…Progressive-Democrat style. Here’s Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (D, FL):
people who are “making fun of members of Congress” online “should be prosecuted”
Because, she went on, making fun of Congress intimidates Congressmen. In fact, she went on in that vein for more than 40 seconds, just in the recording.
Wow.
That’s how close Iran is to getting a nuclear weapon. The Wall Street Journal‘s subheadline tells the tale.
Tehran exceeded a key limit in the 2015 deal but experts say that it is only a small step and that it would take Tehran at least a year to make a weapon
That’s how far away from nuclear armament Iran would have been under the JCPOA on that deal’s expiration. After all,
The 2015 deal was structured to make sure that Iran would take a year to amass enough material for a weapon if it chose to break the accord.
A whole year.
And the People’s Republic of China threatens. Hong Kong citizens have been protesting a PRC-endorsed law proposal that would allow Hong Kongese and others resident in or visiting Hong Kong to be extradited to the mainland for trial in the PRC’s government-run court system.
[The PRC’s] government signaled its fraying patience with protesters in Hong Kong after they stormed the city’s legislature, calling the violent turn a direct challenge to Beijing’s authority and suggesting it would have to be answered.
Public statements from Beijing marked a shift in Chinese leaders’ attitude toward the crisis in the semiautonomous territory, indicating they may be forced to step in….
Consistent with that, the PLA’s Hong Kong garrison has begun “emergency handling” exercises.
And this:
The [PRC] government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office called the protests a “blatant challenge to the bottom line of ‘one country, two systems’….”
Hardly. The PRC’s proposed extradition law for Hong Kong is a deliberate threat to the two systems part. Yet, here’s Zhang Jian, Associate Research Fellow at the Shanghai Institute of International Studies:
The suspension of the bill is tantamount to a withdrawal. There is no more room for backing down, no more ground for retreating.
This, of course, is nonsense. Suspension is not withdrawal, it’s a deliberate attempt to keep the extradition bill alive for later, quieter reconsideration and for enactment out of site of the peasantry. There’s plenty of room for continued action: the actual withdrawal of the bill.
Beijing has often appeared tolerant in the face of mass protests in mainland China and Hong Kong—and when passions and attention fade, authorities detain, attack, or otherwise punish ringleaders to prevent a recurrence.
To be sure, that’s a faux patience, and the tanks may well roll across the bridges, just as they rolled into Tiananmen Square not so very long ago when another bunch of uppity peasants demanded freedom.
This one regards the rescue of those escaping from northern Africa and their disposition on arrival on European shores. The particular case concerns Italy’s arrest of a German national who is the captain of an NGO ship that had rescued a number of refugees whose ship was in danger in international waters in the middle of the Mediterranean. Carola Rakete, captain of the Sea-Watch 3, was arrested after she docked her ship at Italy’s Lampedusa, an island in the southern Med—and closer to Tunisia than to any land of Italy’s.
UK [and UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres] spokeswoman Stephane Dujarric said in a daily press briefing that “no vessel or ship master should be at risk of being fined for coming to the aid of boats in distress, where loss of life is imminent.”
“Sea rescue is a longstanding humanitarian imperative. It’s also an obligation under international law.”
Dujarric went on:
the UN was “concerned by the recent decree from the government regarding NGO vessels.”
She was referring to Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s successful implementation of legislation to fine ships that flout orders to stay out of Italian waters.
Dujarric is mischaracterizing the situation, and a part of the incident that matters has been omitted by Deutsche Welle in its piece at the link. Italy has not criminalized rescue on the high seas. Italy has only responded to the illegal entry into Italian waters, compounded by the illegal entry into an Italian port, by a captain and her vessel that not only had no permission to enter either, she had been explicitly denied that permission.
Furthermore, that denial had been enforced by an Italian police vessel that Rakete rammed and forced her way past as she docked at Lampedusa. That was elided by the DW article.
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas is upset over the arrest of the German national for her criminal act.
Haggling over refugee distribution is undignified and must stop. We urgently need a European solution—one that is also in line with our European values.
Indeed, the haggling must stop. The EU must respect the European value of territorial integrity of its member nations.
In the end, regardless of what we might think of Italian actions in the present incident, such…confusion…reduces the credibility of those favoring the transfer of rescuees from the rescuing ships to a nation’s shore regardless of that nation’s expressed wishes and of that nation’s laws. And of that nation’s sovereignty.
That’s the title of The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial last Sunday about President Donald Trump’s general foreign policy. They’ve misunderstood it, though, beginning with their subheadline:
With this President, the diplomacy is always personal.
Well, of course it is. Just as all politics are local, so all diplomacy is personal: the principals must know who each other are and the degree to which they can trust each other.
And this:
President Trump believes in personal diplomacy and showmanship above all in foreign policy….
Well, no. Trump sees personal diplomacy and showmanship as necessary early, if not first, steps in foreign policy. Establishment diplomats and policy “experts” are too used to conducting matters quietly and behind the scenes—and they have an unblemished record of failure in serious policy matters in areas, for instance, related to Iran, the People’s Republic of China, and northern Korea. Starting things out in a highly publicized—showman-ized—manner prevents those diplomats from hiding behind their comfortable gentility as they perpetuate their useless chit-chat.
And finally this:
But Mr Trump’s public canoodling with Mr Putin is still a sorry spectacle.
It’s amazing that journalists of the NLMSM—including those of the WSJ—still, after all these years, remain so self-absorbed that they can’t recognize when they’re being trolled.