Following-up, "U.S. Army Soldier in North Korean Custody After Crossing Border 'Voluntarily'."
It turns out the kid was in big trouble and was in the midst of being sent back to the U.S., apparently for some kind of disciplinary action. Private King may have literally defected.
This is really bizarre.
I'm still figuring out this story.
At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. Soldier Held in North Korea After Crossing Border: American man on a tour of South Korean side of the Joint Security Area crossed over the military demarcation line without permission, U.N. says."
A U.S. National on a JSA orientation tour crossed, without authorization, the Military Demarcation Line into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). We believe he is currently in DPRK custody and are working with our KPA counterparts to resolve this incident. pic.twitter.com/a6amvnJTuY
— United Nations Command 유엔군사령부/유엔사 (@UN_Command) July 18, 2023
On Twitter:
Some units in the first wave that hit Omaha Beach on D-Day suffered a casualty rate north of 90%. We asked young men with their whole lives ahead of them to pay the ultimate price.
— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) May 30, 2022
Next time you want to complain about how tough you have it, read a history book. #MemorialDay pic.twitter.com/2O5oNPNtZo
Just like the good old times with Uncle Joe or back to the future?
At the New York Times, "Spurred by Putin, Russians Turn on One Another Over the War":
Citizens are denouncing one another, illustrating how the war is feeding paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Marina Dubrova, an English teacher on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the Pacific, showed an uplifting YouTube video to her eighth-grade class last month in which children, in Russian and Ukrainian, sing about a “world without war.” After she played it, a group of girls stayed behind during recess and quizzed her on her views. “Ukraine is a separate country, a separate one,” Ms. Dubrova, 57, told them. “No longer,” one of the girls shot back. A few days later, the police came to her school in the port town of Korsakov. In court, she heard a recording of that conversation, apparently made by one of the students. The judge handed down a $400 fine for “publicly discrediting” Russia’s Armed Forces. The school fired her, she said, for “amoral behavior.” “It’s as though they’ve all plunged into some kind of madness,” Ms. Dubrova said in a phone interview, reflecting on the pro-war mood around her. With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within. The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent. There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain. In the western region of Kaliningrad, the authorities sent residents text messages urging them to provide phone numbers and email addresses of “provocateurs” in connection with the “special operation” in Ukraine, Russian newspapers reported; they can do so conveniently through a specialized account in the Telegram messaging app. A nationalist political party launched a website urging Russians to report “pests” in the elite. “I am absolutely sure that a cleansing will begin,” Dmitri Kuznetsov, the member of Parliament behind the website, said in an interview, predicting that the process would accelerate after the “active phase” of the war ended. He then clarified: “We don’t want anyone to be shot, and we don’t even want people to go to prison.” But it is the history of mass execution and political imprisonment in the Soviet era, and the denunciation of fellow citizens encouraged by the state, that now looms over Russia’s deepening climate of repression. Mr. Putin set the tone in a speech on March 16, declaring that Russian society needed a “self-purification” in which people would “distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.” In the Soviet logic, those who choose not to report their fellow citizens could be viewed as being suspect themselves. “In these conditions, fear is settling into people again,” said Nikita Petrov, a leading scholar of the Soviet secret police. “And that fear dictates that you report.” In March, Mr. Putin signed a law that punishes public statements contradicting the government line on what the Kremlin terms its “special military operation” in Ukraine with as much as 15 years in prison. It was a harsh but necessary measure, the Kremlin said, given the West’s “information war” against Russia. Prosecutors have already used the law against more than 400 people, according to the OVD-Info rights group, including a man who held up a piece of paper with eight asterisks on it. “No to war” in Russian has eight letters. “This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Bayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens. “This is some kind of enormous joke that we, to our misfortune, are living in,” Aleksandra Bayeva, the head of OVD-Info’s legal department, said of the absurdity of some of the war-related prosecutions. She said she had seen a sharp rise in the frequency of people reporting on their fellow citizens. A recording of that exchange appeared on a popular account on Telegram that often posts inside information about criminal cases. The Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., called her in and warned her that her words blaming Russia for the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, last month were “100 percent a criminal case.” She is now being investigated for causing “grave consequences” under last month’s censorship law, punishable by 10 to 15 years in prison. Ms. Gen, 45, said she found little support among her students or from her school, and quit her job this month. When she talked in class about her opposition to the war, she said she felt “hatred” toward her radiating from some of her students. “My point of view did not resonate in the hearts and minds of basically anyone,” she said in an interview...
Still more.
Another day of war. Thursday will mark exactly one month since Putin's invasion.
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine—The battle for the southern port city of Mariupol intensified Tuesday with fleeing civilians describing Russian and Ukrainian forces locked in street-by-street warfare through the city’s downtown as Moscow’s airstrikes gutted entire neighborhoods. Nearly a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, it is on the verge of taking Mariupol in what would be the first major city to fall under its control. But Mariupol is a shattered prize. “Everything fell apart,” Natalia Poluiko said Tuesday, hours after arriving in Zaporizhzhia, about 150 miles to the west, with her 8-year-old daughter and five other relatives. “We had a choice to wait there until a bomb fell on our building, or risk trying to get out.” The family fled Mariupol in two vehicles with belongings strapped to the roof and a religious icon on the dashboard, praying for safe passage on the approach to each Russian checkpoint. Hundreds of people from Mariupol now arrive daily in Zaporizhzhia in a grim procession of cars, with shattered windshields and shrapnel damage speaking to the ordeal endured by their passengers. The wider battle lines across Ukraine have shifted little in recent days. Ukrainian forces said they were regaining ground in some areas. Russia’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday its troops had made progress battling for towns along its lines of attack. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, maintained his busy schedule of trying to rally international support on Tuesday, speaking with the pope and, separately, the Italian parliament. President Biden heads to Europe on Wednesday for talks with allies about the war and is preparing to roll out new sanctions on most members of Russia’s State Duma, the lower house of parliament, U.S. officials said. The fighting around Mariupol has been under way since the opening days of Russia’s assault that began Feb. 24. The city has seen stepped-up levels of attack for about the past two weeks and as the battle moved closer to the city. Mariupol has been a focus of the Russian offensive because it is a strategically important city linking Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine with a swath of territory Moscow has captured in the south, and creating an arc containing much of the country’s Russian-speaking population. Streams of cars from Mariupol pull into the parking lot of a hardware store on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia—now a way station for people fleeing to safety further west, or abroad—part of the more than 10 million people uprooted by the fighting. Taped to the windows are homemade signs reading “children” in Russian, and strips of white material tied to the door handles, scant protection from the war raging over their city. More than a dozen residents who fled since last week described a desperate struggle to stay alive in a city where venturing outside meant exposure to being shot, shredded by artillery fire or obliterated in an airstrike. “They are basically wiping the city from the face of the earth,” said Andriy, 37, who took his chances during a lull in the bombardment on Monday and fled Mariupol with his wife and two children. Andriy, who declined to give his full name, said his ears had yet to adjust to the absence of constant shelling in the city he left behind. “It’s as though I’ve come back to life.” Although Mariupol was always likely to be a target of Russia’s invasion, many residents stayed because they couldn’t believe the situation would get so bad. By the time they realized what was unfolding, it was too late. The bombardment of the city of between 350,000 to 400,000 residents was growing heavier and closer by the day. Local officials say Russia has rained 50 to 100 bombs a day on Mariupol, destroying between 80% and 90% of the city. Ukraine rejected a Russian ultimatum to surrender the city this week. Ukrainian military officials said Tuesday that those defending the town were able to destroy a Russian patrol boat operating close to the city, as well as a Russian radio complex...
At Der Spiegel, "The Ukrainian Capital Under Fire":
The people of Kyiv spend their nights in subway stations and their days preparing for the arrival of the Russians. Fear is rising, but so too is the resolve to defend their country from Putin’s invasion. It is a restive night in the subway car. Those sleeping on the floor or narrow benches snore, rustle and cough their way through the night as cold air seeps through the cracks in the doors. From above, from the surface, the muted sounds of war can sometimes be heard. Kyiv is under attack, on this night as well. "It’s rumbling longer than usual. What is that?" asks a woman in the half-light. "No idea. Why don’t you go up and have a look," a man’s voice jokes, earning a giggle from someone. Kyiv these days is a city on the frontlines. It is a city where the subway stations are for sleeping, providing protection against rocket attacks. It is a city where the streets are blockaded with automobile tires and cement blocks. Where men with yellow armbands made of tape examine identity papers at roadblocks and hunt down spies and saboteurs. A city with burned-out cars standing at intersections and long lines of people in front of the grocery stores. Where bizarre signs are ready to greet the enemy troops who hope to force their way into the city: "Russian soldier, go fuck yourself!" Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine a week ago. And even if he wasn’t able to rapidly take control of Kyiv, one thing is clear: This city remains his primary objective. On both sides of the Dnieper River, which runs through the Ukrainian capital, Russian troops are advancing from the north in the hopes of cutting the city off from the surrounding countryside. It is a city where just a few weeks ago, the cafés were full and the streets bustling with life – and which is now preparing for a long siege and house-to-house fighting. For the residents of Kyiv, dark days are upon them. On Tuesday evening, a few colleagues and I do the same thing many Kyiv residents do every evening: We pack up pillows, blankets and food and descend into the subway. The heavy metal doors that can seal off subway stations in Kyiv are almost completely closed, we have to slide through a gap to enter the station at Poshtova Square. It’s 6 p.m. and an air-raid warning has sounded. Our plan is to make our way to the Obolon station to meet up with my colleague Krystyna Berdynskych, a Kyiv journalist. The nightly curfew is set to begin in two hours. Those who remain on the streets after that will be treated as saboteurs or spies, city officials have warned. Fears of Russian spies and of a pro-Moscow fifth column are widespread in Kyiv. And they are growing as Russian troops advance on the city, especially from the north. The first Russian soldiers have long since reached the Kyiv suburbs. The Obolon District is also in the northern part of the city. On just the second day of the war, on Feb. 25, shooting erupted there, with Ukrainian military leaders reporting the incursion of Russian agents. For Kyiv residents, it was a shock that the enemy had turned up in the heart of their city so early on in the conflict. In hindsight, there is much to suggest that it was a false alarm. As we head north, I look into the tired faces of the passengers and begin wondering if those in the subway far below the city would even realize if Kyiv were to fall to the Russians in the night...
Still more.
Well, let's not call it a war or anything. I mean, it's all daisy-chains and puppies over there. Over 2 million Ukrainian refugees? Pfft. That's crazy talk. Folks are just taking advantage of the March thaws to get out and see the sights.
At the Irish Times, "Email on communications policy reminds worker of responsibility to 'be impartial'."
Yes. "Impartial." If you've watched any of the recent sessions at the Security Council, you can be assured *everything* is impartial because the Russian delegation currently holds the rotating chair of the council's presidency.
No worries. IT'S ALL IMPARTIAL!
From Caroline Glick:
At the UN General Assembly last week, a large majority of member nations voted to lavishly fund a permanent inquisition against the Jewish state. The member states funded the operation of an “ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry,” against Israel. The commission, run by outspoken haters of Israel with long records of demonizing the State of Israel and its people, was formed by the UN Human Rights Council in a special session in May. Its purpose is to deny and reject Israel’s right to exist, its right to self-defense, its right to enforce is laws, and its citizens rights to their properties and to their very lives. The Human Rights Council’s decision to form its new permanent inquisition constitutes an unprecedented escalation of the political war the UN has been waging against Israel for the past fifty years. To grasp the danger, it is necessary to understand how Israel’s foes operate at the UN and how their partners in Europe and Israel itself operate. We begin with the UN. In 2005, acting on pressure from the Bush administration, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan disbanded the UN Human Rights Commission. The Bush administration’s chief complaint was that the commission was endemically anti-Semitic. The UN Human Rights Council was founded in 2006, and its members and UN staff wasted no time making clear that they intended for the new council to be even more anti-Semitic than its predecessor was. Shortly after the Human Rights Council was established, it determined that demonizing Israel would be a permanent agenda item. Item Number 7 is the only permanent agenda item that deals with a specific country. And like the council’s nine other permanent agenda items, Item 7 is discussed at every formal council session. Item 7 enjoins the council to discuss, “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” Having a permanent agenda item dedicated to specifically demonizing Israel however, wasn’t enough to satisfy the Human Rights Council’s obsession with attacking the Jewish state. So since 2006, the council has convened nine special sessions to expand its focus on attacking the Jews. To get a sense of just how overwhelming the council’s focus on Israel is, in the same period, the council has convened just 19 special sessions to deal with every other country on the planet. The council’s template for demonizing Israel has been fairly consistent through the years. Immediately after each Palestinian terror campaign against Israel comes to an end, the Holocaust denying, terror sponsoring PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has his UN representatives ask for a special session to discuss the “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity” Israel supposedly carried out against the Palestinians. No one ever mentions that ever single missile launched against Israel from the Hamas terror regime in Gaza constitutes a separate war crime. No one ever mentions Hamas at all. In short order, the council accedes to the PLO’s request and convenes the special session. On cue the member nation’s representatives rise, accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, operating a killing machine, targeting children, and any other crime they can think of. Then a majority of the members vote to form a new “commission of inquiry,” led and staffed by “independent” investigators nearly all of whom believe that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews have too much power. At the end of its “in-depth investigation,” the commission issues a report which determines that Israel conducted war crimes and crimes against humanity. This brings us to the second arm of the international political war against Israel – Europe. Every Human Rights Council resolution to form a commission of inquiry, includes a call to non-governmental organizations and other parties to submit “testimonies” and “reports” that will substantiate the council’s blood libel that Israel committed war crimes and is inherently and incurably evil. NGOs registered in Israel, the Palestinian Authority and in Western countries answer the council’s call. And the final reports issued by each of the inquisitions include hundreds of citations from “testimonies” and reports submitted by these NGOs as proof of Israel’s inherent venality. These organizations are not independent actors. European governments fund them and direct their operations. If they operated in the U.S., nearly every NGO involved in the Human Rights Council’s witch hunts against Israel would have to register as foreign agents of European governments. As MK Amichai Chikli put it, “Europe is waging a war against Israel.” Last week, Chikli and MK Keti Shitreet were scheduled to hold a conference at the Knesset on European funding of radical NGOs. But in a sign of the depth of Europe’s commitment to its war against Israel, and to its power in Israel, the EU embassy in Israel placed massive pressure on the Knesset secretariat and the Knesset Speaker to cancel the conference. In the end, the conference was cancelled at the last moment, citing Covid-19 restrictions, even as the Knesset’s parliamentary operations went on unimpeded. The reports the Human Rights Council publishes at the end of each fake commission of inquiry against Israel form the basis for various boycott efforts against Israel that European bureaucrats carry out. For instance, on the basis of one such report, EU member states stopped recognizing Israeli veterinary certificates relating to agricultural exports from Jewish farmers in Samaria. This brings us to the third arm of the international political war against Israel – Israel’s European-influenced, progressive legal establishment. Last weekend, Haaretz published an interview with former attorney general and recently retired Supreme Court justice Meni Mazuz. Between the lines, Mazuz explained the legal establishment’s methods for transforming anti-Israel UN documents into “law.” A significant portion of the interview dealt with Mazuz’s campaign from the bench to block military demolitions of homes of terrorists. As Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University’s Law Faculty explains, “The law explicitly stipulates that it is legal to demolish the homes of terrorists. And there are dozens of Supreme Court decisions that approve demolition orders, based on the law.” Mazuz told Haaretz that for many years, including during his tenure as Attorney General, “I thought that house demolitions were an immoral step, in contravention of the law whose effectiveness was dubious.” But when Mazuz served as attorney general, he lacked the authority to end the practice. As he explained, “I couldn’t tell the government that it is prohibited when dozens of Supreme Court decisions say that it is permitted.” But the minute Mazuz was appointed to the Supreme Court, he began legislating his political views from the bench. To substantiate his position regarding the demolition of terrorists’ homes, Mazuz said that he relied on “the positions of legal scholars,” in Israel and abroad, and on the decisions of the UN Human Rights Council. “The demolitions cause us international damage,” Mazuz said. “Do you think that these things stay here? That they don’t come up every year at human rights councils in Geneva and in international forums?” In other words, Mazuz made clear that along with several of his colleagues on the bench, he used the anti-Israel reports generated by the obsessively anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, to justify his rulings which denied Israel the right to act in accordance with Israeli law in a manner that the duly elected government, and the duly constituted leadership of the IDF deemed necessary in their efforts to quell Palestinian terrorism. As Bell explains, aside from a limited category of UN Security Council resolutions, UN actions and decisions are all devoid of significance in international law. Decisions by the UN Human Rights Council, like those of all other UN bodies are political documents without any legal weight. Mazuz and his colleagues in the legal fraternity exploit the public’s ignorance and the impotence of the government and Knesset to transform these political documents into “law” through their judgments and legal opinions. And this brings us to the Human Rights Council’s permanent inquisition whose operations a large majority of UN member nations voted to fund last week at the General Assembly. As Prof. Anne Bayefsky explained in a detailed report published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the commission of inquiry’s mandate is effectively limitless. The commission is empowered to rewrite the entire history of the Arab conflict with Israel and determine that Israel’s birth was an original sin which must be undone. The commission is empowered to carry out an “investigation” on the basis of “testimonies” which EU-funded anti-Israel groups will supply them describing entirely fraudulent “war crimes” that will form the basis of indictments of Israeli elected leaders, IDF commanders and line soldiers, and Israeli civilians who reside in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem. The UN’s political “courts” in turn will agree to try them for these made-up crimes. Moreover, as Bayefsky noted, the commission is charged with making “recommendations on measures to be taken by third States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem…[to ensure] that they do not aid or assist in the Commission of internationally wrongful acts.” A similar statement is made in the resolution’s preamble regarding “business enterprises.” The message in both cases is self-explanatory. The reports the inquisition will publish will serve as the basis for economic boycotts of Israel to be enacted by both government bureaucrats and businesses. Israel has no choice but to fight this commission and any business, government or judge that uses its reality-free reports. Israel must ensure that the anti-Semitic propaganda the commission puts out does not turn into “law” through the actions of radical justices and government attorneys. And Israel must reconcile itself to the fact that the EU bureaucracy and much of Europe is waging a war against it, and launch a vigorous counter-assault...
You don't have to like Jonah Goldberg --- and I don't much, especially his NeverTrumpism --- but he's a good writer. Or at least I think so. And he's especially good when he's writing about Israel.
This piece is worth your time, at the Dispatch.
Well, this is the New York Times again, so feel free to click over to the next blog on your own personal blogroll if you'd prefer not to read this below (and I wouldn't blame you, frankly).
But, I do feel it's of interest, and perhaps of great importance (not good importance, sadly), so here you go:
I know, she's a "very bad woman!", though the quote's not mine, as I'm one-quarter-quoting from the Twilight Zone's old episode, "You're a Bad Man!"
And here's the obligatorily video of our former Ambassador the the United Nations, and who is the former Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University (or she still may in fact be a current professor there, because evil dolts like this lady don't give a crap about ethics nor morals, or all those "bourgeois" things that us "backward rubes" in "flyover country" might think are important, as those "old-fashioned" kind of things are what're actually "keeping the republic," and dang, that's a miracle at this point, sheesh):
* Ethiopia’s former Minister of Health and Minister of Foreign Affairs.And FrontPage Magazine, "The Legacy of a Marxist failure – Dr. WHO":
* Was elected Director-General of the World Health Organization in 2017.
* Nominated Robert Mugabe, the Marxist former president of Zimbabwe, to serve as a WHO Goodwill Ambassador in 2017.
* Purposely covered up three separate outbreaks of cholera in Ethiopia, so as to avoid the impact that a public admission of a cholera epidemic might have on tourism and on his party’s public image.
* Was alleged to have helped facilitate a systematic genocide targeting the Amhara people of Ethiopia.
* Was accused of complicity in the commission of “crimes against humanity.”
* Served as a propagandist on behalf of Beijing in a massive coverup of China’s role in unleashing the deadly worldwide coronavirus pandemic in 2019-20.
You can't be this stupid Bill. Malicious yes, but ignorant of the attacks on Trump as a racist for taking sensible measures? Also everyone was taking cues from the pawn of the Communist dictatorship that launched the virus Dr. W.H.O. https://t.co/Et3NIWlm9C https://t.co/jpfLybml35— David Horowitz (@horowitz39) April 13, 2020
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is the name of the top global health official. But what do we know about this man? The globalization-favoring leftist mainstream media has been silent, apparently reluctant to investigate the total lack of qualifications of this man for the role.
They give him the moniker of “Doctor”, but he is not really a doctor at all. In fact, he is the first World Health Organization Director-General without a medical degree.
He has never cured a patient in his life. He has a diploma in public health, but even this could not cover his dangerous incompetence as Ethiopia’s Health Minister.
There is growing unhappiness with this man following the disastrous virus crisis. Prominent US senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio joined the global call for Doctor WHO’s removal.
Rubio accused him, with reasonable cause, of pandering to Communist Beijing who, through the office of Dr. WHO, misled the global community. Tedros echoed China’s false claim that the virus had no human-to-human transmission.
In other words, he was the global mouthpiece for Chinese lies.
Former US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, tweeted about Tedros’s unquestioning promotion Chinese lies. “This was posted by the WHO on January 14, that the WHO found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus.”
The World Health Organization didn’t find any because they didn’t look. Tedros Adhanom simply chanted China’s disinformation.
President Trump imposed a travel ban on Chinese entering the United States in late January. He is no medical expert. Trump was right. The World Health Organization under Tedros was wrong.
In February, Tedros, the Chinese front man at the World Health Organization, continued to say there was no need to impose travel restrictions on China. He insisted that measures to restrict travel and trade were “unnecessary” in trying to halt the spread of the virus.
This as hospitals and cemeteries were filling with the victims of the Chinese pandemic.
Because Tedros echoed China’s lies, the global communities lost vital weeks in evaluating and fighting the pandemic to the cost of 100,000 lives and widespread economic ruin, a global ruin that is benefiting China’s Belt and Road foreign and economic global policy.
Not only does China have a global responsibility to come clean, so does the WHO. But who is going to keep their feet to the fire? The United Nations? Forget it!Keep reading.
In early April, while the China pandemic was raging from country to country, China was elected to sit on the UN Human Rights Council panel, a committee that decides who is a human rights abuser. Any bets that China will be excluded from such a list no matter how many of their citizens were abused, silenced, welded into infected apartment buildings to die, or made to disappear throughout China’s national epidemic.
In February and March, as the world was reeling from the Chinese virus, Tedros continued to praise the Beijing regime.
In February he said, “I was so impressed with my meeting with President Xi and his commitment to take serious measures to prevent the spread of the virus to other countries.”
What “serious measures” was he referring too? We haven’t seen any...
WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.We're all gonna die!
The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.
Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”
At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.
As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.
A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines.
But as these natural landscapes wither and become less biologically rich, the services they can provide to humans have been dwindling.
Humans are producing more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural productivity on 23 percent of the planet’s land area, the new report said. The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.
The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient. Instead, they call for “transformative changes” that include curbing wasteful consumption, slimming down agriculture’s environmental footprint and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing...
Denmark plans to house the country’s most unwelcome foreigners in a tiny, hard-to-reach island. One of the two ferries that serve the island is called the Virus. https://t.co/BsAP5scxcf— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 4, 2018
COPENHAGEN — Denmark plans to house the country’s most unwelcome foreigners in a most unwelcoming place: a tiny, hard-to-reach island that now holds the laboratories, stables and crematory of a center for researching contagious animal diseases.Oh, like the U.N.' s1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol? Well, doesn't sound like Denmark's too worried about non-compliance or anything, but who am I to critique? (*Eye-roll.*)
As if to make the message clearer, one of the two ferries that serve the island is called the Virus.
“They are unwanted in Denmark, and they will feel that,” the immigration minister, Inger Stojberg, wrote on Facebook.
On Friday, the center-right government and the right-wing Danish People’s Party announced an agreement to house as many as 100 people on Lindholm Island — foreigners who have been convicted of crimes but who cannot be returned to their home countries. Many would be rejected asylum seekers.
The 17-acre island, in an inlet of the Baltic Sea, lies about two miles from the nearest shore, and ferry service is infrequent. Foreigners will be required to report at the island center daily, and face imprisonment if they do not.
“We’re going to minimize the number of ferry departures as much as at all possible,” Martin Henriksen, a spokesman for the Danish People’s Party on immigration, told TV 2. “We’re going to make it as cumbersome and expensive as possible.”
The deal allocates about $115 million over four years for immigrant facilities on the island, which are scheduled to open in 2021.
The finance minister, Kristian Jensen, who led the negotiations, said the island was not a prison, but added that anyone placed there would have to sleep there.
Louise Holck, deputy executive director of The Danish Institute for Human Rights, said her organization would watch the situation “very closely” for possible violations of Denmark’s international obligations...
#Migration is:
— IOM - UN Migration (@UNmigration) April 1, 2018
• inevitable
• desirable
• necessary
this Easter, let’s not forget those who are caught in crises around the world 🌎 pic.twitter.com/e7fT1FE0D1
Bullshit. Send them home. https://t.co/I0aKw4Zyg0
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) April 3, 2018
Pres. Trump says he likes the message Nikki Haley sent at the UN that the "US will be taking names" of countries against Jerusalem embassy move. "Let them vote against us. We'll save a lot. We don't care." https://t.co/cFinWveOTw pic.twitter.com/sEm7X1AIGF
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) December 21, 2017
Nikki Haley confronts the U.N.'s "jackals" https://t.co/XfdqJjfiiY via @BV pic.twitter.com/JVdOIaFaSJ— Bloomberg (@business) December 21, 2017
Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (Ret.): "@nikkihaley is on track to be our Margaret Thatcher. She's really strong... She's sticking up for truth, justice, and the American way." pic.twitter.com/J2ADep1koT
— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 20, 2017
United Nations Ambassador @nikkihaley issued this warning to countries planning to vote against @POTUS's Jerusalem decision. https://t.co/XA7HenCPN5 pic.twitter.com/hNM9tcLLqW
— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 20, 2017
