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An Environmentalist Sues over an Academic Disagreement Meet Stanford’s $10 million man. By Robert Bryce

Leonardo di Caprio’s favorite renewable-energy promoter, Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson, has set a new record in thin-skinned-ness. Jacobson has filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and Chris Clack, the lead author of a paper NAS published in June that roundly debunked a previous paper of Jacobson’s. The earlier paper had claimed it would be possible for the U.S. to run entirely on renewable energy by 2050.

Even when Jacobson implied in an email to Clack that he was going to sue, a development I noted here in July, I didn’t believe he would actually do it. Nevertheless, on September 29, he did. Jacobson’s 42-page lawsuit, filed in federal court, hinges on the fact that Clack — and the 20 co-authors of the paper, who are not named as defendants — refused to accept the Stanford professor’s numbers on the amount of hydropower available in the U.S.

Clack’s paper found that Jacobson had overstated hydropower’s potential by a factor of ten or so. The land-use requirements for wind power were equally cartoonish. Clack determined that Jacobson’s all-renewable scheme would require covering more than 190,000 square miles with turbines — an area larger than the state of California. Given the burgeoning coast-to-coast backlash against Big Wind, such a notion is absurd on its face.

Rather than admit any errors, Jacobson claims that Clack — a Ph.D. mathematician who has worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and taught at the University of Colorado, and now has a consulting firm — and the National Academy damaged his reputation and made him and his co-authors “look like poor, sloppy, incompetent, and clueless researchers.”

In an email, Clack told me that it’s “unfortunate” that Jacobson has “chosen to reargue his points in a court of law, rather than in the academic literature, where they belong.”

Despite the many flaws in his plan, Jacobson made himself the patron saint of America’s richest and most powerful green groups by claiming a fully renewable energy sector was possible. His papers, many of them peer-reviewed, lent a patina of credibility to the all-renewable-no-fossil-fuel-no-nuclear dogma that Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other groups have been feeding their math-challenged disciples for decades. In 2013, Jacobson even appeared on David Letterman’s show.

Gregg Jarrett: Did Comey obstruct justice by protecting Hillary Clinton from prosecution? Gregg Jarrett By Gregg Jarrett

Former FBI Director James Comey’s explanation for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton was always improbable. Now it seems impossible.

The Espionage Act makes it a crime to mishandle classified documents “through gross negligence” (18 USC 793-f). Punishment upon conviction carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

With 110 emails on Clinton’s private server that were classified at the time they were sent or received, the Democratic nominee for president could have been prosecuted on 110 separate felony counts. Yet Comey scuttled the case.

But a story in The Hill this week by John Solomon says a newly discovered document shows that then-FBI Director Comey authored a draft statement accusing Clinton of mishandling classified documents and being “grossly negligent.”

The document was confirmed by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was written a full two months before Clinton was ever interviewed by the FBI.

However, sometime later the words “gross negligence” were edited out with red lines. The words “extremely careless” were substituted. This would appear to show that Comey knew Clinton violated the law but subsequently resolved to conjure a way to exonerate her by altering the language.

Comey didn’t do a very good job. The two terms are largely synonymous under the law.

Donna e Mobile by Mark Steyn

A couple of thoughts on the passing parade:

~Political memoirs are almost always boring, self-serving, committee-written and unreadable – Hillary’s What Happened being merely an especially bloated example. So Donna Brazile, hitherto one of the Clintons’ loyalest acolytes, might have been expected to turn in a more or less typical insider account of a flop campaign, worth neither your time nor money. Instead, she has confirmed what some of us charged at the time – that the Democrat establishment succeeded in doing to Bernie what the GOP establishment tried but failed to do to Trump: steal the nomination away from the insurgent.

Sanders vs Trump would have made it a much tougher race, and I suspect Bernie could have held a couple of those rust-belt states. But that match-up never happened, because, while the Republicans’ institutional corruption is ineffectual, the Democrats’ is lethal and all too effective. Ms Brazile’s publisher should have made a last-minute title-change and called the book What Really Happened. As is customary with the Clinto Nostra, Donna is now being accused of being a squealer and a turncoat: As the union heavies say in On the Waterfront, you’re supposed to stay D’n’D – deaf and dumb. Ms Brazile, of course, was previously head of the DNC, which is dumb’n’complicit.

I heard, I believe, Jessica Tarlov talking about this the other day, and regretting that the Brazile fracas had reopened the party divisions between the Sanders progressive wing and the Clinton moderate faction. But that’s not really what the divide is, is it? The party split is between Sanders social-justice warriors and the Clintons’ dynastic kleptocracy. And if the latter is what “moderation” and “centrism” look like, why be surprised that Dem foot-soldiers are lurching lefter? Kleptocrat centrism appeals only to wannabes – whether Clinton bagmen like Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who’d like to get a piece of the sleazy deals with Kazakh oligarchs; or media suck-ups who wish they were getting Clinton-sized six-figure sums from Goldman Sachs for speeches nobody wants to listen to.

Beyond that, kleptocrat centrism has no takers: In leftie parties around the world, it requires some effort to wean youthful idealists off their starry-eyed utopianism, and corrupt, entitled, pay-for-play Clintonism isn’t going to cut it. I made this point at the dawn of the 2016 presidential cycle in early 2015:

Leaving the studio, I ran into [Democrat pollster Doug Schoen] emerging from makeup and he upbraided me for my hostility to Hillary – which I felt bad about, because I’ve always gotten on well with him, and we have a shared interest in demography and whatnot. Twenty months later, Doug has caught up to my view.

But few other centrist Dems have. Yet the question underpinning Donna Brazile’s book is pretty basic: What do genuinely moderate Democrats have to show for mortgaging their brand to the Clinton Foundation? Me again:

Hillary got rich, Bill got laid, republican virtue got screwed. Like the sickly leaders of late-Soviet politburos, both appear older and feebler than their years: once the star performer of the double-act, Bill staggers around like the Blowjob of Dorian Gray; the life has all but literally been sucked out of him. His straight-woman, once the reliably stolid, stone-faced Margaret Dumont of his cigar-waggling routine, now has to be propped up on street bollards and fed lines by her medical staff. When she shuts down and she’s out cold, who’s driving the pantsuit? Huma? Cheryl? Podesta? Bill and Hillary have been consumed by their urges. America would be electing the Walking Dead, insatiable and fatal to the touch, but utterly hollow.

As long as “centrism” is cornered by the Clintocracy, the Democrats will continue to drift left and lefter. Clean house, or go full antifa.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: CROSSING THE TRUMP RUBICON

We are in a veritable war of competing visions. The strife inside the two parties is irrelevant—when compared to the larger existential war for the soul of America.

Like it or not, Donald Trump in fits and starts has chosen not to accommodate the progressive vision. But in most unlikely fashion he leads the fight against it.

Those who found him too crude, who saw his tweets as too adolescent, and who vowed never to vote for such an antithesis of conservative and family values have all weighed in.

So have those who are embarrassed that Trump—as did Obama during the Henry Louis Gates fiasco, the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, and the Ferguson shooting and subsequent riots—quite inappropriately weighs in on current criminal investigations and trials.

And yet, warts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.

The Age of Intolerance

We are no longer in the late 1950s era of liberal reform. It is now a postmodern world of intolerance and lockstep orthodoxy.

There are few Berkeley-like free speech areas on college campuses any more. Students charged with particular crimes enjoy little due process. There is no Joan Baez-style acknowledgement of the tragedy of good Southern poor men fighting for an awful cause. No one acknowledges tragedy anywhere at all; it has all become melodrama. We may yet see Joan Baez’s version of The Band’s ballad or Shelby Foote’s commentaries in Ken Burn’s epic Civil War documentary Trotskyized.

The media is not disinterested. Networks such as CNN see their role actively on the barricades, devoted to the higher cause of destroying the Trump presidency, not as reporting its successes or failures. The danger to free expression and a free media is not even Trumpian bombast. It is the far more deliberate and insidious transformation (begun in full under Obama) of journalism into a progressive ministry of truth. Even if he wished, Trump could not take away what the professional press already surrendered voluntarily.

President Trump Targets Voter Fraud—Dems Go Insane! Joan Swirsky

They never ever counted on the one entity for which neither media hacks nor pollsters have any respect: the American public!

On Tuesday, American voters will once again go to the polls hoping that the candidate(s) they vote for will fulfill what should be their one and only mission, i.e., to serve the needs of We the People.

Republican, ahem, leaders are appropriately nervous that the phony so-called conservatives they’ve been foisting on us for decades will be replaced by authentic conservatives who will help President Trump fulfill his mission to Make America Great Again!

And––oxymoron here––Democrat leaders are even more agitated because looming over the entire election will be the initiative President Trump announced last May to investigate voter fraud, an issue they are all-too-seedily familiar with.

They are also in high anxiety about the inconvenient truth that, according to journalist Susan Jones, “There have been five special congressional elections so far this year, and in the four races where Republicans ran against Democrats, Republicans have won all four. (In CA, two Democrats vied for a House seat, so a Dem win was the only possible outcome).

VP Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach are leading the commission’s efforts to reassure voters about the integrity of federal elections. The president also appointed Hans von Spakovsky, a GW Bush appointee, to head the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

The far-left Washington Post called his appointment “divisive,” which to most Americans meant that the president picked the perfect guy. In 2005, von Spakovsky led the Justice Department’s approval of a Georgia law requiring voters to produce photo ID, which was rejected!

Think about that rejection. You need a photo identification card to get a driver’s license, donate your blood, buy alcohol or cigarettes, open a bank account, apply for welfare benefits or food stamps or Medicaid or Social Security or unemployment or a mortgage or a hunting and fishing license, get on an airplane, rent a car, get a prescription, buy a cell phone, visit a casino and get married––and that is the short list!

But the initiative was rejected because Democrats object to any requirement that would prevent illegals and dead people and cartoon characters from voting and potentially swinging an election in their favor.

What do you think Sanctuary cities are all about? They are certainly not about the deep love and empathy leftists have for humanity, or the preference people who work 12 or 16 or 20 hours a day have for giving total strangers free housing, education, healthcare, and ongoing stipends into perpetuity. No no no….sanctuary citizens are all about Democrat votes!

Sure enough, the reliably cringe-producing Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called on the president to reject the embrace of “white supremacy” and the desire to “disenfranchise” voters that motivated such a commission.

How Leftism Makes Us Stupid By Andrew Klavan

Perhaps the worst thing about having an exclusively leftist media is that it makes all of us, right and left, stupider. Take for example that media’s reaction to the latest Islamist terror attack in Manhattan. Evil loser Sayfullo Saipov follows the ISIS playbook by driving a rented van over innocent civilians, killing eight. He jumps out of the van shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (Allah is the greatest) and later tells police he’s glad about what he did and requests an ISIS flag in his hospital room. (I know just where to plant the pole.)

In reporting the event, CNN Crime and Justice reporter Shimon Prokupecz refused to share the police description of the killer after he was caught. Because he’s a journalist, and the last thing we want is to have journalists going around giving people information! CNN’s Jake Tapper responded to news of the loser’s Arabic shout by remarking inanely that Allahu Akbar is “sometimes said under the most beautiful of circumstances, and too often we hear it being said in moments like this.” He later clarified that he was referring to beautiful circumstances like weddings and births. Yeah, what if the guy had been waving a Confederate flag? They wear those at some weddings too.

The New York Times, a former newspaper, ran two separate articles trying to justify the triumphalist Islamic battle cry, one headline reading, “Allahu Akbar: An Everyday Phrase Tarnished by Attacks.” Actor James Woods responded by tweeting: “Let me yell it out at 35,000 feet while you’re eating Chicken Florentine in first class. Then hope someone knows the Heimlich Maneuver…” When I tried to quote this tweet to my wife, I laughed so hard I couldn’t get the words out.

None of which is to make fun of a tragedy, of course, but only of the absurd reaction of the leftist press. Because, being leftist, they reduce every issue to a binary choice: their way or hatred. Ignore the worldwide connection between Islam and terror or you’re a bigot. Support gay marriage or you’re a homophobe. Buy into government health care or you want people to die. Buy into affirmative action or you’re racist. And so on. In each of these cases, there are rational arguments to be made on both sides and, as President Trump pointed out when discussing iconoclasm, “some very fine people” who support those arguments.

But the left has, for the most part, abandoned rational argument altogether, not because leftism is always wrong about everything but because it is wrong and has been proven wrong on its central premise. It is now irrefutable that socialism destroys every nation it touches. Small homogenous nations that are essentially protected by American might can fool around with confiscatory taxes and massive social programs, but even they will have to privatize industry sooner or later to stay solvent. Otherwise socialism gets you Venezuela, and that’s only if you’re lucky enough not to wind up with the Soviet Union or Red China, with over 100 million human beings exterminated in the name of paradise.

And since each of the left’s arguments is being made not in support of Islam or blacks or women or anyone else, but in support of a bigger government with an eye toward ultimately achieving socialism, leftists can’t afford to accept or even hear the arguments from the other side.

Thus we end up with a press corps full of idiots: leftists too stupid to deliver the straight news about an act of Islamist terror. CONTINUE AT SITE

Fight Breaks Out Among Democrats Over 2016 Campaign Former DNC chairwoman accuses Hillary Clinton’s team of unethical practices; they say her facts are off By Louise Radnofsky

WASHINGTON—Democrats became embroiled in an intraparty fight Friday over last year’s presidential election.

Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee during the election, asserted in a new book that the fundraising agreement between the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign was unethical because it gave her too much influence on the party’s infrastructure.

In excerpts published on Politico, Ms. Brazile said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign raised money for the DNC and helped fund it, and in return took control of its finances and strategy as well as the funds. Ms. Brazile noted that it is common practice for a presidential nominee to take control of his or her party’s operations and fundraising.

But she said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign signed the agreement with the DNC in August 2015, almost a year before she clinched the party’s nomination. That disadvantaged Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his primary fight with Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Brazile wrote.

Late Friday, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters pointed to a memo obtained by NBC News that said the agreement related only to the general election.

“Enough of this. If you’re a Democrat, we have things to do,” wrote Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Nick Merrill, in a Twitter message referencing the reported memo.

WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib explains what have we learned after Special Counsel Robert Mueller unveiled his first two big actions in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Photo: Getty

DNC Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement Friday morning that “there shouldn’t even be a perception that the DNC is interfering” in the primary process. She noted that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders had the option to raise money through joint DNC accounts.

The two campaigns set up joint fundraising accounts with the DNC during the Democratic primary, though the accounts were ultimately used very differently. Joint fundraising accounts allow campaigns and parties to solicit larger individual donations that are then divvied up between the entities that sign the agreement.

Mr. Sanders shunned big-dollar fundraising, relying instead on small donors to fuel his campaign. Mrs. Clinton, however, routinely held large-dollar fundraisers for her joint account with the DNC and state parties—some of which would then transfer the funds they received back to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

Did Hillary’s rigging at the DNC push Biden out of the race? John Podhoretz

The stunning revelation by longtime operative Donna Brazile that the Hillary Clinton campaign secretly took control — literal control — of the Democratic National Committee a year before Hillary became the party’s nominee is the talk of American politics.

As it should be.

Brazile’s piece in Politico describes her shock at the discovery of formal legal paperwork between the two entities when she took the reins at the DNC in August 2016. Brazile had been tapped for the job when DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign. Leaked emails had shown how Schultz had been putting her finger on the scale to help Clinton while the insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign was making a serious bid to seize the party nomination away from New York’s favorite carpetbagger.

Her account features ridiculous and unbelievable melodramatics — she says she “gasped” when she found out the truth and that she “lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music” to calm her before she called Sanders to deliver the awful news.

But silly though Brazile’s prose is, her account is vitally important not only for all those who want to understand how American politics works but also for the future of Brazile’s beloved party.

First, it raises key questions about what was happening as Clinton faced a time of trial in the middle of 2015. Her reputation was taking hits as her evasions and denials and untruths about what had happened to the private email server she had set up illegitimately in 2009 seemed to mushroom on a daily basis.

As this was happening, she found herself with only two semi-serious challengers for the nomination — Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

There was another person out there — then-Vice President Joe Biden. Though grieving over the tragic loss of his son Beau, Biden was still seriously considering a late entry into the race. Indeed, it would not be until October that Biden would declare himself out of contention.

Consider, then, that a formal agreement signed by the DNC and the Clinton campaign was executed in August 2015, two months before Biden made his decision.

The agreement, according to Brazile, “specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.”

Obama’s Shady Trump-Russia Spinmeister By Julie Kelly

An explosive story by Sean Davis at The Federalist reveals that President Obama’s PAC, Obama for America, paid nearly $1 million in 2016 to the law firm that retained Fusion GPS, the consulting group responsible for the infamous Trump “dossier.” According to Davis, Federal Election Commission records show the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Obama’s PAC paid Perkins Coie more than $12 million last year alone. https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/31/obamas-shady-trump-russia-spinmeister/

The article also notes that Neil King, Jr.—the husband of Shailagh Murray, one of Obama’s former senior advisors—went on to work for Fusion GPS shortly after the election. King was a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter who, while at the Journal, was also a colleague of Glenn Simpson, one of Fusion GPS’s founders. These links were never divulged in any of King’s election coverage for the Journal. These ties could explain the Obama White House’s almost daily attention to the Trump-Russia collusion plotline, fueled largely by Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary.

From the White House press podium, Earnest played a critical role in tossing Trump-Russia conspiracy chum to an eager White House press pool. He conferred White House credibility to a politically connected cybersecurity firm that claimed Russian hackers hit the DNC server; wove a tale of Trump campaign collusion after the election in a shameful attempt to discredit the president-elect; and, just days before Trump’s inauguration, childishly compared Trump’s obligation to defend himself against the dossier to Obama’s need to defend against “birther” allegations.

In retrospect, knowing what we know now, particularly that the spouse of one of Earnest’s colleagues was close to and subsequently hired by the same outfit digging up dirt on Obama’s biggest political foe, Earnest’s conduct calls into question the integrity of Obama’s communications shop both before and after the election.

Earnest first floated the Russia-hacked-the-election meme during his press briefing on July 25, 2016. It was the same day the FBI announced it would investigate “cyber intrusion involving the DNC” related to the hacking of that organization’s email server earlier in the year. But while the FBI’s statement did not mention Russia, Earnest—with the help of some willing reporters—fueled the unsubstantiated but politically explosive plot line that the Russians hacked the DNC, even suggesting it was an attempt to help Donald Trump.

Here is an exchange on July 25, 2016, between Associated Press reporter Josh Lederman and Earnest at the beginning of the daily briefing, one day after the emails exposed via the DNC hack led to chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s ouster at the Philadelphia convention:

Lederman: Turning to the investigation into this hack that the FBI is now leading . . . are you prepared to say anything about whether Russia was involved in this hack and whether it may have been an attempt by a foreign state to try and sway the election towards Donald Trump?

Earnest: I know that there’s been a lot of public reporting about this particular matter and I know that there are some private sector entities that have conducted their own investigations and even released their own reports on these investigations. So the FBI has put out a statement indicating that they are investigating this situation . . . we know that there are a variety of actors who are looking for vulnerabilities in the cybersecurity of the United States, and that includes Russia.

*record scratch* Wait, what? The DNC server is hacked, no one knows who did it, but it’s automatically presumed to be helping Trump?

Further, the “entity” Earnest refers to is Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack. (We now know Perkins Coie also hired Crowdstrike on behalf of the DNC to look into the breach. To date, the DNC refuses to surrender its server to the FBI for a forensic analysis.) In June 2016, Crowdstrike posted a blog article identifying “two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network” and concluded, “attacks against electoral candidates and the parties they represent are likely to continue up until the election.” Trump’s name was never mentioned, and early news articles reported the hackers did it to gain “opposition research on Donald Trump.” So, how could anyone conclude that the DNC hack was intended to help Trump?

SYDNEY WILLIAMS: OCTOBER 2017 THE MONTH THAT WAS

October 24th marked the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia. The rise of Communism gave birth to the world’s deadliest ideology – far worse than Nazism and Fascism, in terms of the number of people subjected to imprisonment, terror and death. Yet does the world associate Communism with evil commensurate with its history? I think not. In the Soviet Union alone, subtracting the number of Soviet soldiers and citizens killed in World II, an estimated twenty million were killed by Stalin. About forty-five million were killed in China by Mao Zedong. Between seven and ten million Ukrainians died during the Soviet-inspired “Holodomor,” in 1932-33. Approximately two million Cambodians – almost a third of the population – died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Millions were killed in North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, East Germany, Rumania, Bulgaria, Ethiopia and other places. Communism killed as many people as died in the two world wars of the last century. As Bruce Thornton, classicist and Hoover research fellow recently put it, its history is a “…road to utopia [that] runs over mountains of corpses.” Today, it is not Communism that concerns us, but its half-brother Socialism. Despite its failure in places like Venezuela and in Europe where unrestrained Muslim immigration has created segregated neighborhoods and increased government dependency, it has become popular in the U.S. among followers of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

During the month, elections were held in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, and a re-run, in Africa (Kenya). Elections in Austria and the Czech Republic moved both countries to the right, meaning people are still concerned about terrorism, immigration and economic growth. Sebastian Kurz will become, at age 31, Europe’s youngest leader, when he assumes the Chancellorship of Austria. In the Czech Republic, Andrei Babis, former finance minister, populist and billionaire businessman, won a “thumping” victory, as Prime Minister-designate. The Catalans declared independence, and Spain’s parliament granted Prime Minister Rajoy powers to enforce union. Catalonia has simmered a long time. In 2006, Madrid promised the region increased autonomy. Four years later – amidst recession and financial crisis – they reneged on that promise. This is a story of disillusionment with bureaucratic and distant administrative governments run by elites. While immigration was pivotal in Brexit, the bigger problem is politicians who are deaf to the people they represent and who are unaffected by the policies they promote. We are witnessing a backlash against hypocrisy, arrogance and authoritarianism, in Brussels, Madrid and other capitals.

In Japan, Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party won its third landslide victory. Abe, an ally of the U.S. and a friend of President Trump, is an advocate for more defense spending. He benefitted from North Korea’s militant rhetoric and an improved economy. In Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif returned as Prime Minister and as head of the Pakistan Muslim League two months after being disqualified on charges of corruption. In Argentina, President Mauricio Macri’s Republican Proposal Party increased its seats in both the legislature and the senate, while former president Christina Kirchner’s Justicialist Party lost seats. A re-run of August’s race in Kenya was won again by current president Uhuru Kenyatta.

U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces took back the Al-Omar oil fields – Syria’s most productive – from ISIS forces, fields that had been captured in 2014. Elsewhere, Islamic terrorists persisted in their work. Almost 400 people died in Somalia, when separate truck and car bombs exploded, the work of al-Shabaab militants. In Marseilles, two women were stabbed to death by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The assailant was shot dead. At least seventeen died in Cameroon, in two provinces bordering Nigeria. In all, over 700 people died during the month at the hands of Islamic extremists. Good news came toward the end of the month, when 32-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmon said his country would return to “moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world.” It should be remembered that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens.