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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/11/2017 11:45:26 AM

FEBRUARY 9, 2017 6:17 PM

Should U.S. be preparing for a North Korean nuclear strike on the West Coast?

WASHINGTON

After listening to experts describe the threat posed by North Korea and its nuclear arsenal, U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, paused amid a Capitol Hill hearing earlier this week and made a suggestion.

“We ought to have civil defense in this country,” said Sherman during a hearing of theHouse Foreign Affairs Committee. “Some of us are old enough to remember when we had civil defense and we were under our desks.”

The congressman wasn’t calling for an immediate return to the “duck and cover” days of the Cold War. But his statement reflects heightened alarm among members of Congress – especially those from the West Coast – over North Korea’s continuing nuclear tests and advances in missile technology.

In the last year alone, North Korea has conducted 20 missile tests and two nuclear tests. That’s a marked annual increase from the 42 missile tests and two nuclear tests of the previous seven years, according to Victor Cha, a Korea specialist with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Cha and other experts say it is highly likely that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will launch another intercontinental ballistic missile this year, in part to gauge the response from President Donald Trump. While some of North Korea’s missile tests have ended in failure, the regime seems to be learning from each launch to improve its capability.

Many arms control specialists believe that, by 2020, North Korea could have the capacity to launch a miniaturized nuclear device on an ICBM, with the range to strike at least the West Coast. It might even have that capability sooner.

“The difficulty here is the lack of visibility into North Korea’s nuclear program. It’s a black hole,” said Anthony Ruggiero, a Korea researcher who previously worked in the Treasury Department, the U.S. agency tasked with enforcing sanctions on Pyongyang.

North Korea remains one of the world’s most closeted countries, and international inspectors haven’t had even partial access to its nuclear facilities since 2009.

To slow North Korea’s nuclear advances, the United Nations has imposed increasingly harsh sanctions. Those sanctions have deprived Pyongyang of hard cash but have received spotty enforcement, especially by China, which is wary of squeezing North Korea too hard. Within Congress, there is increasing recognition that North Korea has gotten short shrift amid the intense foreign policy attention on the Islamic State, Iran and the Middle East.

“Are we as focused on this threat as we should be? If you look over the last 10 years, the answer is clearly no,” Ruggiero, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, said in an interview. “We have not focused on that threat, and it has continued to grow.”

Several members of Congress from the West Coast are aiming a spotlight at North Korea, particularly Rep. Ed Royce, a Republican from Southern California who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. On Tuesday, Royce led a hearing examining how the United States and its allies could further squeeze North Korea financially and possibly slow its nuclear weapons program.

Royce said he was particularly concerned about North Korea’s bomb miniaturization efforts, along with one of its missile tests last year from a submarine. “That is what has got our attention,” Royce said. “At this point it is clear that very, very soon, North Korea is going to be able to target all 50 states in the United States, as well as target our allies.”

Some analysts doubt that North Korea, as it advances its weapons systems, would launch a first strike on the United States or its allies. Kim is pursuing the weapons program, they say, as a deterrent to a U.S. attack and also to enhance his stature at home.

Yet U.S. officials feel compelled to remind Pyongyang what would happen if it were to strike first. “Any attack on the United States, or our allies, will be defeated, and any use of nuclear weapons would be met with a response that would be effective and overwhelming,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said last week during a visit to South Korea’s Defense Ministry.

Given the failure to slow North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, some Asia specialists say the United States should consider a new strategy, attempting to negotiate with Pyongyang on a freeze, or “cap,” in missile and weapons development. Others say such a move would be a disaster, even if Kim abided by a freeze.

“Agreeing to a cap means the U.S. accepts North Korea as a nuclear weapons state for the indefinite future, which would destroy our credibility not only with our allies but with other rogue regimes,” said Sue Mi Terry, a Korea analyst with the consulting firm Bower Group Asia, who testified at Tuesday’s hearing. She added that the U.S. must keep highlighting North Korea’s human rights abuses while trying to reach out to elites in Pyongyang susceptible to defection.

Last year, Royce and Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York who’s the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, led passage of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, an attempt to stanch the outside cash that flows into North Korea, bolstering the regime.

Such laws, however, depend on the capacity and commitment of the U.S. Treasury Department to pursue alleged violators. Last year, federal prosecutors charged four Chinese businesspeople and a Chinese company with conspiring to create a web of shell companies to evade U.S. economic sanctions and funnel money to North Korea. But critics have questioned why the Treasury Department didn’t also hold Chinese banks accountable for their role in creating the shell companies.

“The fact that a Chinese bank has not been punished for that is quite appalling,” said Ruggiero.

He and other analysts have criticized the Obama administration, saying it was inconsistent in the region. While Obama once counseled a policy of “strategic patience” with Pyongyang, he left office reportedly advising Trump that nuclear North Korea should be the new president’s top foreign priority.

How Trump will handle Korean affairs remains a mystery. When Kim hinted in a New Year’s speech that North Korea might test another missile, Trump responded with one of his trademark Twitter blasts: “It won’t happen!”

Trump sent mixed messages during the presidential campaign on his support for Asian allies, such as South Korea and Japan, who face an immediate threat from North Korea missiles. Mattis’ trip to Asia last week – the first foreign trip by a Trump Cabinet member –was widely seen as an attempt to ease allies’ concerns about the new president.

Sherman, a Democrat from Northridge, raised the possibility of restarting “civil defense” in the context of raising awareness about North Korea’s actions, including its reported sharing of nuclear technologies with Iran and other regimes.

“We have a foreign policy establishment that will not admit to the American people that it (deterrence) may fail to prevent us from being hit,” he said. “We could prepare to minimize casualties. We won’t, because that means we’d have to admit that there’s the possibility we will face casualties.”

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/11/2017 5:10:43 PM

ISRAEL’S NEW SETTLEMENT BILL PUTS IT ON THE FAST TRACK TO THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT

BY



The approval of the “Regularization Law” by Israel’s Knesset on Monday came as no surprise to Palestinians. The move now legalizes Israel’s illegal settlement outposts built on private Palestinian land, and allows settlers to get retroactive recognition of their illegal settlements, thereby encouraging settlers to steal more Palestinian land. It came as no surprise because, for months, Israel’s settlers have pressed for the passage of this law and pressed even harder for it following the United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s settlements.

For Palestinians, this type of reaction is not new. Since the beginning of 2017, Israel has announced that it intends to build 6,000 new settlement units, includinga new settlement in the West Bank, the first in 20 years. In addition, since January, Israel has demolished more than 30 Palestinian homes for “illegal construction”even though they were built on their Palestinian owners’ land.

This law comes as a direct result of the Israeli court-ordered evacuation of the illegal outpost of Amona. There, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered that the theft of private Palestinian land is illegal and accordingly ordered that the settlers illegally squatting on this land be removed. But, unlike when Palestinian homes are demolished with bulldozers, accompanied by soldiers brandishing automatic weapons and batons, these settlers were evacuated by officers wearing baseball caps, who did not dare pull out a baton or automatic rifle even as the settlers threw bottles and stones at them.

The evacuation of Amona was a 20-year battle, with the Palestinian landowners deprived of the use of their land for two decades as the case made its way up through the courts. And, while the landowners were deprived, the 40 squatting settler families were handsomely compensated, receiving more than $10 million in exchange for leaving land that is not legally theirs. And, in addition to the financial compensation meted out by the state to reward theft, the Knesset has given the settlers an even larger reward—legalizing the theft of private Palestinian land, despite a Supreme Court ruling that bars the theft of private land.


A picture taken on February 8, 2017 shows a general view of a construction site in a new housing project in the Israeli settlement of Nili, near the West Bank city of Ramallah.GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP/GETTY

But this is not a battle between settlers who seek to defy international law and the Israeli Supreme Court justices who seek to uphold international law. On the contrary, this is the same Supreme Court that has sanctioned the use of home demolitions as a form of punishment, that has ruled that assassinations of Palestinians, mass deportations and the cutting-off of fuel and electricity supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip are all permissible. Indeed, this is the same court that has sanctioned the construction of Israeli bypass roads and Israeli settlements, while only begrudgingly stopping the small number of outposts built on private Palestinian land.

In short, it is a court that continued to allow Israel’s apartheid to flourish; indeed, it has given it legal cover. This is why today, in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the areas Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, there are more than 700,000 Israeli settlers. In the West Bank, they control almost half of the entire territory, with much of it off-limits to Palestinians. This is why inside Israel more than 90 percent of land is considered either “state land” or land that “belongs” to the Jewish National Fund (and hence off-limits to Palestinians), according toHuman Rights Watch, even though Palestinians continue to hold claims to this very land.

Yet international law is clear: These settlements are illegal and amount to war crimes, whether the settlements are built with or without government sanction, and whether a kangaroo court, such as the Israeli Supreme Court, declares them legal or not. But there is a silver lining to all of this.Whether giving the Israeli government the right to build settlements under the guise of “military necessity” or declaring Palestinian land “green spaces” or “military installations” and then later allowing the government to build settlements, this court has facilitated, rather than stopped Israel’s settlement expansion and has facilitated, rather than stopped, Israel’s theft of Palestinian land. So while international condemnation is welcome, it also stops short: for Israel’s land theft is not new—it is the country’s modus operandi.

With the passage of this law, Israel has demonstrated to the world what settlements really are—a land grab. In other words, theft. And, as Israel’s opposition leader Isaac Herzog, who is also an apologist for Israel’s settlements has noted: “The train departing from here has only one stop—at The Hague,” referring to the International Criminal Court where settlements are deemed a war crime. Indeed, he is correct.

Diana Buttu is a Ramallah-based political analyst and former advisor to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian negotiators.


(Newsweek)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/12/2017 12:33:33 AM

Assad Rejects Trump “Safe Zone” Plan: Says Syria Will Be Safe When The West, GCC Stop Supporting Terrorists

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/12/2017 1:03:41 AM

Vaccines House Of Cards Is Tumbling Down—Fast

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/12/2017 10:16:44 AM
A French farmer fed and sheltered migrants. Today he was fined $3,200.


The house, if you can call it that, is nearly impossible to find. Unless you happen to be a migrant — then you probably know the place. And, by word of mouth, its owner.

A self-described “extreme leftist” with the requisite beard and unruly ponytail, Cédric Herrou — once an auto mechanic, then a steeplejack — is now technically an olive farmer, living out of a crumbling, 19th-century cottage in the middle of nowhere, on a rocky incline high above a ­riverbed. But Herrou’s focus is no longer the picholines that grow on his trees. These days, what matters are the migrants.

For the past two years, Herrou, 37, has continually defied French authorities by shepherding undocumented migrants across the Italian border and onto his hillside farm. As many as 60, he says, have stayed on his land at one time, some after knocking on his door in the dead of night. Herrou, like other good Samaritans in Britain and Scandinavia, is now on trial, accused of “helping undocumented foreigners enter, move about and reside” in France. He faced a possible sentence of five years in prison as well as a fine of 30,000 euros ($32,000) if convicted.

On Friday, he was fined 3,000 euros and given a suspended sentence. But Herrou vowed not to give up the fight: ‘We will continue because it is necessary to continue,’ he said, speaking outside the courthouse in Nice.”

As France struggles to navigate the tidal wave of migration that has crashed onto European shores in recent years, the case of this obscure mechanic-turned-farmer has electrified a nation that has remained comparatively inhospitable to refugees. At its core is an uncomfortable question about the moral obligations of French citizenship. In times like these, does being French mean following the letter of the law, which indeed prohibits undocumented foreigners? Or does it mean upholding the lofty, humanitarian values of the French republic in spite of its laws?

Cédric Herrou has defied French authorities by shuffling undocumented migrants across the Italian border and onto his hillside farm. (James McAuley/The Washington Post)

Herrou — and the thousands who have rallied to his defense across the country — insist on the latter. As was widely reported in French media during his trial last month, he responded to a judge who asked him why he had helped migrants across the border with a simple phrase.

“I am a Frenchman,” Herrou said.

“There’s much to criticize about it today, but France is a country with values that are beautiful — the rights of man, the protection of children, and the social welfare we have,” Herrou said in an interview Wednesday, sitting on the terrace of his cottage, sipping coffee he had made in his alfresco kitchen. “All of which we are in the process of losing.”

He was brandishing a sizzling skillet in front of the last of the migrants staying on his land: Mohamed, 19, from Sudan, who had made his way into Libya and across the central Mediterranean to Lampedusa and then onto the Italian mainland. Herrou had found Mohamed wandering in the valley earlier in the week and quickly taken him in.

“I worry about this one,” Herrou said. “He doesn’t eat much.”

Typically, Herrou said, he collects migrants from a church in nearby Ventimiglia, Italy, where many — most often from sub-Saharan Africa — live in a squalid camp along a set of abandoned train tracks outside of town. Then he drives them across the French border in the same beat-up blue van he uses on the farm.

Entry into France tends to be safer on the back roads than through the train stations, where — in spectacles eerily reminiscent of the hunts for Jewish stowaways during World War II — French police repeatedly stop and comb trains for migrants without the right papers.

This is precisely what happened Tuesday afternoon at the Menton-Garavan station, the last stop in France before the Italian border. A squadron of the French National Police flanked Cheick Isaac Binate, 21, from Ivory Coast, on the platform and deposited him on the 3:40 p.m. train for Ventimiglia.

“Don’t you worry!” Binate screamed as the officers shoved him on the train and waited for it to pull out of the station.

All of the officers involved declined to comment.

Once on the Italian side, ­Binate — who had also arrived in Europe via Libya and Lampedusa — explained that he had crossed the French border late Sunday night with hopes of making it to the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis to find his aunt. The French police had caught him in Nice earlier on Tuesday trying to board a Paris-bound train with papers that had expired in mid-November.

When he struggled with the officers, Binate said, one of them struck him over the head, leaving a bloody gash, which he bent over to show. “I had a positive idea of France, the country of human rights, of legality,” he said. “But there’s nothing to see of that here.” Even still, he vowed to try again.

Back on the French side of the border, Herrou scoffed at the notion that many now consider him a hero.

“I’m not doing this for the money or the material benefit. When you don’t live for that, the notion of ‘your house’ and ‘my house’ being somehow separate doesn’t apply,” he said.

Herrou sees the problem on the border as less about a society shutting its doors on foreigners than about people willing to tolerate indecency beyond the scope of their immediate concerns.

“Everyone should go out in the streets and try to solve whatever problems they see,” he said. “That’s what democracy is. It’s not staying at home and sharing things on Facebook. It’s positioning ourselves to live better together.”

“And if we have to fight against the state to do it, then we have an obligation to do so.”

(The Washington Post)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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