[South Front] Emmanuel Macron, the photogenic 39-years-old financier with an amazing career became the leader of the presidential race in France after Francois Fillon and Marine Le Pen faced a wave of discredits. According to opinion polls, he will reach the second round with Marine Le Pen, where he will win 66 percent of the votes.
Emmanuel Macron can be called the most unusual candidate for president of France. He has no real political experience. He has not been elected anywhere before. He is not a member of any of the leading parties and the three years (2006 to 2009) in socialist ranks can be considered a formality; Macron joined them "officially" but did not pay dues and did not attended party events.
By profession, Macron is an investment banker specializing in mergers and acquisitions and was successful in his career. He graduated from the National School of Administration, a leading university for the French elite. He worked for several years as an inspector at the Ministry of Economy. Then in 2007, a crucial year in his career, the promising 29-year-old economist was spotted and invited by Jacques Attali in his Commission for stimulating economic growth.
[PJ] WASHINGTON -- FBI Director James Comey told the Anti-Defamation League today that the Bureau is determined "not to let evil hold the field" as he fears people "stewing" with hate turning their prejudices into hate crimes.
He cited recent incidents including "the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, the racially motivated shooting of two Indian immigrants... swastikas on synagogues and subway signs, a transgender woman attacked in her own home, a noose sent to an African-American attorney... a defaced sign on a Spanish-language church."
Comey told the ADL's National Leadership Summit that "as much as we love" the activist group, "we have been spending way too much time together lately -- I think we'd all be happier if we had meetings that were fewer and far between, if we had no need to investigate hate crime, no need to share information about pending terrorist threats, no need to educate kids or community leaders or cops about bigotry and prejudice."
"In your line of work, and in ours, we see a lot of people filled with hate. Some of those people will sit quietly, simmering and stewing in their own bitterness. Some will shout about it to anyone who will listen, ever hopeful that maybe their hate will attract hate," he said. "And while we can try and illuminate and educate those people who are sitting there simmering, some will always be trapped in that starless midnight that Martin Luther King wrote about so many years ago."
Comey mused about whether people have been "emboldened by divisive rhetoric" or if there are "simply more opportunities to instill fear and intimidation today than ever before."
#2
Vandalism of Jewish cemeteries - bad. Funding Palestinian terrorism - good. A cynic might conclude that, for certain class of people, the only good Jew is - neh, I'm being paranoid. The World is different now - much more civilized.
[Bloomberg] The national security adviser has lost sway. The White House says everything's fine.
For the Washington establishment, President Donald Trump's decision to make General H.R. McMaster his national security adviser in February was a masterstroke. Here is a well-respected defense intellectual, praised by both parties, lending a steady hand to a chaotic White House. The grown-ups are back.
But inside the White House, the McMaster pick has not gone over well with the one man who matters most. White House officials tell me Trump himself has clashed with McMaster in front of his staff.
On policy, the faction of the White House loyal to senior strategist Steve Bannon is convinced McMaster is trying to trick the president into the kind of nation building that Trump campaigned against. Meanwhile the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, is blocking McMaster on a key appointment.
McMaster's allies and adversaries inside the White House tell me that Trump is disillusioned with him. This professional military officer has failed to read the president -- by not giving him a chance to ask questions during briefings, at times even lecturing Trump.
Presented with the evidence of this buyer's remorse, the White House on Sunday evening issued a statement from Trump: "I couldn't be happier with H.R. He's doing a terrific job."
Other White House officials however tell me this is not the sentiment the president has expressed recently in private. Trump was livid, according to three White House officials, after reading in the Wall Street Journal that McMaster had called his South Korean counterpart to assure him that the president's threat to make that country pay for a new missile defense system was not official policy. These officials say Trump screamed at McMaster on a phone call, accusing him of undercutting efforts to get South Korea to pay its fair share.
#2
Good executives pick the best people they can find, and quickly get rid of those who don't work well with the rest of the team, however perfect they might appear on paper. On the other hand, this may just have been the lesson Gen. McMaster needed to become a useful part of the team -- assuming it happened as described in the article. I imagine President Trump is as displeased about the leaks as he is about the original behaviour.
[DAWN] IN Pakistain, the case of Tayabba, a 10-year-old maid allegedly beaten and tortured by her employers, a judge and his wife in Islamabad, serves as an ugly reminder that the myriad of programmes and campaigns for girls’ education, awareness and empowerment, aren’t making much of a dent in changing negative attitudes towards girls and young women in our society.
Perhaps that’s because we aren’t addressing a basic paradox: that Pakistain’s girls are not just socially shortchanged but are also vigorously economically exploited in all strata of society. In 2012, 12.5 million Pak children were involved in child labour, according to the ILO. No official study on child labour has been conducted by Pakistain since 1996, so no figures exist to examine the huge economy of girl-child labour in Pakistain. Yet it’s precisely this economy that we have to short-circuit before any meaningful change will take place for Pakistain’s girls.
Some development programmes in Pakistain try to offset the economic losses parents face when choosing to send their daughters to school instead of putting them to work. Nutritional interventions feed girls in school, such as the Tawana Pakistain project; others provide a small stipend, as in the Girls Stipend Programme in KP. But these projects are largely symbolic and financially nugatory. They do not compensate for the monetary worth a girl can provide her family through more profitable but illegal means.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
05/09/2017 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11127 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
See Chibok girls returned for fresh ones, then talk about tough lives.
#2
Only slavery committed by dead white southern men is a crime that must be paid for into perpetuity. What goes on anywhere else is a quaint tribal custom. Mmmm Kay?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
05/09/2017 9:12 Comments ||
Top||
#3
But- but- it's obviously an Occidental cultural thingy. Who are we ta judge?
#4
Possession. Poor schoolgirls from Chibok,
And your kids in Nike or Reebok.
Mohammedan preachers
And public school teachers
Are scaring the pair with one dybuk.
Which is of course... you, Mr. and Ms. Trucker Western Civ.
[NationalInterest.org] Despite diverging political agendas on the Indian subcontinent, there should be a common interest in limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the likelihood of nuclear war. Growing arsenals in India and Pakistan serve to increase the catastrophic human cost of a potential conflict between the too, without evidently decreasing the frequency of inflammatory episodes of violence that spike tensions between the nuclear-armed states.
India and Pakistan will of course retain their nuclear arms, and continue to see them as vital deterrents to attack. However, for such policies to remain tenable in the long run, the longtime adversaries must seek to bring an end to a pattern of recurring conflict that is entering its seventh decade this year.
#3
Because Kashmir. The problem has never gone away and lately it's been flaring up again. They've both got nukes, they hate each other's guts, and by local standards Al Franken would be a sweet voice of reason.
Posted by: Matt ||
05/09/2017 8:02 Comments ||
Top||
#5
I know Pakistan has nukes but I find it hard to believe they can have kept them in proper working order. I understand nukes degrade and the third world is a bit sloppy when it comes to maintenance.
In fact I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out Pakistan sold nukes to Bin Laden who later found they couldn't get them to blow.
[WaPo] In mid-February, Muhammad al-Khaththath, leader of the hard-line Muslim Community Forum, held court on the top floor of a Jakarta fast-food restaurant. With key deputies gathered around, he explained the direction in which he hoped to push relatively secular, democratic Indonesia.
Sharia would become the law of the land, non-Muslims would lose their leadership posts and thieves would have their hands lopped off, he said. He also criticized Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s pluralist president. Widodo “isn’t a liberal Muslim,” Khaththath said. “He’s a Muslim who doesn’t get it.”
Six weeks later, Khaththath was detained on treason charges, accused of plotting a coup. But in an April 19 runoff election for governor of Jakarta, his preferred candidate, Anies Baswedan, defeated the Christian incumbent, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, after a campaign fraught with religious overtones.
Since then, hard-line Islamist organizations have gained stature; their ability to mobilize huge crowds was considered crucial to securing Baswedan's lopsided victory. But a strong backlash also has emerged, led by moderate Muslims who worry that conservative Islamists are wrecking Indonesia's tradition of religious tolerance.
[Breitbart] Monday at the Anti-Defamation League Conference, FBI Director James Comey said law enforcement "officers and deputies and agents" need to do a better job "understanding" the communities they serve, including "the history and journey of black America--the hopes, the dreams, the disappointments, and the pain."
Comey said,"Everybody in this room knows that officers and deputies and agents signed up for this work because they want to do good for other people. They want to help other people o matter what they look like, no matter what they believe, no matter who they love. They signed up to help all the people, all the time. But we have to do a better job of not just explaining that to the communities we serve and protect. We need to do a better job of understanding those communities. Especially those with the greatest need for police. We need to know the people who live there, the challenges they confront, the fears that they have, the hopes they have."
"As law enforcement officers, we especially need a full understanding of the history and journey of black America--the hopes, the dreams, the disappointments, and the pain," he continued. "We need to know the history of law enforcement’s interaction with black America because black people cannot forget it. We need to know what is happening in all of our communities, not what we think is happening, or even what the people we’re serving to think is happening, but what is really happening."
Comey added, "For that, we need better information in this country. Now, I know data is a boring word. People tend to tune out when you start talking about data. But it’s vital because only data, only information, gives us a full picture of what’s happening. It’s what smart people use to make hard decisions. We at the FBI have been pressing for more data in this country for the last two years, and we will keep pressing for it. Data related to violent crimes of homicides, data related to officer-involved shootings, data related to altercations with citizens and attacks against law enforcement officers, and yes, data related to hate crime."
"We must do a better job of tracking and reporting hate crime to fully understand what’s happening in our communities and in our country so we can stop it," he continued. "Some jurisdictions do not report hate crime data. Some say there were no hate crimes in their jurisdiction, which would be awesome if it were true. We must continue to impress upon our state and local counterparts how important it is that we track and report hate crime data. It’s not something we can ignore, not something we can sweep under the rug, even though it’s painful."
#2
"But it’s vital because only data, only information, gives us a full picture of what’s happening. It’s what smart people use to make hard decisions."
Considering the Beest never went to trial, even with mountains of criminal evidence, Comey's 'smart people' statement is quite the personal indictment. Of course he's too arrogant a tool to see the looming hypocrisy.
#3
How about Asians? Segregated into Chinatowns. Denied opportunity because of their skin. Rounded up and put in detention camps. Unlike the other community, it choose to follow MLKs goal of integration rather than pursue power. So successful, they're actively discriminated against by the UC university system. The 'New Whites'.
#4
You mean how they blacks had a sizable middle class until the "New Society" and then they have been put in grinding and soul crushing poverty every since while being convinced they are special for being forced into their own reservations?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[WaPo] In mid-February, Muhammad al-Khaththath, leader of the hard-line Muslim Community Forum, held court on the top floor of a Jakarta fast-food restaurant. With key deputies gathered around, he explained the direction in which he hoped to push relatively secular, democratic Indonesia.
