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February 2016

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‘We Have Slid Into A New Cold War’: Chilling Statement From Russian Prime Minister Medvedev over tensions in Syria further raises the spectre of WWIII as France accuses them of bombing civilians

By on February 15th, 2016

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said tensions between Russia and the West have sent the world into a ‘new Cold War’, while speaking at the Munich Security Conference today.

‘We have slid into a new period of Cold War,’ he said. ‘Almost every day we are accused of making new horrible threats either against NATO as a whole, against Europe or against the US or other countries.’Amid an escalating war of words, the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said a lack of trust could return the continent to ‘40 years ago, when a wall was standing in Europe’.

He rejected claims that Russian planes had killed more than 1,000 civilians in Syria, and insisted that Russia was ‘not trying to achieve some secret goals in Syria’ but was ‘trying to protect our national interests’.
He added: ‘Nearly on a daily basis, we are being blamed for the most terrible threat to Nato as a whole, to Europe, to America, to other countries. They make scary movies where Russia starts a nuclear war. I sometimes wonder, are we in 2016 or 1962?’

His comments comes after France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls called on Russia to stop bombing civilians in Syria, saying this was crucial for achieving peace in the country.France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls also warned that the European project could ‘disappear’ if policymakers were not careful

‘France respects Russia and its interests … But we know that to find the path to peace again, the Russian bombing of civilians has to stop,’ Valls said in a speech at a security conference in Munich.

‘The European project can go backwards or even disappear if we don’t take care of it,’ he said.

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Nationalism Wreaks Havoc in Divided Europe Confronted by common challenges, national politicians have been unable to adopt a pan-European view By Simon Nixon

By on February 15th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/nationalism-wreaks-havoc-in-divided-europe-1455477856

There are many different ways the European Union could fall apart in the coming weeks, but all of them have a common thread: the inability of national politicians to adopt a European perspective when confronted by common European challenges.

This is as true of the crisis surrounding the U.K.’s membership of the EU and the migration crisis, which will dominate a crunch EU leaders’ summit this week, as it is true of the eurozone economic crisis, which have burst back on the agenda following recent moves in financial markets.

Take Britain’s EU membership: When Prime Minister David Cameron first said that he wanted a new deal for the U.K. ahead of a referendum he has pledged to hold by the end of 2017, he insisted that the reforms he was seeking would benefit the whole of Europe.

Yet the draft deal that EU leaders will discuss does nothing of the sort. It consists of a series of carve-outs for the U.K. carefully crafted to stop other countries taking advantage of them. Indeed, EU officials are clear that if other member states try to make use of a controversial “emergency brake” that will allow the U.K. to restrict welfare payments to EU migrants for four years, the deal with the U.K. government would fall apart.

The deal may fall apart anyway: European Council President Donald Tusk has warned that the process is “fragile”. Mr. Cameron can’t even be sure he will achieve even his limited objective of persuading key figures in his party to back his deal, complicating his efforts to win the referendum, which he hopes to hold in June.

Either way, the deal looks likely to make the EU harder rather than easier to manage. The price of trying to keep Britain in the EU has been to put in question core EU principles including nondiscrimination against EU citizens, the free movement of workers and the integrity of the single market rule book. That looks like a recipe to embolden nationalists across the continent, showing that unilateral threats can deliver results. CONTINUE READING AT THE SITE

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Antonin Scalia Was Democracy’s Legal Champion He changed the way judges looked at text and law, and he was the best writer the Supreme Court has ever known.By Michael W. McConnell

By on February 15th, 2016

Mr. McConnell, a law professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday at age 79, was the most influential Supreme Court justice of the past 30 years. Not because he had the votes. He was influential because he had a clear, consistent, persuasive idea of how to interpret the Constitution: It means what it says; it means what those who enacted it meant to enact.

And Justice Scalia was influential because he wrote opinions with verve and good sense, in prose that any American could read and understand. He was the best writer the Supreme Court has ever known—and with justices like John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Jackson, that is saying a lot. He was the court’s most withering logician. He showed us what a real judge can be, even on that most political court.

When Justice Scalia arrived at the Supreme Court in 1986, its jurisprudence had become sloppy, results-driven, plagued with fuzzy three-part tests and fuzzier four-part tests, all of them concocted by his predecessors with little basis in constitutional text. Today, the entire court—even the liberal justices—have adopted Justice Scalia’s style: close attention to text, awareness of history, analytical rigor. The Supreme Court has not announced an impressionistic multipart “test” in years. CONTINUE READING AT THE SITE

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Why Islamists and the radical Left loathe the Day of Love. Jamie Glazov

By on February 15th, 2016

Yesterday, February 14, was Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one another. If you’re thinking about making a study of how couples celebrate this day, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical Left are not the places you should be spending your time. Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo jihadists and “progressives” when it comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the territory on which the contemporary romance between the Left and Islamic fanaticism is formed.

The train is never late: every year that Valentine’s comes around, the Muslim world erupts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in their power to suffocate the festivity that comes with the celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine’s every year — and the celebration of the day itself is literally outlawed in Islamist states.

This year, for example, Pakistan banned Valentine’s Day as an “insult” to Islam and warned that “strict” action would be taken against anyone daring to celebrate the day in any part of Islamabad. While in the past, Valentine’s Day activities were disrupted by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s main religious party, it was the first time this year that the state actually got involved to ban celebration of the day. In Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia this year, and as always, Valentine’s Day was outlawed. Under the Islamic regime in Iran, for instance, any sale or promotion of Valentine’s Day related items, including the exchange of gifts, flowers and cards, was illegal. The Iranian police warned retailers, as they do every year, against the promotion of Valentine’s Day celebrations.

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