Displaying posts categorized under

WORLD NEWS

China caves on 125% tariff for major US export after White House predicts Beijing can’t keep up

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/china-caves-on-125-tariff-for-major-us-export-after-white-house-predicts-beijing-can-t-keep-up/ar-AA1DQXAe?

China waived a 125% tariff on ethane imports from the U.S. on Tuesday, according to a report from Reuters.

China had initially imposed the tariff earlier this month as part of its retaliation against President Donald Trump’s Liberation Day tariff campaign. China is responsible for purchasing roughly half of America’s ethane exports each year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Chinese companies that rely on U.S. ethane include Satellite Chemical, SP Chemicals, Sinopec, Sanjiang Fine Chemical and Wanhua Chemical Group, while the key U.S. exporters are Enterprise Products Partners and Energy Transfer.

Ethane joins a growing list of products that China has granted tariff exemptions for amid the ongoing trade war with Washington.

Spain’s blackouts are a disaster made by Net Zero Renewables have made our energy grids dangerously unreliable.Fraser Myers

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/29/spains-blackouts-are-a-disaster-made-by-net-zero/

‘We face a long night’, warned Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez yesterday evening, after much of Spain, Portugal and south-west France were plunged into darkness by the worst power outage in European history. Tens of millions of people were left without electricity. Trains were halted, planes were grounded and the internet was shut down. Modern life ground to a halt across the Iberian Peninsula. Although the exact causes of the blackout have yet to be declared, we can be certain of one thing: the risk of such outages will only get worse as we embark on the path towards Net Zero.

Spain and Portugal are increasingly reliant on solar and wind power. Renewables were supplying 80 per cent of electricity just before the outages. The blackouts were triggered by a rapid loss of power – of around 15GW, the equivalent of 60 per cent of Spain’s national electricity demand. It is not clear what exactly led to this loss, although a cyber attack has been ruled out. What matters is that a renewable-heavy grid is far less able to absorb this kind of shock than one that runs on traditional energy sources.

Coal and gas plants, or hydroelectric dams, have what is called ‘inertia’ built into the system, whereas wind and solar do not. The spinning turbines used in traditional energy generation will not immediately grind to a halt when there is a fault, acting as a buffer against power outages. ‘In a low-inertia environment’, explains energy expert Kathryn Porter, ‘if you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react. That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly.’

It is not as if Europe’s leaders are unaware of these risks. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which vociferously promotes Net Zero in public, circulated a confidential paper to world leaders last week, ahead of the UK government’s summit on the future of energy security. According to Bloomberg, the IEA warned that ‘systemic challenges will emerge from balancing increasingly renewable-dominated grids’. For energy systems to work, supply needs to be matched precisely to demand, or ‘balanced’, which is made infinitely more difficult with renewables, which are so variable and unpredictable – a fact green ideologues are usually reluctant to acknowledge.

Bye Bye Canada Meet Trudeau 2.0. by Aynaz Anni Cyrus

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bye-bye-canada/

The Conservatives were defeated in Canada’s federal election on Monday night – after being significantly ahead in the polls just a few months ago – and Liberal leader Mark Carney has managed to cling to power.

Canada just hit its own Great Reset – Klaus Schwab-style. And it’s far from the great win for the country that the Liberal voters of Canada may think it is – unless, of course, they voted for their own country’s destruction, which we know is a desire rooted in the hearts of many leftists residing in any Western capitalist nation.

While headlines celebrate “historic change,” “new leadership,” and “fresh starts,” the reality is something much darker: a tired, battered system stuck rearranging the same deck chairs on a Titanic steered by the radical Justin Trudeau. The players have changed, but the leftist game stays the same.

The new Liberal face Carney, 60, doesn’t really represent any kind of surprising revolution. Anointed prime minister in early March following Trudeau’s resignation, Carney is a career globalist, a central banker polished to a high corporate shine, now sitting atop a crumbling political machine. The Liberals cling to power with what seems to now be a minority government — a sign of great weakness, not strength — while the Canadian media hails it as stability.

Spain’s big blackout came less than week after it went full green on electricity By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/04/spain_s_big_blackout_came_less_than_week_after_it_went_full_green_on_electricity.html

Spain and Portugal achieved net zero on Monday, but not the way anyone would want to achieve net zero: By going back to the cavepeople times with no electricity.

According to the New York Times:

A major power outage hit Spain and Portugal on Monday afternoon, abruptly shutting down daily activities, halting trains and subways, cutting off traffic lights, closing stores and canceling or delaying some flights.

Hours after the power shut off around 12:30 p.m. Central European time, stranding tens of millions of people across the Iberian Peninsula, officials remained at a loss as to the cause, though several denied any foul play.

“At this point, there are no indications of any cyberattack,” António Costa, the president of the European Council, wrote on X after communicating with the leaders of Spain and Portugal, who both assembled emergency meetings. “Grid operators in both countries are working on finding the cause and on restoring the electricity supply.”

Their whole society was disrupted, and no one knows exactly why as of yet.

According to Politico Europe:

The massive blackout that left the Iberian Peninsula in the dark on Monday appears to have been sparked by the unexplained disappearance 15 gigawatts of power from Spain’s electricity grid.

“This has never happened before,” said a grave-looking Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at a press conference late on Monday evening. “And what caused it is something that the experts have not yet established — but they will.”

He added that “no hypothesis has been rejected, and every possible cause is being investigated.”

How Ireland became a cauldron of the culture war Saturday’s protests for and against immigration perfectly captured the tensions of our time. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/28/how-ireland-became-a-cauldron-of-the-culture-war/

EXCERPT

This was Dublin on Saturday. There was a huge protest against the government’s immigration policy, and a counter-protest of self-styled radicals chanting ‘Refugees welcome here’. And it was about the most perfect distillation of the ‘culture war’ I’ve ever seen. Crowds of working people rallying behind the national flag as the virtuous of Dublin 4 flipped a collective middle finger at them and branded them fascist scum. There it was, in glorious technicolor, the great clash of our time: that between ordinary people worried about mass immigration, and an elevated class of high-status opinion-havers for whom borders are so 20th century.

The main protest was against the immigration policy overseen by both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in recent years. Immigration is the hottest topic in Ireland right now. Swarms of Irish people are both bemused and troubled that Ireland’s foreign-born population is heading towards a fifth of the whole population. They’ve watched as sleepy green towns have become 35 per cent foreign-born almost overnight. No, they’re not racist, just curious: curious to know how this happened, why it happened, and whether they get a say in it.

The other side, the counter-protesters, could not have been more different. They were rallied by United Against Racism, a leftish group backed by Sinn Fein, the Greens and others in Dublin’s noisy virtue-displaying class. They waved the trans flag rather than the tricolour, because apparently the right of men to shit next to women is more important than the right of nations to self-determination. The words ‘fascists fuck off’ were scrawled on one trans flag, beautifully capturing the seething animus these snobs disguised as radicals feel for Dubliners who’ve never darkened the door of a university and probably think there are only two genders.

Where the big demo was a sea of tricolours, the counter-demo was full of the accoutrements of the neo-religion of woke. People were adorned in the keffiyeh, the Arab garment appropriated by the bourgeois of the West to signal their moral fitness for polite society. The Pride flag fluttered, because to this new class of faux-progressive individual identity matters far more than national identity. It was a clash of two moral universes, the green, white and gold of the tricolour signalling an affinity with the nation, the multicolours of Pride signalling a preference for the neoliberal cult of self-regard.

Kenya: Jihadists Target Majority-Christian Country “If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot.” Uzay Bulut

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kenya-jihadists-target-majority-christian-country/

This month marks the ten-year anniversary of when Islamic terrorists stormed the Garissa University College in Kenya, murdering 148 Christian students and injuring at least 79.

On April 2, 2015, gunmen took over 700 students hostage at the university campus. According to the witnesses, the terrorists asked the victims about their religion and segregated the Muslims from the Christians, intending to execute those who identified as Christians.

Student Collins Wetangula told the Associated Press that when the militants stormed his dorm, he could hear them demanding if residents were Muslim or Christian.

“If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot. With each blast of the gun, I thought I was going to die.”

“All I could hear were footsteps and gunshots; nobody was screaming because they thought this would lead the gunmen to know where they are,” he said. “The gunmen were saying sisi ni al-Shabab” (That is Swahili for “We are al-Shabaab.”)

The siege ended the same day, after all four of the attackers were killed.

The terrorist group al-Shabaab took responsibility for the attack. The group had also claimed responsibility for a deadly 2013 attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. This incident left 67 people dead and over 150 wounded.

Since then, Islamic terrorist attacks in Kenya and many other African nations have remained ongoing. In the latest incident, on March 23, 2025, al-Shabaab killed six police personnel after assailants attacked a base near the Somali border.

A jihad group formed in the early 2000s, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, was quickly nicknamed al-Shabaab, which means “The Youth.” It seeks to establish an Islamic state in Somalia.

Al-Shabaab was created as a member of the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition of Sharia law courts united against the federal government of Somalia. In 2012, al-Shabaab pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda. Today, al- Shabaab controls parts of central and southern Somalia, where it enforces Sharia law.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, in the areas it controls, al-Shabaab prohibits “various types of entertainment, such as movies and music; the sale of khat, a narcotic plant that is often chewed; smoking; and the shaving of beards. Stonings and amputations have been meted out to suspected adulterers and thieves. At the same time, the group bans cooperation with humanitarian agencies, creating a harrowing challenge in the face of unprecedented droughts.”

Mr. Globalism Goes Away Daniel Greenfield

https://bkdvk-zgpvh.campaign-view.com/ua/viewinbrowser?od=3z2bfeefc6e25f26cf812b76a5b

When the skies over the Swiss resort of Davos next fill with over 1,000 private jets bearing the elites of the world to discuss its fate, the Teutonic man behind it all may no longer be there.

Klaus Martin Schwab, born during WWII to a Nazi factory manager using forced labor to make flamethrowers, is Mr. Globalism. Even those who don’t know his name have seen that face with its cold fish stare through the rimmed eyeglasses looking back at them from under the towering futura font, slim and minimalist, of a solemn address at a World Economic Forum event.

“As I enter my 88th year, I have decided to step down from the position of Chair and as a member of the Board of Trustees, with immediate effect,” Klaus announced with dryly punctilious precision, declaring his departure while telling us nothing about why he’s leaving.

One reason may be that the WEF is investigating Schwab’s alleged withdrawal of cash from ATMs and use of the WEF to pay for hotel room massages, but the WEF founder has been accused of worse in the past.

But the real reason may be all the empty seats at the last World Economic Forum’s Davos event.

Not only Trump, who delivered virtual remarks, but most world leaders stayed home from 2025’s AI-themed Davos. Apart from Ukraine’s Zelenskyy, who can be counted on to show up at garage sales, dinner theaters and children’s puppet shows as long as there’s a chance photos will be taken, the WEF had to make do with personal addresses from the likes of South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, the UN Secretary General, and the European Commission president.

The globalists, failed state leaders, and CEOs looking to mingle still come, but Davos is dying.

China Just ‘Folded’ in the Trade War by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21576/china-trade-war

Xi Jinping’s regime simply cannot admit it is not able to stand up to Washington.

[O]n April 24 about a dozen Chinese officials, including a “high-ranking official from the Chinese Ministry of Finance,” were seen entering the U.S. Treasury’s main building in Washington at 7:00 in the morning as Chinese security officials attempted to prevent photographers from recording the entry.

“In fact, the tariff waivers underscore that not only does Beijing need access to the American market far more than Americans need the China market but also that the United States makes vital products that simply aren’t Made in China, and won’t be for years at best.” — Alan Tonelson, trade expert at RealityChek, to Gatestone, April 25, 2025.

When Trump has to raise the temperature, Beijing has just shown him which U.S. products China believes it cannot do without.

Beijing has ordered its airlines not to take delivery of Boeing aircraft, and the plane maker has now flown back, from China to the U.S., three 737 Max aircraft that were about to be delivered. Due to the long order backlogs at both Boeing and Airbus, this punishment imposes, as a practical matter, almost no cost on Boeing. Yet if Trump were to order Boeing not to deliver parts or provide services to Chinese airlines, China would soon have to ground a large number of its airliners.

China is making significant trade concessions without saying it is making concessions. Xi Jinping’s regime simply cannot admit it is not able to stand up to Washington. When Trump has to raise the temperature, Beijing has just shown him which U.S. products China believes it cannot do without

China, according to Reuters and Financial Times reporting on April 25, is not uniformly imposing its new 125% across-the-board tariff on American goods. In short, certain imports from the U.S. are in fact coming in tariff-free. Beijing’s new policy has not been announced and is not official.

“Companies in sectors including aviation and industrial chemicals said that some of their products had already been granted a reprieve, while local media reported that some semiconductors had been spared tariffs,” the Financial Times noted.

Here’s the Most Remarkable Thing About the Trump/Zelensky Sit-Down at the Pope’s Funeral Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/04/26/heres-the-most-remarkable-thing-about-the-trumpzelensky-private-sit-down-at-the-popes-funeral-n4939262

In their first tête-à-tête since the fireworks in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sat down for a remarkable fifteen-minute meeting at the Vatican Saturday, where both heads of state were attending the funeral of Pope Francis. The Saturday meeting was striking for several reasons, not least because it was just Trump and Zelensky talking things out alone. No aides or translators were present, and while photographers some terrific photos of the two leaders in intense discussion, reporters were not buzzing around performing their usual act of asking questions designed to show the world what an awful person Donald Trump is.

The privateness of the Trump-Zelensky confab is what makes it most remarkable. We just had four years of a president who not only couldn’t make the most insignificant of moves without a cheat sheet telling exactly what to do and when and how to do it. Now even Old Joe Biden’s top aides are admitting that the senescent corruptocrat simply wasn’t there, and that his dementia had advanced to the point that Old Joe knew nothing whatsoever about the policies his autopen was signing into law. What he appeared to know about the war in Ukraine, and everything else, was just an illusion created by his reading words off a teleprompter with reasonable competency.

Even before the misrule of Old Joe’s autopen, we have gotten used to seeing presidents surrounded by clouds of aides, and clearly those aides often did the real spadework in international diplomacy and other areas. Trump, however, is in this, as in so many ways, a sharp departure from what has become the norm for the chief executive. He is entirely capable of handling the negotiations with Zelensky (and others) without any input from aides, and even without their presence.

Kneecap make me ashamed to be Irish Their sympathy for the fascists of Hamas exposes the rotten heart of Israelophobia. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/26/kneecap-make-me-ashamed-to-be-irish/

Materially, what’s the difference between Kanye West gushing over Hitler and Kneecap saying ‘Up Hamas’? Both are instances of rappers praising Jew-killers, no? Kanye prefers the OG of murderous fascism, even going so far as to post a pic of Hitler next to the goat emoji – in short, Hitler was the Greatest of All Time. Kneecap, meanwhile, seem to have a thing for fascism with an Islamist twist. ‘Up Hamas!’, they cried at a London gig, just a year after Hamas carried out the worst act of anti-Semitic slaughter since the era of Kanye’s hero.

Kanye cuddles up to the man who oversaw the gravest crime of the 20th century, Kneecap big up the army of anti-Semites that carried out the worst act of violent racial hatred of the 21st century so far. Kanye admires the dictator who greenlit the industrialised burning of six million Jews, Kneecap admire the neo-fascist militia that laid waste to more than a thousand mostly Jewish lives on 7 October 2023. Two very different hip-hop acts united by a grim fascination with cunts who kill Jews.

But here’s the thing: where the woke left condemns Kanye, it praises Kneecap. It damns Kanye’s Hitler fandom as evidence of a disturbed mind, but it defends Kneecap’s open flirtations with the fascists of Hamas as a brave stand against ‘imperialism’. You couldn’t ask for better proof of how today’s fashionable hatred for Israel has fried the minds and ravaged the moral sensibilities of those who pose as progressive. That London’s bourgeois brats moshed in ecstasy as Kneecap praised the racist slayers of Israelis is the crisis of civilisation distilled.

Kneecap are a rapping trio from Belfast. They’re theatre kids cosplaying as Irish rebels. One is 35 years old and wears a tricolor balaclava. They rap about taking ket and hating ‘Brits’. This gets Shoreditch shitheads and other plummy pricks hot under the collar while driving the likes of the Daily Mail mad. And they really hate Israel. Of course they do. How else are you going to stay sweet with the Guardian and BAFTA and every other influential ponce in a keffiyeh other than by spouting the Israelophobia that is absolutely de rigueur in such circles?