Lightning Times

Morning Report: 2014-06-12

Nigeria: Boko Haram demands ransom for kidnapped women. Boko Haram terrorists have demanded a ransom of 40 cows for each of 20 kidnapped women who have been held for a week now. The Fulani women were captured near Chibok, Borno Province, in northeastern Nigeria.

Iraq: Parliament fails to muster quorum for emergency plan. The Iraqi parliament failed to muster a quorum for approving the Shiite prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s plan to impose a national state of emergency to ward off ISIS’s threatened march on Baghdad.

Russia: Military exercises held in response to NATO drills. In Kaliningrad (that little piece of Russia that's situated between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast), Russia has begun military drills in what it says is a response to NATO moves in Eastern Europe.

Morning Report: 2013-07-05

African Union suspends Egypt. 'The African Union is suspending Egypt from membership in the continental body after the military ouster of President Mohammed Morsi. AU Commission head Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told a news conference Friday that the removal of Morsi on Wednesday falls under the AU doctrine on unconstitutional changes of government. ...'

India, China agree on need for strategic communication. 'Seeking to maintain peace and stability on the line of actual control in the backdrop of the PLA incursion in Ladakh, India and China on Friday agreed that "strategic communication" is required for building mutual trust even as they agreed to resume joint army exercises. During the delegation-level talks between defence minister AK Antony and his Chinese counterpart Gen Chang Wanquan here, the two sides agreed that they will make joint efforts to maintain peace and tranquillity on the borders and take measures to strengthen communication and coordination at various levels between the border guarding forces. ...'

Pakistan, China look to Arabian Sea. 'China and Pakistan set their sights on Friday on developing a transport link through rugged mountains and lawless lands, a route they hope will boost economic growth and bring critical oil supplies to power-hungry China much faster. A broad agreement for the "economic corridor" was among eight pacts signed following a meeting in Beijing between Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. ...'

Report: Egyptian troops fire on Morsi supporters. 'Egyptian troops reportedly opened fire Friday on supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi outside the Republican Guard headquarters, where he was believed held, but there were conflicting reports on casualties. ...'

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: 2013-01-02

France: Charlie Hebdo publishes Mohammed comic. The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published on Wednesday a comic book biography of Islam's founder entitled "The Life of Mohammad," based on writings by a Franco-Tunisian sociologist.

Turkey: Erdogan talks to Kurds. Walter Russell Mead: 'It’s all very messy and complicated, but a settlement with the PKK would bring big advantages to Turkey—not least an end to the guerrilla war in the southeast, which has drained a lot of blood and treasure and hampers Turkey’s efforts to exert influence in the region.'

Space: Giant leaps for private space travel. Space.com: 'Of the many spacecraft being developed only one has already flown in space, the Dragon capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in Hawthorne, Calif.The unmanned cargo ship has flown in space three times so far, and carried supplies to the International Space Station twice in 2012 — first in May during a test and then again October. ...' But there's lots more in the works. Full article at the link.

Commentary: Scary times - VDH.

There is no historical appreciation among the new progressive technocracy that central state planning, whether the toxic communist brand or supposedly benevolent socialism, has only left millions of corpses in its wake, or abject poverty and misery. Add up the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and the sum is 80 million murdered or starved to death. Add up North Korea, Cuba, and the former Eastern Europe, and the tally is egalitarian poverty and hopelessness. The EU sacrificed democratic institutions for coerced utopianism and still failed, leaving its Mediterranean shore bankrupt and despondent.

Nor is there much philosophical worry that giving people massive subsidies destroys individualism, the work ethic, and the personal sense of accomplishment. There is rarely worry expressed that a profligate nation that borrows from others abroad and those not born has no moral compass. ...

Morning Report: 2013-01-01

Pakistan: Gunmen kill seven charity workers. Fox: 'Gunmen killed five female teachers and two other people on Tuesday in an ambush on a van carrying workers home from their jobs at a community center in northwest Pakistan, officials said. The van was transporting teachers and aid workers from the center in conservative Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Two health workers, one man and one woman, were also killed and the driver was wounded.' BBC has more, with a map. Workers at the center say they suspect its vaccination program is the target of the attacks; last month nine health workers were killed during a national polio vaccination drive.

India: Delhi gangrape protests continue. Hindustan Times: 'The capital on Tuesday continued to witness protests against the Delhi gangrape, with a modest gathering at Jantar Mantar demanding strong law against sexual offences. Some people continued their fast demanding stringent punishment for the culprits involved in the gangrape of the 23-year-old paramedic student, who died last Saturday.' Via Rantburg, The cops stated that after throwing the victim out of the moving bus, the accused had tried to crush her under the bus.

Syria: Fighting continues near Aleppo airport, throughout country. Fierce clashes have erupted near the international airport in Syria's second city of Aleppo, officials say. Syrians woke on New Year's Day toc ountrywide aerial bombardment, while President Bashar al-Assad's forces and rebels fighting to topple him clashed on the outskirts of the capital.

Saudi Arabia: Women refuse to segregate. A group of conservative man who wanted to attend the “Saudi Elite and Alienation Issues” lecture this week at the Jeddah Literary Club protested against the presence of women in the same room as men and threatened to leave if they were not moved to another room. However, the women refused to move room and insisted on remaining in the main hall to listen to the lecture.

Azerbaijan: Rent hike prices Russian radar out. Strategy Page:

January 1, 2013: Russia has decided to shut down its Daryal type long range missile detection radar in Azerbaijan after the Azerbaijanis demanded that a new lease increase annual rent from $7 million to $300 million. Russia refused to pay and will shut down the Azerbaijan radar and dismantle it. The ten year lease ended on December 24, 2012. This radar went operational in 1983 and was supposed to be one of seven. But the end of the Cold War halted that project and only one other Daryal radar was built (on the north coast of Russia). That one detected missiles coming in over the North Pole from North America. The radar in Azerbaijan covered all of the Middle East and India. Its role will be assumed by a more recent radar design that recently went into service on the Black Sea coast. Russia had offered to upgrade the Azerbaijan radar and pay more rent, but not $293 million more a year more. In addition, Russia has always paid Azerbaijan $5 million a year for electricity and $10 million a year for other services. About 500 Azerbaijanis were employed at the radar station, in addition to 1,100 Russians.

Morning Report: 2012-08-21

Ethiopia: PM Meles dies. 'Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has died, Ethiopian state television said on Tuesday. Meles had not been seen in several weeks. The government said in July that he was taking a break to recover from an unspecified condition. State television said Deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn will be acting prime minister. ...'

Syria: FSA bans torture, prisoner killings. 'The Free Syrian Army issued new orders Aug. 20 forbidding the torture and killing of prisoners following criticism by U.N. investigators, Reuters reported. ...'

Russia / Israel: Gazprom eyes Leviathan. 'Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom is studying opportunities to participate in the development of Israel's Leviathan offshore natural gas field, Bloomberg reported Aug. 20 ...'

Turkey: Gaziantep bombing kills 8. CNN: 'Eight people were killed in a bombing in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, an official in the Interior Ministry said Monday. A spokesman for the Gaziantep governorship said 66 people were wounded in the blast. ...' Bianet - English: 'An explosion that took place near the Karşıyaka Police Station in the southeastern province of Gaziantep killed eight people and injured 61 at around 20:00 on Monday. The blast occured after someone detonated the explosives loaded inside a vehicle, Gaziantep Governor Erdal Ata told the broadcasting station NTV. The victims of the blast were passengers inside a nearby automobile and a minibus, according to reports. Two buses also caught fire in consequence of the explosion ...'

Gaziantep, previously and still informally called Antep; ʻayn tāb [ʕajn tæːb] is a city in southeast Turkey and amongst the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. The city is located 185 kilometres (115 miles) northeast of Adana and 127 kilometres by road north of Aleppo, Syria. The city has two urban districts under its administration, Şahinbey and Şehitkamil. It is the sixth most populous city in Turkey.

USA / terrorism: Hezbollah funds seized. BBC: 'The US authorities say they have seized $150m (£95m) from a bank allegedly linked to a money-laundering scheme of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Last year, US officials accused the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB) of helping the group launder profits from drug trafficking and other crimes. The funds were allegedly used to ship cars from the US to West Africa, with the proceeds smuggled back to Lebanon. ...'

Analysis: Benjamin Kerstein on Chomsky, NPR. Michael Totten interviews Benjamin Kerstein on Noam Chomsky:

Benjamin Kerstein: There are a couple of main points that should be made. First, Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you've ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it's quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it. I don't think anyone ought to be allowed to get away with that kind of behavior.

Second, Chomsky is immensely important to the radical left. When it comes to American foreign policy he isn't just influential, he's basically all they have. Almost any argument made about foreign affairs by the radical left can be traced back to him. That wasn't the case when he started out back in the late '60s, but it is now.

Third, he is essentially the last totalitarian. ...

Go read the rest. Now via a Facebook friend here's Kerstein in 2010 on NPR:

Put simply, NPR is for coastal liberals what Rush Limbaugh is for heartland conservatives: a means of relating to the world from within the confines of a specific subculture. The difference, of course, is that Limbaugh’s admirers do not force others to pay for it.

Nor, I imagine, are Limbaugh’s listeners laboring under the same illusion as NPR’s. Most of them probably understand that Limbaugh is giving opinions based on his political point of view, which is, to say the least, well known to his listeners. NPR’s listeners, on the other hand, are quite convinced that they are receiving nothing less than the pure, unvarnished, objective truth from the network. They believe themselves to be smart and informed, and thus the network they love must also be, perhaps by definition, smart and informative. ...

Morning Report: 2012-08-14

Syria: Rebels claim to hold pilot. They say they shot his plane down. Reuters: 'Syria's rebels were jubilant on Tuesday, claiming to have shot down a jet and captured its pilot, an apparent victory against the overwhelmingly superior firepower of President Bashar al-Assad's forces. Video uploaded onto the Internet on Monday showed the jet bursting into flames as it streaked through the sky amid heavy gunfire. The rebels said they had hit it with newly acquired high-caliber anti-aircraft guns. ...'

Syria / China: China hosts Assad regime aide Bouthaina Shaaban. BBC: 'A senior aide to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has flown to China for talks on the crisis, officials say. The Chinese foreign ministry said Bouthaina Shaaban would meet Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi later. The ministry said it was part of its effort to implement the UN's six-point peace plan. ...'

Egypt: Meet the new boss, etc. The Arabist on SCAF: 'I agree with [Accidental Occidental's] take and put it in a different way in a Guardian piece yesterday — i.e. that talk of Morsi's triumph overshadows that generals (just different generals) were still kingmakers. ...'

Morning Report: 2012-07-11

More business with Burma, fewer brains on drugs.

USA / Burma: Washington eases sanctions. 'President Barack Obama on Wednesday eased sanctions against Myanmar to allow U.S. companies to invest there, calling the move a "strong signal" of support for political reform taking root in the southeast Asian country. But Obama said Washington remained concerned about the lack of investment transparency as well as the military's role in Myanmar's economy ...'

USA: New and improved War On Drugs, now with less intelligence. Via Fausta, Obama administration closes National Drug Intelligence Center.

Mexican cartel violence is at an all-time high along the increasingly porous southern border yet the Obama Administration has shut down a critical intelligence agency dedicated to identifying, tracking and severing the nexus between drug trafficking and terrorism.

It’s a senseless move, which is why it was done very quietly. The only real way to discover that the Justice Department’s 19-year-old National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) has been closed is by trying to visit its website. It simply says that on June 15, 2012, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) closed. The public is redirected to another website with “historical materials, an archived version of the NDIC.”

The move is baffling considering the agency’s crucial mission. Consider this; just a few years ago an NDIC task force uncovered that Mexican drug cartels are buying arms from radical Islamic terrorists and that they team up to distribute narcotics in Europe and the Middle East. The NDIC report that revealed this identifies terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestine Liberation Front and the Palestine Liberation Organization as Arab associates of Mexican drug-trafficking cartels. All are officially designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. Department of State. ...

Uzbekistan: Tashkent pulls out of CSTO. The Diplomat
: 'Uzbekistan’s withdrawal from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) highlights the growing influence of this often overlooked Moscow-led military alliance in Eurasia. But it also underscores the limited ability of Russia to dominate the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Even more, it indicates how the typical “great game competition” framework for analyzing great power competition in the region is misleading. ...'

Space: OK, but if it's not really a planet, how can it have moons? 'A fifth moon has been discovered orbiting former planet Pluto, scientists with the Hubble Space Telescope announced Wednesday ...'

Morning Report: 2012-06-26

Egypt army, Muslim Brotherhood work out the details. 'The Muslim Brotherhood has reached some agreements with the army on the powers of Egypt's first Islamist president and the fate of a now-dissolved Islamist-led parliament, Brotherhood officials said on Tuesday. The newly elected president, Mohamed Mursi, toured his palace on Monday. But after savoring the outcome of a vote that installed him in place of the Brotherhood's enemy Hosni Mubarak, he immediately went to see the generals in the Defence Ministry in a scene that seemed to underline who really calls the shots. ..'

Erdogan: Syrian regime "illegitimate". "Any Syrian element that approaches the Turkish border will be regarded as a threat, he said."

Morning Report: 2012-06-25

Morsi declared winner in Egypt elections. Fox: 'Egypt's new president-elect, Islamist Mohammed Morsi, moved into the office once occupied by ousted leader Hosni Mubarak and started consultations Monday on forming his team and a new government, an aide said. Morsi was declared on Sunday the winner of Egypt's first free presidential election in its modern history, following a tight race with Mubarak's last Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq. ...' Ryan Munro:

The results of Egypt’s presidential election have been officially announced and the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian wing, Hamas, are in a state of jubilation. Mohammed Morsi won with 51.7% of the vote, while the secularist former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq came in a close second with 48.2%. The Islamists shouldn’t get too excited. The fact remains that the Supreme Armed Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) remains in control of the country.

Protests in Egypt swelled as it was reported that Shafiq was going to be declared the winner. By all accounts, it was a close election but the preliminary tally showed Morsi ahead. If Shafiq became president, the population would have understandably seen it as a decision of SCAF and not the voters. By permitting a legitimate election, SCAF has avoided a confrontation with the Egyptian population while maintaining its hold on power. ...

The Glazov Gang hosts video discussion at FrontPage.

Syrian official: Turkish plane violated airspace. 'Syrian air defenses had to react immediately to a Turkish jet flying at 100 meters altitude inside Syrian airspace in what was "a clear breach of Syrian sovereignty", Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said on Monday. ...'