Lightning Times

Morning Report: 2013-05-30

Syria says its shipment of Russian S-300 missiles (registration) has arrived.

Burmese changes: 'After 50 years of brutal military rule, Myanmar’s democratic opening has been swift and startling...'.

Over the past two years dramatic reforms introduced by a new president, Thein Sein, prompted by the country’s increasingly desperate economic straits, have started a rapid transition from secretive isolation to an open democracy of sorts. The mere fact of such a change taking place has surprised the world; its speed and breadth have caused widespread bewilderment.

China interested in the Azores?

"Hundreds of thousands" of AP phone records seized, says CEO Gary Pruitt.

Richard Fernandez examines the dangers of recruiting informants - if indeed that is the reason so many warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Bomber; Michael Adebolajo, the Woolwich beheader and Alexandre D. the Parisian neck-stabber were ignored.

The biggest cost to using informants is that they can in the meantime continue their life of crime. In fact, they are often expected to proceed as before in order to rise ever higher in the hierarchy of the target. The crimes they may naturally commit along the way often go unpunished. The price of catching the big fish is feeding it bait.

Morning Report: 2013-01-03

USA: Illinois state senate moves toward gun ban. Breitbart: 'On Wednesday, the Illinois Senate Public Health Committee, led by anti-gun, Senate President John Cullerton and backed by Governor Patrick Quinn, passed House Bills 1263 and 815. These measures, if passed would ban nearly all common firearms and magazines, and institute new shooting range restrictions. ...'

Israel: Bayit Yehudi surges in polls. Tablet's Adam Chandler has trouble believing it, but the Jewish Home Party looks set to tie Labor for second place after Likud-Beiteinu in the upcoming Israeli elections.

USA: Hillary Clinton said heading for 'full recovery'. CNN reports that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was discharged from New York Presbyterian Hospital on Wednesday after spending three days being treated for a blood clot, and doctors expect her to make a full recovery.

China: Housing market heading for a fall? Walter Russell Mead:

The Chinese government, worried that property prices were climbing too high, first started taking steps to hold down prices. In some places, they fell by as much as ten percent. Then, fearful of the disastrous economic effects of a bursting housing bubble, authorities relaxed these policies. Now they’ve started to artificially create land scarcity to drive prices up again by reducing the number of competitive auctions. Critics worry that the skyrocketing land prices will once again increase the chances that the housing bubble will burst.

Our reaction at Via Meadia to this news is mixed. ...

Read the rest at the link.

Morning Report: 2012-10-10

USA / Libya: State denies mob protests before Benghazi attack. It's been difficult to get clear, reliable (or even consistent) information on just exactly what happened on September 11 of this year in Benghazi; all we know for sure is that a US Consulate was destroyed, and Ambassador Stevens and three other diplomatic personnel are dead. Up until now, the official story (to the extent that there is one) has been that it was a spontaneous, mob demonstration that got out of hand. This would be exculpatory for the Administration (because it implies something unpredictable) and for the attackers (because it implies they were acting in the heat of the moment). Well, now there's a different story: that the calculated, premeditated attack was in fact a calculated, premeditated attack. Go to the link to marvel at the ABC folks' ability to act surprised. Here's Tim Cavanaugh at Reason:

The Obama administration's unraveling story of the deadly September 11 attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya has not finished unraveling. A State Department official yesterday confirmed that there was no mob outside the Benhazi compound prior to the Al Qaeda attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. And a former security officer at the embassy told Congress that officials on the ground had spent months prior to the attack requesting more protection for the site. ...

Go read it all.

USA: Obama thought he won debate - report. Mail (UK):

When President Barack Obama stepped off the stage in Denver last week the 60 million Americans watching the debate against Mitt Romney already knew it had been a disaster for him.

But what nobody knew, until now, was that Obama believed he had actually won.

In an extraordinary insight into the events leading up to the 90 minute showdown which changed the face of the election, a Democrat close to the Obama campaign today reveals that the President also did not take his debate preparation seriously, ignored the advice of senior aides and ignored one-liners that had been prepared to wound Romney. ...

Fernandez, recalling the ill-fated mission of Colonel Kiyono Ichiki, observes with understatement that "It is important not to underestimate the opponent." Go to the links for the rest.

China / Burma: Dammed if you don't. Via Meadia covers the aborted Myitsone Dam project in northern Burma (or Myanmar, if you prefer). Moral of the story: "When you meddle in affairs beyond your borders, you must take local politics and sensitivities into account; you can’t just make deals with dictators and hope for the best."

China: By land and by sea. Robert Kaplan at Stratfor (registration) writes that China's well-publicized accession to the ranks of the world's sea powers is secondary to - and dependent upon - its ability to keep stability in its own interior. Kaplan argues that "China is, albeit to a much smaller extent than the former Soviet Union, a prison of nations waiting to express themselves once central authority weakens." Register or subscribe to read the article.

Morning Report: 2012-07-26

China: South China Sea. 'China announced this week it would station troops on Yongxing Island, a one-square-mile islet in the Paracel Islands ...'

Israel: Alert as Syria moves chemical weapons to border. Breitbart:

Coinciding perfectly with Obama's warning not to use chemical weapons, Assad's government appears to have shifted the location of their chemical weapons for the very purpose against which Obama warned.

According to reports, "Assad has transferred some of [the] weapons and equipment for mixing chemical components to airports on the [Syrian] border." ...

Global: Where are the Jews? The Economist offers some answers.

Morning Report: 2012-07-10

Official visits in London and Kabul, official truth from Beijing, and desperate officials in Damascus.

France / Britain: Hollande to meet with British leaders on UK visit. French President Francois Hollande will meet with British Prime Minister David Cameron and Queen Elizabeth II during a visit to the United Kingdom today. They'll talk about the economy, the eurozone, and foreign policy issues.

Afghanistan: Pakistan PM Raja Pervez Ashraf to visit. Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf will visit Kabul on July 16, according to reports.

China: Censors tip Beijing's hand. Analects at The Economist covers online censorship in China. 'Teams at Harvard and the University of Hong Kong have been using new software that allows them to watch the censoring of posts on Chinese social-media sites more closely than before,' the Economist's Asia blogger reports, and as many as 13 pct of all social-media posts are censored. In another censorship-watch program, 'researchers at the University of Hong Kong have developed a program that concentrates solely on China’s most popular microblogging site, Sina Weibo.' They also discovered that an uptick in official censorship often portends an imminent crackdown.

Syria: Assad regime running out of options. Strategy Page notes that 'with more cash and weapons flowing in from the wealthy Persian Gulf Arab states, and Turkey providing bases and training for the growing number of Syrian men fleeing the country, the number of trained and armed rebels within Syria grows.'

Morning Report: 2012-07-04

USA: Americans celebrate Independence Day.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Read the whole thing here. Listen here. Scott Johnson at Power Line on the eternal meaning of Independence Day:

On July 9, 1858, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas gave a campaign speech to a raucous throng from the balcony of the Tremont Hotel in Chicago. Abraham Lincoln was in the audience when Douglas prepared to speak. Douglas invited Lincoln to come join him on the balcony to watch the speech. In his speech Douglas rang the themes of the momentous campaign that Lincoln and Douglas waged that summer and fall for Douglas’s Senate seat.

Douglas paid tribute to Lincoln as a “kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and an honorable opponent,” but took issue with Lincoln’s June 16 speech to the Illinois Republican convention that had named him its candidate for Douglas’s seat. In that speech Lincoln had famously asserted that the nation could not exist “half slave and half free.” According to Douglas, Lincoln’s assertion was inconsistent with the “diversity” in domestic institutions that was “the great safeguard of our liberties.” ...

Go to the post to read Lincoln's response.

Israel: Entebbe remembered. On the day of America's bicentennial, Israeli commandos executed one of the most daring hostage rescues in history.

It took Israeli commandos minutes to conduct one of the greatest and most daring rescue missions in modern history, in Entebbe, Uganda, on July 4, 1976.

During those brief fateful moments, good triumphed over evil; the innocent were saved and the terrorists who threatened them were routed.

It was 11:30 pm Saturday night, June 27, 1976. The seventh night that over 100 Israelis, non-Israeli Jews, and the twelve-member Air France crew were held in the Entebbe airport since PFLP (Popular Front Liberation Palestine) terrorists and two West German supporters, hijacked the jet, Air France flight 139, while on the ground during a stopover in Athens as it was bound from Tel Aviv to Paris. The Ugandan regime under Idi Amin Dada supported the terrorists and gave them cover. ...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost his brother on that day:
The rescue operation, was renamed Operation Yonatan in honor of its commander, Yonatan Netanyahu, 30, who was cut down by a Ugandan sentry.Netanyahu believed from the outset that the plan could be accomplished and his confidence influenced government leaders and his fellow commandos. On that day, one of Israel’s greatest soldiers had fallen.

China: Uighur hijackers killed by their hostages. More recently, 'Two men who allegedly tried to hijack a plane in far west China by battering the cockpit door with a crutch and trying to set off explosives have died, state media said Monday.' Atlas covers it. Rantburg provides commentary.

Turkey: Bodies of two airmen recovered. 'The bodies of the crew members of a Turkish jet shot down by Syria last month have been found. Turkey's TRT television said the two airmen were found on the Eastern Mediterranean seabed by a US deep-sea exploration vessel, according to AP. The F-4 Phantom jet was shot down on 22 June, after Syrian authorities claimed it had violated their airspace, a claim disputed by Turkey. ...'

Morning Report: 2012-06-29

Chinese astronauts return home. BBC: 'Jing Haipeng, commander of the Shenzhou-9 crew, was the first to emerge from the return capsule, followed by his flight engineers, Liu Wang and the country's first woman astronaut, Liu Yang. Job well done. But their grin is shared across the whole Chinese nation today. ... The Shenzhou-9 mission posted a series of firsts. Liu Yang's presence in orbit obviously caught the headlines, but I was thinking more about the engineering milestones: the first manned automatic and manual dockings; the first long-duration spaceflight; and the first crew to live aboard a permanently orbiting module, Tiangong-1. ...' Space.com: 'By any measure, Shenzhou 9 — the nation's fourth human spaceflight mission, after efforts in 2003, 2005 and 2008 — appears to have been a big success. The spacecraft docked with the unmanned Tiangong 1 space module by remote control on June 18, and then again on June 24 while being piloted by the taikonauts (as Chinese astronauts are called). ...' The Telegraph has video.

US Ambassador to Kenya quits. 'The U.S. ambassador to Kenya has resigned just over a year after taking up the post, citing differences with Washington over priorities and his style of leadership, an embassy statement said on Friday. Scott Gration's departure came a week after the U.S. embassy warned of a threat of an imminent militant attack in the port city of Mombasa, angering the Kenyan government which said the advisory amounted to "economic sabotage". ...'

Syria: Hamas leader killed in Damascus. Ha'Aretz: 'A Hamas member was killed in Damascus Wednesday night, the French news agency AFP cited a senior official for the organization as saying, adding that Hamas suspected that the Mossad was behind the killing. The official, who spoke anonymously, said that "a group of people entered the home of Kamel Ranaja (also known as Nizar Abu Mujhad), and killed him. According to information that we have gathered, the Mossad is behind the attack." ...'

China's Three Seas

Belmont Club on Chinese naval strategy.

And so, the inevitable question arises ...

... is Liu Yang an astronaut or a cosmonaut?

Morning Report: 2012-06-14

Egypt court: Ahmed Shafiq can run. Stratfor: 'Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court ruled against a law that would have barred Ahmed Shafiq from the presidential vote, Al Jazeera reported June 14. The court also declared that one-third of Parliament members are void.' NOW Lebanon has more:

Egypt's constitutional court ruled on Thursday that a third of the seats in the Islamist-dominated parliament were invalid, stirring fresh uncertainty in the politically divided country.

"The constitutional court ruled unconstitutional some articles of the parliamentary election law related to the direct vote system," MENA reported, referring to the third of seats elected on a first-past-the-post system. ...

Read the rest at the link.

China tightens grip on information. Also from Stratfor, 'As China's 2012 transfer of power approaches, Beijing will likely continue to tighten restrictions and limit information flows in an attempt to bring the intelligence industry under government control.' This includes nominally public information; one of the motivations seems to be to prevent citizens from amassing too many embarrassing details about officials. One countermeasure is increasing reliance on guanxi, 'a complex cultural system of personal relationships -- and moral obligations -- which most Chinese see not only as a natural way of doing business but also as pragmatically necessary.'