his condition worsened, so he was transferred to a hospital Sunday.
In Tel Aviv.
Erekat also has one of the several comorbidities associated with particularly severe and potentially lethal Wuhan Virus infections. He had a lung transplant three years ago, and he has a depressed immune system from the drugs necessary to minimize organ rejection.
The lung transplant was performed in the United States.
In the words of Walter Cronkite, “What’s going on here?” How is a PLO mucky-muck running around in two versions of Hell?
What’s up with the PLO hypocrisy?
Paul Wolfowitz had a thought on that last Tuesday. His opening paragraph laid out his thesis.
Beijing has been making a show of hostility toward Taiwan. Last week China released footage of “real combat” it conducted last month in Taiwanese airspace. A Chinese invasion would present the greatest threat to global peace in a generation. The US would confront an agonizing dilemma: risk an armed clash between two nuclear superpowers or abandon a free people to communist tyranny. But there’s an alternative—deter the threat by committing to oppose it, by force if necessary.
I’d be a bit more blunt.
It would be good to remind the PRC of who has vastly more nuclear warheads than the other, who has the better cyberwar capability, and how little the US depends on river dams—or a single dam—for its food supply.
It also would be good to stage our own demonstrations, real rather than virtual, throughout the East and South China Seas and in the Taiwan strait and to increase and accelerate arms sales to the Republic of China.
Joe Biden, however, is the epitome of an Asian nation being of little strategic value, of a commitment to use military force in [RoC] would be ill-advised and impracticable, and whose prevailing mood… [is] not to interfere—after all, the PRC, Biden insists, is not a serious competitor; the nation isn’t a “patch on our jeans.”
…on the foreign policy and national security front.
The White House is moving forward with three sales of advanced weaponry to Taiwan, sending in recent days a notification of the deals to Congress for approval, five sources said on Monday, while China threatened retaliation.
The three weapons systems—of seven in the works—have been approved by the State Department and are these:
These aren’t just feel-good devices, either; they’ll give the Republic of China an ability to strike back hard and meaningfully against People’s Republic of China invasion forces along with recon data concerning approaching/maneuvering PRC forces.
Other weapons systems in the works include these, and their approvals and deliveries need to be moved along apace.
Still, these sales and deliveries, sound progress that they represent, need to be coupled with more frequent Naval sailings throughout the South and East China Seas and in the immediate vicinity of the RoC, including the Taiwan Strait, and port calls at RoC ports in order to maximize the sales’ potential and concrete effect.