RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/china-and-those-not-so-rare-earths/

“As ideology dictates renewable electricity sources, and conflict looms, these rare earths are fundamental. Demand for graphite, lithium, cobalt and manganese is surging but, without meeting the increase in future demand for REE’s, we cannot keep the lights on, never mind fight a war.”

As demand increases and China restricts supply, rare earth availability is causing increasing political tensions. Donald Trump is looking for supplies in Greenland, in Ukraine, and in Australia.

Rare earths, also known as rare earth elements (REE’s), are a set of 17 nearly indistinguishable, lustrous heavy metals, most with unpronounceable names. As it happens, it is something of a misnomer to describe them as rare because they are actually quite common. Cerium, for example, is the planet’s 25th most abundant element, even more plentiful than copper.

Compared with other minerals such as iron or bauxite, however, they are thinly spread, making mining difficult, with processing requiring enormous amounts of raw ore. They do at least tend to occur together, but this makes their separation another production issue. Current methods of extraction result in toxic contamination of soil and water and, further complicating matters, deposits are usually found with thorium and uranium, meaning the 2000 tonnes of waste typically generated to produce a single tonne of REE is radioactive. This plunges environmentalists into a state ongoing cognitive dissonance: while they hail the production of CO2-free “clean-energy” minerals as key to “renewable” power sources, they must also countenance the pollution and environmental degradation extraction causes. Fortunately, consistency has never been a prerequisite for the green movement.

Rare earths have diverse applications in electrical and electronic components, lasers, glass, and industrial processes. In the modern age of so-called clean energy, their use has assumed critical importance for batteries, the magnets essential for electric vehicles and wind turbines, not to mention drones, missiles and other military hardware. The global demand for REE’s continues to soar and is expected to at least double again over the next ten years, leaving a supply gap.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/13/the-uks-free-speech-crisis-is-about-to-get-so-much-worse/

The UK government’s Crime and Policing Bill poses a formidable threat to free speech in the UK. The bill, which is currently at the committee stage in the House of Commons, promises to keep our streets ‘safe’ by giving courts a new power to issue ‘respect orders’. These orders are potentially so draconian and wide-ranging that they could well end up being used for very different purposes – including silencing anyone who says anything online that the authorities disapprove of.

Under the bill, police, local authorities and a number of other bodies will be empowered to ask courts for ‘respect orders’ that can either prohibit someone from doing or require them to do ‘anything described in the order’. You read that right – anything. The only condition that needs to be satisfied is that the court thinks, on a balance of probabilities, that the person ‘has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person’. This essentially amounts to ‘precrime’. There won’t even be a need to warn people. The court can issue an interim order without notice. Once the order (which can be indefinite in duration) is there, breaching it carries an unlimited fine or two years in prison.

This spectacularly authoritarian measure is supposedly aimed at street hoodlums, but it is not restricted in any meaningful way. It is a racing certainty that the courts will not apply any limits to its scope.

This bill is a particular threat to free speech. Already, you have to worry that police might turn up at your door over a controversial social-media post. At least at present, the poster has a reasonable chance of defending themselves. While our hate-speech laws are vaguely worded and authoritarian, at least the onus is on the authorities to investigate and prosecute.

This changes dramatically under the Crime and Policing Bill. If it passes, all the police would have to do is persuade a county court judge that people are distressed by the post in question. Then, the poster can be compelled, on pain of prosecution, to delete the offending content, not refer to the subject concerned online again and even stay off social media altogether. They might even be forced to provide an official with the passwords to all of their internet-enabled devices.

This law could be used to attack practically anyone who criticises or makes life difficult for their elected officials. It would be straightforward for, say, a local council to obtain such a ‘respect order’, telling a pesky critic to pipe down indefinitely or face possible imprisonment.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21522/sahel-islamism

Global Terrorism Index 2025, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, reveals that the primary instigator of global terrorism during 2024 was the Islamic State (ISIS) and associated groups — such as al Qaeda, Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and al- Shabaab — together responsible for more than 7,500 deaths.

Although the West is experiencing escalating terrorism in countries such as Sweden, Australia, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, the Sahel region evidently remains the “global epicentre of terrorism, accounting for over half of all terrorism-related deaths in 2024.” Here, conflict deaths exceeded 25,000 for the first time, of which nearly 4,000 were directly connected to terrorism.

A perturbing factor is that in Europe, “one in five persons arrested for terrorism is legally classified as a child.”

The consequence is, of course, that with the West’s retreat, ISIS has free rein to action their visions of global influence. They are present in 22 countries at present….

Russia’s Wagner mercenary militia, although rebranded as an “Expeditionary Corps,” continues its predatory activities in the area, offering “governments in Africa a ‘regime survival package’ in exchange for access to strategically important natural resources.”

Covertly obtained Russian documents reveal how the group strives to “change mining laws in West Africa, with the ambition of dislodging Western companies from an area of strategic importance.” The upshot is accelerating anti-Western sentiment, resulting in the local states seeking to expel hitherto entrenched foreign interests.

“This is the Russian state coming out of the shadows in its Africa policy.” Russia’s patent objective is therefore to “seize control of critical resources,” and “aggressively pursue the expansion of its partnerships in Africa, with the explicit intent to supplant Western partnerships.” — Jack Watling, Royal United Services Institute, February 20, 2024.

Currently, the significant strategic, political, and economic benefits in the region are reaped by Russia, China and Turkey. The West is nowhere to be seen.

The center of world terrorist activity and violent death is no longer the Middle East. The “Sahel region of Africa is now the ‘epicentre of global terrorism,'” responsible for “over half of all terrorism-related deaths” worldwide, according to the respected Global Terrorism Index.

The sub-Saharan Sahel is largely unknown to much of the world. It can be described as the large, mostly flat, strip, nearly 600 miles wide, located between the savannahs of Sudan to the south and the Sahara desert to the north.

https://www.aol.com/ballerina-imprisoned-russia-over-ukraine-030744498.html

A Russian American woman who spent more than a year imprisoned in Russia over allegations of financially supporting Ukraine’s military returned to the United States on Thursday night after a prisoner exchange.

Ksenia Karelina, a former ballerina who had been living in Los Angeles, was arrested in Russia in February 2024 and sentenced to 12 years in a penal colony for “high treason.”

The plane carrying Karelina touched down at 10:56 p.m. at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.

She was smiling as she exited the plane’s steps and embraced her fiancé, Chris van Heerden, who was waiting outside the jet. Van Heerden gave his coat to Karelina in the 50-degree night air and put his arm around her as they walked away from the plane.

“Mr. Trump, I’m so, so grateful for you to bring me home and for American government,” Karelina said in video recorded by Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka. “And I never felt more blessed to be American, and I’m so, so happy to get home.”

The Russian legal group Perviy Otdel and the U.S. spa where Karelina worked said she was arrested because of a $51.80 donation to a charity that provides aid to Ukraine.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/10/the-insane-campaign-to-decriminalise-hamas/

It’s safe to say Britain did not cover itself in glory this week. We’ve had legal bigwigs warning that we risk resurrecting the crime of blasphemy following the charging of a man for burning the Koran. We saw the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, announce that the UK government can’t be arsed with inquiries into the industrial-scale abuse of working-class girls by gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men. And now, the icing on this rancid cake: British lawyers are agitating for Hamas to no longer be designated as a terrorist organisation.

Yes, a UK legal firm is making a plea for Hamas to be ‘un-proscribed’. It’s called Riverway Law. It’s making representations for Dr Mousa Abu Marzouk, Hamas’s head of international affairs. Their case is that Britain’s use of the term ‘terrorist’ against Hamas is a breach of its supporters’ human rights. I’m not making this up. It ‘unlawfully restricts’ their freedom of speech, apparently. Welcome to modern Britain, where you must never desecrate the Koran or expect an inquiry into rape gangs, but you might soon be free to say: ‘I love Hamas.’

The lawyers have submitted a 106-page legal application to the home secretary. It wails about how unfair it is that Britain brands Hamas a terror group. Yes, how dare we use the word terrorist to describe a movement that sent thousands of armed hysterics to slit the throats of Jews on 7 October 2023? Hamas is a ‘resistance movement’, the application says, whose aim is to ‘liberate Palestine’. The trouble is, Hamas, that those of us still in possession of a moral compass know what this means: you want to ‘liberate’ the Middle East of its Jews. You want to banish, with savage violence, the Jews from their homeland. And that’s terrorism. Actually, it’s worse: it’s the dream of genocide wrapped in the lie of ‘resistance’.

Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was proscribed in 2001. Its political wing was proscribed in 2021, when the then Tory government decided that the distinction between the two was ‘artificial’. The proscription means it’s a criminal offence for anyone here to be a member of Hamas or to drum up support for it. Waving the Hamas flag and wearing pro-Hamas clothing is a crime, too. Hamas – brace yourselves for this – is now citing the European Convention on Human Rights against the UK government. Your proscription of our lovely resistance movement is an assault on our British supporters’ ‘freedom of speech’, it says.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/3372482/ali-khamenei-revealing-glimpse-islamic-republic-fears/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-

When Iran’s supreme leader speaks, the world expects a predictable mix of praise for his Palestinian allies, blustery predictions of Israel’s demise, and bitter denunciations of the Great Satan (the United States). Any departure from Ali Khamenei’s usual script is worth noting.

In his recent Eid al-Fitr prayer sermon, Khamenei added something as surprising as it was revealing: an emphatic expression of anxiety unusual for a regime that normally projects omnipotence.

Of course, his sermons are rarely purely religious but rather signals of policy and national sentiment from the commanding heights of the Islamic Republic. This year, Khamenei laid bare the nightmare haunting the regime’s leadership: the specter of foreign military intervention, the persistent possibility for mass internal unrest framed as “sedition,” and the targeted assassination of top officials. Most telling, perhaps, was the implicit acknowledgment that the convergence of these threats could pose no less than an existential challenge to the regime, especially after a series of Israeli strategic victories and a toughening of American resolve.

For the leader of any power to reveal so much vulnerability should be taken seriously. If the leader is worried, his followers cannot be far behind. Cracks in the armor of authoritarian regimes tend to spread when morale is shaken.

Ghasseminejad lists several threats to the Islamic Republic:

First among his articulated fears is the possibility of an external attack. Khamenei addressed this directly, stating, “If malice comes from outside, which is unlikely, they will certainly receive a strong reciprocal blow.” The qualifier “unlikely” attempts to project confidence, yet the very act of addressing the threat underscores its presence in Tehran’s strategic calculus. In a region simmering with tension, particularly involving long-standing adversaries such as Israel and the United States, this preemptive warning serves both as deterrence and possibly as preparation for the domestic audience

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-sign-that-syrias-al-sharaa-is-not-the-moderate-he-claims-to-be/

Now there is another worrisome sign that Ahmed al-Sharaa may not be the moderate he claims to be. For he has appointed a most immoderate Sunni cleric to be the Grand Mufti of Syria. More on this appointment can be found here: “Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Pick for Syria’s Mufti Shows He Is No Moderate,” by Kamal Chomani, Middle East Forum, April 3, 2025:

Self-appointed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s recent appointment of Sheikh Osama Al-Rifa’i to be Syria’s Grand Mufti and al-Sharaa’s announcement of the transitional Syrian government signals the new regime will continue to disregard Syria’s ethnic and religious diversity. Al-Rifa’i previously was head of the Syrian Islamic Council in Istanbul, which largely carried water for Turkey.

Al-Rifa’i’s appointment especially concerns minorities given his 2018 anti-Kurdish fatwa that greenlighted the Turkish invasion of Kurdish territories, and the Turkish forces’ subsequent ethnic cleansing and cultural eradication.

Al-Rifa’i’s fatwa began with a condemnation of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the largely Kurdish militia that allied with the United States against the Islamic State, for working with Americans and said, “Fighting the Syrian Democratic Forces is jihad in the way of God.” In its seventh point, the fatwa legitimized cooperation with Turkey’s military operations. “We do not see a legitimate obstacle to cooperating with the Turkish government in fighting criminals,” it explained….

The “criminals” Turkey claims to be fighting in Syria are the Kurds in the Syrian Democratic Forces who are fighting only to keep their autonomy in northeast Syria, while the Turkish army is trying to suppress them. Osama al-Rifa’i is in the pocket of Erdogan, who was no doubt delighted when al-Sharaa appointed him to be the Grand Mufti of Syria.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/06/sudans-forgotten-war-exposes-the-inhumanity-of-israelophobia/

They’re actually calling it ‘the forgotten war’. Following the fall of Khartoum to the Sudanese army last week, the global commentariat has been wringing its hands over this ‘overlooked’ tragedy. They’re inviting us, finally, to ponder Sudan’s ‘forgotten crisis’, to reflect on what some refer to as the world’s worst humanitarian calamity. Our reporters found ‘fear, loss and hope in Sudan’s ruined capital’, said the BBC this week. To which the only reasonable reply is: what kept them? This war’s been raging for years and only now do you deign to cover it?

It is an act of incalculable gall for the media elites to call Sudan’s suffering ‘the forgotten war’. For this war wasn’t forgotten, it was erased – by them. It was ruthlessly relegated down the hierarchy of human suffering by a media class so drunk on its obsession and animus with Israel’s war in Gaza that it became blind to every other horror on Earth. It wasn’t forgetfulness that led the West’s cultural establishments to so pitilessly neglect the suffering of the Sudanese people – it was Israelophobia.

Sudan has been ravaged by war since 15 April 2023. Yes, we will shortly arrive at the second anniversary of this brutal conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and yet which so few people in the West are aware of. The war pitted the army of Sudan against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful paramilitary force that has its origins in the Janjaweed militia that carried out unspeakable atrocities during the ‘Darfur crisis’ of 2003 to 2020. The Sudanese army and the RSF were allies once. They ruled Sudan on a joint military council following the populist ousting of Sudan’s dictatorial president, Omar al-Bashir, in 2019. But tensions between them grew and a merciless war for sole power exploded in 2023.