RUTHFULLY YOURS

The $800 million the Prime Minister is diverting from foreign aid might have done real and genuine good in the Third World. Instead of funding clinics and clean water, that cash is underwriting a cynical exercise in climate showmanship and green-eyed moral vanity
Malcolm Turnbull, by way of making a splash at the Paris Climate Conference, has just pledged a billion dollars to help poor countries meet the challenge climate change. This forms part of a broader promise by ‘rich nations’ to provide $100 billion a year in ‘climate aid.’ What Turnbull was less keen to emphasise is that $800 million of the funds would be redirected from the existing foreign-aid budget. That means $800 million less for disaster relief, treatment for preventable diseases, access to clean drinking water and malnutrition. That list is bad enough, but the worthy causes shouldered aside in the name of warmism number many more than that.

How many people died from climate change last year? Directly, none.

But what about indirectly? That’s a tougher one. The earth’s weather patterns have defied prediction since long before multilateral climate love-ins became an annual entry in every posturing world leader’s travel diary. So we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that isolating the impact of carbon emissions on natural disasters, bushfires and draughts is anything more than educated guesswork.

This is welcome news…both Venezuela and Argentina- where Iran has wielded great influence have overturned tyrants….rsk

It isn’t every day that a police state takes such a beating at the polls that it has to admit defeat in its own rigged election. So kudos to the Venezuelan opposition, which thrashed the government’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in Sunday’s national assembly election, even taking the two-thirds supermajority needed to pass major economic and judicial reforms.

After 16 years of repressive left-wing rule, this is cause for hope in Venezuela and across the Americas. An impressive 75% of the electorate turned out to vote, driven by plummeting living standards. Hyperinflation, food shortages, crumbling public works and soaring murder rates have made the country miserable.

President Nicolás Maduro, the late Hugo Chávez’s handpicked successor, accepted the vote—at least for now. It’s doubtful he would have done so without pressure from the military, which also seems to be fed up with the country’s accelerating decline.

Number of fighters from North America steady but number from Western Europe more than doubled since 2014, report says

WASHINGTON—More than a year of international efforts to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq have fallen short, with the number of militants taking up arms for Islamic State and other extremist groups more than doubling in that time frame, a report released Monday found.

Between 27,000 and 31,000 people from at least 86 countries have traveled to the Middle East to join the extremist movement, according to the report, by the security consulting firm The Soufan Group, founded by a former federal official who investigated the 2001 terrorist attacks. By comparison, a June 2014 by the firm issued identified approximately 12,000 foreign fighters from 81 countries who had traveled to Iraq and Syria.

Week one of COP 21, the UN climate conference in Paris, concluded with the adoption of a draft “outcome.” You can read it at CFACT.org.

This was the must-have first step if the UN is to have a chance of adopting a full treaty this week.

While the COP (Conference of the Parties) reached a milestone, the draft is riddled with unresolved divisive issues. The draft contains multiple versions of many key provisions within square brackets and placeholders for future text.

For instance, did the UN adopt a draft of a binding treaty or a toothless nonbinding agreement? No one in Paris can say for sure.

Resolving these disputes is what the negotiators in Paris will be working on as they reconvene at a ministerial level.

It remains to be seen whether the COP can bridge all divides and agree to a final text.

Two factors argue the UN might pull it off.