Two Evangelists in Vietnam Sentenced to Prison
CDN:
Two Christian evangelists, Ksor Y Du, 47, and Kpa Y Co, 30, were sentenced this month to six and four years in prison respectively for “undermining national unity.”
Ksor and Kpa, of the Vietnam Good News Mission (VGNM) church, received the harsh sentences on Nov. 15. House arrest of four and two years respectively also was added to the sentences, according to church sources and Vietnam’s Phap Luat (Law) newspaper. Both evangelists, who are of the Ede minority, live in Song Hinh district of Phu Yen Province, where there are some 20 VGNM congregations.
[...]
Canadian Women Support Roxanne’s Law
EFC:
For more information about Bill C-510 aka Roxanne’s Law, please visit our website.
On a cold Manitoba night in February 2007, a pregnant Roxanne Fernando was lured outside and brutally beaten at the hands of her boyfriend and the father of her unborn child. Roxanne had refused her boyfriend’s demand that she terminate her pregnancy. Alone and viciously assaulted, mother and unborn baby died in a snowy ditch.
In April 2010, Member of Parliament Rod Bruinooge introduced Bill C-510, also known as Roxanne’s Law. This bill is designed to protect the right of women to safely carry their child or children to term, should they choose to do so. This bill would make it a criminal offence to coerce or attempt to coerce a woman into having an abortion.
[...]
Inspector General Report Details ACORN Fraud
by Publius:
Big Government has obtained an advance copy of Homeland Security’s Inspector General report detailing ACORN’s misuse of a federal grant from FEMA. The report will be released to the public on December 8th. We’ve included it below.
[...]
Pakistan court: Christian convicted of blasphemy must wait for pardon
CNN:
A court in Pakistan on Monday blocked the government from pardoning a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy until her case has been heard by an appeals court, a senior government law officer said.
[...]
What Part of “Hell, No!” Did the Republicans Not Understand?
RushLimbaugh.com:
RUSH: I am literally gonna get sick here. Ha-ha. Literally gonna puke. Who is the author of all of this lack of bipartisanship? Whose mentality is it to defeat your opponents? That’s mine! That’s what I have been suggesting. I’m the hyperpartisan here, I guess. My strategery has been, wipe ‘em out! And that’s what the election meant, wipe ‘em out. They were wiped out. I didn’t see civility on the ballot. Awe, jeez. Okay. That’s it. Look, see where this is headed? (interruption) Well, no, I’ll hold out hope this is just a bunch of BS Republican assumption that the real stuff’s gonna go on. We gotta deal with what is. What does my gut say? Well, my gut could only react to what I heard here and words are just words. What part of “hell, no” did the Republicans not understand? It’s just two words, h-e-l-l, space, n-o. What is hard to understand about that?
[...]
France’s Warning To America
by Rachel Marsden:
It is hard not to notice that French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s efforts to reform France mostly consist of attempting to undo long-held traditions often underpinned by socialism if — not communism. How did Marxistideology ever manage to get France so tightly in its grip in the first place?
The Soviet Union was an ally in defeating the Nazis in WWII, with France being “Ground Zero” in that battle. The fear of cooperation with communists did not exist in France in the same way that it did in America. Ideological boundaries have often therefore been blurred: In the wake of the May 1968 French student riots, dominated by extreme far-left social segregationists, the Communist Party ultimately sided with Charles De Gaulle against the extremist student protestors, despite having opposed his prime ministership 10 years earlier. Later, Socialist President Francois Mitterrand’s Programme Commun reform package resulted from cooperation with the Communists.
In 1976, a TIME Magazine article quoted France’s Justice Minister under center-right president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Jean Lecanuet: “The Communists are in the middle of an identity crisis and are taking up the mask of a certain reformism. If they ever came to power, the mask would fall.”
Some might argue that they have managed to come to power anyway.
[...]
Here it comes, Durban 3
by Fiamma Nirenstein:
The UN never ceases to amaze. Just when we thought we had become immune to all the poisonous concoctions that get dished out, once again, ten years down the road, we are being offered a remake of “Durban 1″, the UN conference against racism which — to most people’s horror — was transformed into a racist conference against Israel and the America. At that time, after the speeches by Mugabe, Fidel Castro and Arafat, who condemned in chorus the “colonialist West” and “racist Jews,” the Canadians, Americans and Israelis walked out. Later, in 2009, when the UN organized “Durban 2″ in Geneva, the Italian government, which had learned its lesson, refused to send a delegation. And, in fact, the entire parliament, from left to right, voted to support a resolution rejecting any anti-Semitic and anti-West sideshow. The protagonist that time was Ahmadinejad, who used the opportunity to repeat his denial of the Holocaust, and promised to exterminate all Jews. Backing him was a plethora of NGOs who, undaunted, assisted the UN in its “anti-imperialist” campaign, as they had done with the violence in Durban in 2001.
So here we are again
[...]
A lethal leak — or a boomerang?
MELANIE PHILLIPS:
Remember all those stories which were so prominent in the media coverage of wars between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah/ Hamas, that Israel committed war crimes by targeting for missile strikes ambulances carrying the wounded? Remember Israel’s answer, that the Red Crescent ambulances were transporting arms and missiles under the camouflage of being ambulances? Remember the reaction of the western media, to assume that Hezbollah/Hamas were telling the truth while Israel was lying? Well, through Wikileaks we now learn that, er, Iran used the Red Crescent in war zones:
[...]
War?
By Jack Curtis:
Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats needed WWII to bolster their failed depression program; Barack Obama’s Democrats are in a comparable place. Most know that troubled, frightened rulers may turn to war to shore up their positions. Should we expect that?
WWII roared up from the never-quenched embers of WWI in the desperation of a world depression. It was the completion of something never properly finished. Hitler’s economic cure, militarization, couldn’t be sustained in isolation; the European Allies’ depressed economies were weak, tempting Hitler’s needs. The U.S. was both weak and isolationist. We know the result.
Today we’re looking again at world economic weakness and fear, with another newly strengthened and militarized country resentful of the generations of subservience imposed upon it by those same Allies.
[...]
All the News The Times Wants You to Know
By Alan Caruba:
In a long career as a journalist, full time and freelance, I have sometimes said that I knew something was seriously wrong with The New York Times when I began to see my byline show up on stories that appeared briefly.
It’s been decades since I have held The Times in my hands though I have read an article or column on occasion via the Internet because I have long since concluded it cannot be trusted for anything it prints with the possible exception of obituaries.
During the early years when Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union, a Times reporter named Walter Duranty, based in Moscow from 1922 to 1936, would deliberately fail to report outrages such as the starving of the Ukrainians to force their capitulation to Moscow. Duranty would win a Pultizer Prize in 1932 which, to this day, the Times has not repudiated. Duranty, like The Times, harbored a lot of sympathy for Marxism.
My own opinion of The Times was shaped during the Vietnam War when it became apparent that the newspaper was rooting for the Vietcong.
[...]
Parliament isn’t too partisan, it’s too big and intrusive
LORNE GUNTER:
Expecting Parliament to be less partisan is naive. And repeating over and over that this is all the fault of a controlling prime minister (a charge made by others, not Dr. Martin) doesn’t make it so. Indeed, such charges of partisanship by the PM are, well, partisan themselves.
Also, as much Dr. Martin’s disdain for Parliament is refreshingly honest, it carries in it a kernel of hope that the institution can be reformed, that it can be made better and more efficient.
Frankly, I just want it smaller. There is no making big government better and the fundamental problem with Parliament is the same as it is with the federal government – the whole thing is too damn big and far, far too intrusive.
If Dr. Martin wants Parliament to function better, he must first work to make the government it directs about one-third to one-half smaller, as well as much less intrusive in ordinary Canadians’ daily lives.
[...]
How Counterpunch Distorts the Truth
by Alan M. Dershowitz:
Counterpunch editor, Alexander Cockburn, specializes in distortions of reality and half-truths. A recent incident illustrates his mendacious modus operandi. In an article posted on Counterpunch, former Senator James Abourezk praised Helen Thomas, who was fired from her job for making bizarrely anti-Semitic statements about Jews going back to Europe. In that post, Abourezk also claimed that I “wrote a column in the Jerusalem Post calling [him] an anti-Semite.” Anyone who reads the Jerusalem Post article can easily determine that Abourezk was lying. My article quotes extensively from an interview Abourezk gave on Hezbollah television in which he accused “the Zionists” of causing 9/11, worldwide anti-Muslim attitudes and picking on the Soviet Union. It is a bizarre and bigoted screed. But in the Jerusalem Post article, I did not accuse Abourezk of being an anti-Semite. He simply lied about that as he has done about so many other things related to Jews, Israel and me.
[...]
Decision Time for Barack Obama
JOHN BOLTON:
This November 2, Obama was not on anyone’s ballot. During his first two years, he seemed indifferent to, or in denial about, the political firestorm growing around him. In January 2010, for example, Arkansas Congressman Marion Berry described Obama’s candid remarks to the House Democratic caucus. Fearing the rising backlash against his programmes, especially health care, Democrats asked how they could avoid a 1994-type cataclysm. Obama answered: “Well, the big difference [between] here and 1994 is you’ve got me.” Apart from unrestrained egotism, Obama’s answer reflected awesome political misjudgment. Bill Clinton, who defeated a Republican incumbent with a 91 per cent approval rating following the first Gulf War, could easily have said exactly the same thing in 1994. Had Obama learned nothing?
Equally telling was Obama’s blithe observation, also in January 2010, that he would rather be a “really good one-term President than a mediocre two-term President”. Obama’s seemingly casual response showed his confidence that his mere election was so historic that he had no need for an actual record of accomplishment. Moreover, his disdain never diminished for his fellow citizens, whom he once described as “clinging to their guns and religion” against the unknown. Other Democrats exhibited similar contempt for mere voters. In October, for example, Senator John Kerry deigned to observe about the common folks: “It’s absurd. We’ve lost our minds. We’re in a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don’t weigh in. It’s all short-order, lowest-common-denominator, cheap-seat politics.”
[...]
Bang goes that conspiracy theory…
Melanie Phillips:
So now the world has been made aware, thanks to Wikileaks, what anyone with their ear to the ground has known for yonks — that Saudi Arabia and other Arab states have been desperately pressing the US to bomb Iran. The Guardian reports:
[...]
Climate Alarmist Wants WWII Style Rationing to Save Planet
Marc Sheppard:
A group of scientists who apparently didn’t get the “Kyoto is Dead” memo are calling upon fellow alarmists attending the Cancun climate summit to take much tougher measures to cut carbon emissions. One is actually calling for leaders of developed countries to impose World War II style rationing on all citizens in order to save the planet.
Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Professor Kevin Anderson believes that without immediate and drastic action, the world will see more than 7ºF of warming by 2060. And that the only fair way to prevent the “floods, droughts and mass migration” such warming will cause is to halt all economic growth in “rich” countries for at least 20 years.
Seriously – that’s his plan. But it gets better.
[...]
Wikileaks – Anti-Israel Foreign Policy Experts Got Saudi Arabia, Other Arab Countries 100% Backward On Iran Attack
By Omri Ceren:
It didn’t get nearly as much play as it should have, but Obama’s June 2009 meeting with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah ended with the monarch flying into a tirade and more or less telling the President to get a grip. This was the Riyadh meeting that Obama took on his way to his insulting and failed Cairo Speech, the better to prepare himself by visiting “the place where Islam began.” The sit-down was such a disaster that Dennis Ross was hurriedly brought into the White House and given a broader role, yielding the impression that the President wanted a Middle East adviser who kind of understood something about the Middle East – and didn’t think he had one.
There were two theories on why the meeting went so badly.
[...]
Time For Economic Restoration Now Climate Change Deception Exposed
By Dr. Tim Ball:
Problems are only problems if you are unaware of them. Once identified you’re over halfway to resolution. American voters rejected the Obama administration’s policies of increasing government control through energy, environment and economic policies. They voted for cessation and reversal. Now the new politicians and chastened survivors must act accordingly. Debt and deficit are serious problems and the solution depends partly on reduced government spending, but mostly on a vigorous growing economy and that depends on energy. Maurice Strong’s plan to collapse the industrial economies recognized this with his focus on fossil fuels and CO2, so that’s where the solution must begin.
[...]
Leak: Iran used Red Crescent to smuggle weapons
By YAAKOV KATZ:
Wikileaks document shows Iranian Revolutionary Guards helped Hizbullah in 2006 Lebanon War, disguised as Red Crescent officials.
[...]
DHS Continues Attacks on Privacy, Seizes Internet Domains
Ann Kane:
The Department of Homeland Security has been taking its job very seriously lately. First, the DHS flexed its muscles by implementing the naked body scanners and their contingent backups-the groping pat downs at airports during the busiest travel season of the year. Americans should be thankful for protection against “terrorists” like the little 80 year old lady and a cancer survivor with a prosthetic breast.
Now Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), under DHS, shut down over 70 internet websites suspected of piracy without notice to some of the owners. There’s no indication other than “court orders” which explain how in the world the government had the legal right to simply block all of those domains. From Fox News:
[...]
The “Settlements” Obsession
by Prof. Phyllis Chesler:
I argued that, in effect, the demonization of Israel by the media, by governments, international bodies, human rights organizations, and university professors allowed the world to self-righteously bypass, minimize, avoid, utterly disappear Muslim-on-Muslim and Muslim-on-infidel tyranny and torture. Scapegoating Israel is what focuses attention away from the larger suffering in the Middle East and in the Muslim world in general.
[...]
In my view, the unending tragedy of the Middle East is the refusal of the Arab leadership to accept a pre-state and post-state Jewish presence; to engage in business and to trade peacefully, create lasting bonds of peace—precisely what the earliest Zionist pioneers envisioned—a vision shared by many pre-politicized Arab civilians on the ground. Instead, the corrupt and tyrannical Arab leadership, to the detriment of their own people, chose to go to war against the Jews. The “catastrophe” was, to a large extent, “self-inflicted.” Read Dr. Ephraim Karsh’s excellent new book Palestine Betrayed on this subject.
[...]
Palestinian revisionism is the only obstacle to peace
By DANNY AYALON:
The attempt to “refute” the Jewish claim to the Western Wall is merely the latest in a series of efforts to deny the Jewish people’s connection with its homeland.
[...]
Surrendered Nation
By Pamela Geller:
The turkey being served up last Thursday by the ruling elite was the American people. Because she was wearing a panty liner that obscured the screener’s view of her genitals, a TSA official subjected a menstruating woman to a fondling “so invasive that I was left crying and dealing with memories that I thought had been dealt with years ago of prior sexual assaults.”
When did we agree to surrender to Islam? Seriously. Whom did we appoint or elect to negotiate this surrender? Our surrender has been parceled out in loss of freedom, accommodation, and submission to Islamic supremacist demands, and in foreign policy that is supine before Iran and cozying up to the Taliban
[...]
Stem-Cell Fraud
IBD:
Supporters of California’s failed 2004 stem-cell law will ask strapped taxpayers to support another $3 billion bond initiative in 2014. Maybe it’s time to restore fiscal sanity as well as science to its rightful place.
When it was passed in 2004, Proposition 71, with its $3 billion state fund and 10-year mandate for embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR), held out the promise of imminent miracle cures for everything from spinal disorders to Parkinson’s.
[...]
The Obama administration recently approved only the second human clinical trial using embryonic stem-cell lines.
“We’ve heard so many times that adult stem cells can’t treat diseases, or only treat a few blood diseases, and those who have pointed out the truth, that adult stem cells are already helping patients for over 70 diseases and injuries, have been scorned,” Prentice notes.
[...]
The embryonic stem cell crowd won’t be happy until they finish what Joseph Mengele started.
Sleazy WikiLeaks Meets the Digital Ninnies of the State Department
by Roger L Simon:
The criminality of self-righteous WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange aside, the State Department or other government nincompoops who authored the leaked documents and emails calling Sarkozy a “naked emperor,” etc., deserve to be terminated for extreme doofuss-ness. These days, a school child knows that what you write digitally is forever indelible.
If you have something nasty to say, do it over the water cooler or at a cocktail party, where you can deny you ever said it. Even write it down, if you must, on the back of a business card or scrap of note paper. They can be burned or flushed down the toilet. But for heaven’s sake don’t type it into a computer. There are no shredders for emails and Word docs. Are these people nitwits or do they have the impulse control of a two year old?
[...]
The Fiscal Trap
By Yuval Levin:
Over at the Weekly Standard, Larry Lindsey makes a very important point, pertinent to both the QE2 debate and the conversation in recent weeks about various proposals to reduce the deficit and debt. Most of the baseline assumptions about the size of our debt assume that today’s exceedingly low interest rates continue. If they don’t—even if rates just return to the average of the past 20 years—the picture looks far more grim.
[...]
The EU has got too big for its boots
By Jenny McCartney:
The European Union launched a website last week to quash some of the more scurrilous rumours about its intentions. It insists that it did not try to ban bingo callers from using the term “two fat ladies”; it did not advocate changing the name of the Channel to “the Anglo-French Pond”; and it did not suggest that Britons be forced to liquefy corpses and pour them down the drain as a way of avoiding CO2 emissions.
I’m glad we’ve cleared that up – but this list almost made me nostalgic for the days when people got worked up about reported EU directives on the curvature of bananas. The reality of recent EU rulings has been a great deal grimmer: last week, it was reported that the European Court of Human Rights has permitted David Cameron six months to implement its earlier order to give British prisoners the vote, or he will have to begin making hefty compensation payments to 2,500 inmates who have lodged complaints.
This latest judgment was prompted by the pressing democratic concerns of Robert Greens, whose own respect for human rights is such that in 2006, he was convicted of the appallingly violent rape of a 19-year-old Dutch tourist who was visiting a beauty spot in Midlothian. The original case, five years ago, was brought by John Hirst, another enthusiast for human rights who was jailed in 1979 for murdering his landlady with an axe.
[...]
Canada’s PM shames British Jews
melanie phillips:
On a recent speaking tour in Montreal and Toronto, I was struck by the beleaguered state of many Canadian Jews.
They were battling the usual mad barrage against Israel from the media, politicians on the left and rabid anti-Israel and Judeophobic lies and libels on campus.
Home from home, in other words.
But perhaps the most troubling aspect was that they appeared not to possess the verbal ammunition with which to respond.
It seemed to me that, as I wrote here last month, the problem was that to a greater or lesser extent they themselves had been sucked into the narrative of lies.
Because so many were centrist or liberally-minded folk, they accepted a premise they quite mistakenly thought represented the ‘centre ground’.
That premise was that the settlements were the big problem. That inevitably paints Israel as the bad guy in the region. So these Israel defenders are forced onto the defensive. And once there, the argument is all but lost.
But as I put to them, Israel has actually done nothing to be defensive about. It is instead Israel’s attackers who are murderous aggressors who refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state, even though settlements have been evacuated and territory offered up as a compromise.
So I suggested they should rethink their entire approach. Change the narrative. Get off the back foot and put Israel’s attackers onto theirs.
[...]
The Christian woman facing death over a work squabble
Telegraph:
It started as nothing more than a petty squabble: a group of Muslim women refused to sup from a bucket of water fetched by a Christian co-worker as they picked berries on a farm.
But within days the spat had escalated into a deadly storm, as imams whipped up an angry crowd accusing Aasia Bibi of badmouthing the Prophet Muhammad.
Today the mother-of-five is on death row, the first woman in Pakistan to be sentenced to hang for blasphemy.
Her tiny, stinking cell is now the centre of a political storm as liberals face off with conservative clerics over the country’s barbaric blasphemy laws, which cuts to the heart of Pakistan’s uneasy relationship between religion and democracy.
Hard-line Muslims have taken to the streets, warning the government not to cave in to foreign pressure to pardon her, and issuing death threats to her supporters, alarming the country’s embattled Christian minority.
[...]
Americans Learning to Submit
By Anthony W. Hager:
In the George Orwell classic Animal Farm, there lived a horse named Boxer. He was strong, willing, and dependable. In fact, Boxer was so dedicated to his assignments and his leader that he often said, “Napoleon is always right,” followed by his personal pledge to “work harder” toward accomplishing the state’s goals.
Boxer was a good, faithful horse. But his fault was his blind devotion to his leader and his willingness to sacrifice himself for Napoleon’s grand schemes. Boxer never benefited from his loyalty or from Napoleon’s phony promise of an easy future. When he was no longer useful, he was shipped to the glue factory, ironically under the guise of receiving state provided medical treatment. Let that sink in, ObamaCare advocates.
[...]
Why is Homeland Security Seizing Domain Names?
Thomas Lifson:
I find it bizarre (and somewhat alarming) that the Department of Homeland Security has apparently taken as its mission the enforcement of copyright laws, and is seizing domain names of websites that reportedly violate copyrights. The Hill reports:
[...]
A Nuclear Standoff With Libya
Max Fisher:
In November 2009, six years after the government of Libya first agreed to disarm its nuclear weapons program, Libyan nuclear workers wheeled the last of their country’s highly enriched uranium out in front of the Tajoura nuclear facility, just east of Tripoli. U.S. and Russian officials overseeing Libya’s disarmament began preparations to ship this final batch of weapons-grade nuclear material to Russia, where it would be treated and destroyed.
The plan was to load the uranium onto a massive Russian cargo plane, one of the few in the world specially equipped to fly nuclear materials. On November 20, the day before the plane was to leave for a nuclear facility in Russia, Libyan officials unexpectedly halted the shipment. Without explanation, they declared that the uranium would not be permitted to leave Libya. They left the seven five-ton casks out in the open and under light guard, vulnerable to theft by the al-Qaeda factions that still operate in the region or by any rogue government that learned of their presence.
[...]
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