NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

China underestimates Trump and his trade war — America is ready for battle Liz Peek

Posted By on May 5th, 2025

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5277881-trump-china-tariffs/

President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are engaged in a monumental struggle over tariffs and trade — will Barbie determine the outcome?  

Xi is betting that Americans are too spoiled to abandon the cheap imported goods — like the iconic Barbie doll — that have filled the shelves of Walmart and Costco for decades. Trump is betting that China’s economy will swoon under the burden of tariffs and that U.S. companies will prove more agile than expected in shifting output to other countries. 

Trump acknowledged the risk of his tariff war at a recent town hall. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”  

Though almost 80 percent of the toys sold in the U.S. are made in China, some makers, like Barbie producer Mattel, have been quietly moving production out of China. Mattel said earlier this year that only 40 percent of its products will be made in China this year, down from 50 percent last year. And Mattel is not alone.

Nonetheless, if tariffs on Chinese goods remain at 145 percent, many toy prices will almost certainly head higher. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Republican Lawmakers Fiddle As Economy Starts To Burn

Posted By on May 5th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/05/republican-lawmakers-fiddle-as-economy-starts-to-burn/

In the time that President Donald Trump has issued more than 140 executive orders, what has Congress been doing?

Anyone?… Anyone?

Next to nothing. So far, it has managed to send just five bills to Trump’s desk for signature, a slower pace than any Congress in modern times.

Five. And none of them delivered on Trump’s agenda.

One was the non-controversial Laken Riley Act, which passed by large margins in both chambers.

Another was a continuing resolution to keep the government from shutting down, which was needed only because Congress failed to do its job of passing appropriations bills, like it’s supposed to.

The other three were bills blocking last-minute Biden regulations from going into effect, one of which would have required oil and natural gas producers to map the ocean floor in search of shipwrecks before they start drilling. Not exactly “Golden Age” stuff.

But that big, beautiful bill that Trump has been calling for? Well, here’s now NBC News described it last week:

Republicans are already hitting some snags as they begin the work of crafting a bill for President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy agenda. And they haven’t even made some of their hardest decisions yet.

Begin the work? It’s May, and they are just beginning the work of crafting this bill? And Republicans in the House say getting a reconciliation bill to the Senate is unlikely to happen before Memorial Day?

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Commons foreign affairs hanging tribunal Parliament should be investigating its own deafness to facts about Israel Melanie Phillips

Posted By on May 5th, 2025

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-commons-foreign-affairs-hanging

A recent hearing of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee demonstrated that Israel’s defenders and its critics appear to inhabit entirely different planets.

The committee, which was taking evidence on “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, had invited two of Israel’s doughtiest champions, the lawyer Natasha Hausdorff and the writer Jonathan Sacerdoti, to address it.

For the committee’s chair, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry, this appeared to be not so much a fact-finding exercise as a tribunal in which Hausdorff and Sacerdoti were in the dock.

Thornberry asked Sacerdoti: “How do you see ideally Gaza in ten years’ time? What would be a good outcome?” Sacerdoti replied that this would be a de-radicalised Gaza whose inhabitants were no longer committed to genocidal acts.

But as Thornberry’s subsequent challenges to him demonstrated, the only good outcome for her seemed to be a Palestinian state.

When it was Hausdorff’s turn, sparks really flew. “What’s the optimistic future for a Palestinian mother in Gaza, what’s the best thing that could happen?” asked Thornberry.

In any moral universe, the best thing that could happen to such a mother would be for her to stop telling her children that their duty was to murder Jews and martyr themselves in the process, as so many Palestinian Arab women boast of doing.

MEDIA Comments turned off

BBC to investigate Arabic channel over Gaza coverage By David Isaac

Posted By on May 5th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/bbc-to-investigate-arabic-channel-over-gaza-coverage/

Samir Shah, chairman of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), told Times Radio on May 3 that the broadcaster is investigating anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the Gaza War and will commission an independent investigation of BBC Arabic.

BBC Arabic broadcasts 24 hours a day from London and Cairo to the Middle East via TV, radio and internet.

In conversation with Times Radio host Rod Liddle, Shah, who was appointed BBC chairman in March 2024, said, “I think this whole business of how we’ve covered Israel-Gaza is a proper thing to examine thoroughly, which is why we’re … going to get hold of an independent figure to look at our corporation.”

Liddle said: “You’re still reporting from Israel with a whole bunch of BBC Arabic correspondents, some … who have been found to say the most appalling things about Jewish people, such as, ‘We’re going to burn them until none are left.’ You know, isn’t it time to stop using them?”

Liddle was referring to comments by Samer Elzaenen, a regular contributor to BBC Arabic, who posted antisemitic and anti-Israel comment since 2011, The Telegraph reported.

In one post he wrote: “My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.”

Elzaenen is one of several BBC Arabic contributors who have been discovered to have posted antisemitic content.

Ahmed Alagha, who has reported for the British public broadcaster since early 2023, described the Israeli army as “the embodiment of filth” and referred to Jews as “the devils of the hypocrites,” according to a Telegraph report last month.

“The Arabic service, we are looking at it. We’ve been examining it,” said Shah.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on May 4th, 2025

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

There is a cliché often applied to individuals who are held responsible for the circumstances or harm they experienced, rather than the actions or responsibility of others. Israel’s detractors are a prime example. In spite of the chilling and murderous rhetoric and action of its enemies, Israel is libeled and blamed. Michael Ordman details how, in spite of war, Israel’s researchers work 24/7 to develop technologies that bring hope and succor to billions of global citizens. Read it all.rsk

 

See the remarkable resilience of war-wounded Israelis.

Israeli fraud detection techniques exposed the proteins responsible for many diseases.

Israeli neonatologists are saving the lives of babies in Ghana.

Israel is the first country to provide an AI tutor to every 16-year-old student.

An Israeli physical security system will be protecting the Netherlands.

Israelis won multiple gold medals in four different sports.

Israelis celebrated Independence Day despite massive (arson) fires.

 

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
Wounded doctor returns to work. Seven months after being severely injured in a Gaza helicopter crash and undergoing intense rehab, senior pediatrician Dr. Eyal Hayman has returned to work at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/406627             https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/396323
 
After 16 years, wounded soldier returns to IDF.  Aharon Karov, the most critically-injured soldier in Operation Cast Lead 16 years ago, has re-enlisted in the IDF as part of a team creating the Disabled Soldiers Department. Following Oct 7 2023 he helped create the “Continuing Life” initiative, to support the injured.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/407428
 
Overcoming the odds at his wedding. Ziv, a 30-year-old Israeli engineer, overcame a Hezbollah missile attack that cost him his arm and spinal cord damage, defying odds to walk down the aisle and marry his bride Nitzan after intensive rehab.
https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-severely-wounded-idf-soldier-beats-the-odds-and-walks-down-the-aisle/
 
“Operation Hug” resumes. Operation Hug (see here previously) has restarted thanks to Nefesh b’Nefesh, JNF-USA and Friends of the IDF. It brings to Israel parents of lone IDF soldiers, to be reunited with their loved ones. The initiative aims to offer soldiers the unmatched strength and comfort of a long-awaited embrace.
https://www.jns.org/operation-hug-resumes-reuniting-lone-soldiers-with-their-parents/  https://hug.nbn.org.il/
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-851890
 
Young resilience awards. 26 children and teens, age 6 – 18) have received “Resilience Award for Children and Youth” for their actions promoting strength, persistence and determination during the Swords of Iron war. Half will also receive a personal scholarship. Three youth groups were also recognized.
https://www.jns.org/wire/resilience-award-bestowed-to-young-people-for-contributions-during-the-war/
 
Robotic bulldozers deployed in Gaza. The IDF has begun limited deployment in Gaza of the Robdozer – the robotic version of Caterpillar’s D9 bulldozer. These are used to clear roads and buildings of Hamas booby traps, plus to build defensive barriers around temporary IDF camps.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-new-unmanned-bulldozers-changing-the-paradigm-of-war-in-gaza/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Identifying key proteins. Ben-Gurion University researchers have developed WGAND – an AI algorithm that can detect “anomalous” proteins that are associated with tissue-specific diseases. It involves “anomalous” behavior analysis, similar to methods that identify fraudulent financial transactions or suspicious user activity.
https://www.bgu.ac.il/en/news-and-articles/ai-algorithm-spots-hidden-disease-clues-in-protein-networks/
https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/doi/10.1093/gigascience/giaf034/8106436
 
Defibrillators installed on 150 trains. Magen David Adom and Israel Railways are installing defibrillators, for the first time, on more than 150 Israeli passenger trains to save lives in the event of cardiac issues. They have already equipped defibrillators at all 67 active Israeli train stations.
https://www.jns.org/magen-david-adom-and-israel-railways-install-defibrillators-on-150-trains/
 
Eye doctor saves heart patient on flight from Tbilisi. Dr Eyal Aloni, head of ophthalmology at Israel’s Barzilai Medical Center, saved a young man with a medical history of heart disease, who collapsed during a flight from Tbilisi, Georgia to Israel. He used medications that he carried, plus oxygen supplied by the crew.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/407449
 
Ex-supermodel is now a paramedic. Israeli ex-supermodel Michaela Bercu featured here previously when she founded the app Tribu, which connects volunteering needs with those who wish to help. She recently completed the Magen David Adom paramedic course, and works two 8-hour shifts a week as a medical orderly.
https://www.israel21c.org/ex-supermodel-reinvents-herself-as-volunteer-paramedic/
 
Chewable gummy synbiotics. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s TopGum (see here previously) has launched no-added sugar, synbiotic” Gummiotics” in two natural flavors: orange and strawberry.  They comprise probiotics and postbiotics, bound together in a natural, prebiotic fiber-based matrix, to provide gut-health benefits.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/topgum-unveils-its-latest-gummy-creation-fruity-chewable-synbiotics-302404255.html

ISRAEL Comments turned off

77 imperatives for an Israeli victory Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 4th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/77-imperatives-for-an-israeli-victory/

This year, Israel marked Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut with an additional reminder of its enemies’ genocidal intentions. Before Memorial Day mourning made way for Independence Day celebrations, multiple wildfires spread across a large area between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Though an investigation into the initial blaze was inconclusive, with the conflagration being attributed to a combination of climate conditions and hikers’ negligence, there’s no question that arsonists stepped in to heighten the crisis. For one thing, some perpetrators were caught on video, and three suspects were arrested for questioning.

For another, Arab social media was abuzz with calls to go out and “burn Israel to the ground.” With jihad in the air, even the slightest desert breeze—certainly a dry heat wave with high winds—can wreak major havoc.   

And as the country’s firefighters, with the help of police and soldiers, battled the flames, the Houthis spent the days launching missiles at Israel from Yemen. Thankfully, neither led to a loss of life.

The same can’t be said about 19-year-old Israel Defense Forces Sgt. Niv Dayag from Ramat Hasharon, however. He was killed on Thursday in Gaza.

Meanwhile, the IDF was striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon; tackling hostile activities in Syria; preparing for a confrontation with Iran; taking out terrorists in Judea and Samaria; and amassing troops to step up military pressure on Hamas.

This is how Israel marked its 77th birthday. Not with quiet reflection followed by cheerful fanfare, but under attack on all fronts, including that involving civil strife.

The latter, as usual, was characterized by a media chorus, echoed by a certain vociferous sector of the public, demanding an end to the war and ridiculing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for reiterating the goal of “victory.”

ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The left claims Sen. John Fetterman is crazy because he supports Israel By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on May 4th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/the_left_claims_sen_john_fetterman_is_crazy_because_he_supports_israel.html

And when I say crazy, they mean in the literal sense, for they’re following the Soviet model of pathologizing opposing views.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is a leftist, make no mistake about that. It’s why I opposed his election to the Senate. Having said that, Fetterman has proven surprising in two ways: First, from the beginning, he’s been willing to moderate his views for the good of the country, and second, he’s pro-Israel, a viewpoint that’s increasingly out of step with the Democrat party. And now, the Democrats, like any good cultists confronted with an apostate, are trying to destroy him. More than that, they’re using the old communist playbook of contending that he’s insane.

As you may recall, Sen. John Fetterman was recovering from a serious stroke when he ran against Dr. Mehmet Oz to represent Pennsylvania in the United States Senate in 2022. Many, including me, felt that his verbal abilities were so limited that it was ridiculous to place him in Congress. I stand by that.

As it turned out, Fetterman seems to have recovered completely, but that recovery included checking himself into a psychiatric ward. It was a huge gamble on the part of Pennsylvania’s leftists to send to Congress a man who could have remained seriously impaired for the duration of his term (kind of like Joe Biden or the late Dianne Feinstein).

However—and this is a lovely reflection on the strength and plasticity of the human brain—Fetterman did recover. Moreover, his recovery has revealed a principled man who recognizes that, as between Israel, a liberal democracy in which all citizens have civil rights and that occupies a minute piece of land, and the Muslims arrayed against her, who are religious fanatics who believe that anyone who is not Muslim should be slaughtered, enslaved, or subordinated, Israel is on the side of the angels.

What Fetterman’s principles have revealed is that, while Democrats are good with brain damage, they’re not good with supporting Israel. So, Democrats are doing what they always do: Engaging in the politics of personal destruction.

According to the left, while Fetterman’s overt signs of brain damage from his stroke (that is, scrambled speech) are over, the real damage has revealed itself. And, in case you didn’t see where I was going, that “real” damage is that he is insufficiently hostile to Israel and solicitous of Hamas, a terrorist group that slaughters its enemies without regard to civilian status and uses its own civilians as human shields.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Politicized Mind: How the University Lost Its Way Academia’s collapse stems not from too much politics, but from the absence of anything but politics—and the virtues needed to resist it are in dangerously short supply. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 4th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/04/332062/

Academia is once again in the news. Donald Trump’s recent commencement address at the University of Alabama, where he said that America’s “next chapter will not be written by The Harvard Crimson, it will be written by you—the Crimson Tide,” sounded one leitmotif of the new, Trump-inspired populism that is washing over the academic establishment. Trump’s announcement that he was seeking to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status sounded another.

These days, whenever the public’s attention is roused by academia, the oculus of media scrutiny turns up references to my book Tenured Radicals, first published more than 30 years ago but subsequently expanded and updated several times.

Given the renewed interest in academic culture, I thought I would adapt a few thoughts from the introduction to the most recent edition of the book.

Academic life, like the rest of social life, unfolds within a frame of rules and permissions. At one end, there are things that one must (or must not) do; at the other end, there is the rule of whim. The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules nor entirely free, is that realm governed by what the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton, writing in the early 1920s, called “Obedience to the Unenforceable.”

This middle realm is a place governed not by law or mere caprice but by virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste. In a word, it is the “domain of Manners,” which “covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.”

A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals, “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘I Saw You Come Out of the Church’: The Persecution of Christians, March 2025 by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on May 4th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21584/persecution-of-christians-march

“Our imam had assured us that when you kill a kafir [infidel], Allah rewards one with a Jannah [paradise]… so I wanted to get that Jannah.” — Hanifa Hamiyat, a Muslim woman who poisoned and killed three people: a young Christian couple, as well as her own 18-year-old daughter, who accidentally ate the same poisoned food the Muslim woman had offered to the Christians; Morning Star News, March 28, 2025, Uganda.

“Pure genocide” experienced by Christians at the hands of Muslims, headlines…. – Nigera

“During the time I was there, Ali did bad things with me… He also beat me whenever I used to cry for my parents and told him that I wanted to go back home. I was kept locked in a room most of the time.” — Saba Masih, age 12, kidnapped, and forced by her kidnapper to convert to Islam and marry him. When her father reported the kidnapping to the police, “the police deliberately misstated Saba’s age,” writing down that she was 16, even though her father kept insisting she was 12; Morning Star News, February 7, 2025, Pakistan.

[E]ven in Indonesia, which is often presented as an exceptionally moderate Muslim nation, Christians are being persecuted for blasphemy…. — Morning Star News, March 21, 2025, Indonesia.

Coptic Christians, for some inexplicable reason, must have become the most careless and fire-prone people in the world: more Coptic churches than any other kind seem to keep “accidentally catching fire.” — Coptic Solidarity, March 17, 2025, Egypt.

The following are among the abuses and murders inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of March 2025.

Uganda: On March 16, Hanifa Hamiyat, a Muslim woman poisoned and killed three people: a young Christian couple, as well as her own 18-year-old daughter, who accidentally ate the same poisoned food the Muslim woman had offered to the Christians for sharing Christ with the daughter. The Christian woman she killed was six months pregnant. When local leaders later questioned Hanifa, she confessed to poisoning the food, saying:

“I never intended to kill my daughter, but my plan was to kill the neighbors because of taking my daughter to church during this holy month of Ramadan. Our imam had assured us that when you kill a kafir [infidel], Allah rewards one with a Jannah [paradise] called Firdausi, so I wanted to get that Jannah.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

President Trump: How You Can Be the Greatest Leader of the 21st Century by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on May 3rd, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21587/trump-nuclear-iran

If Iran can enrich a little uranium, it can at any time enrich a lot.

Iran’s latest diktat to the United States openly states that the regime has no interest in compromise, no intention of abandoning its nuclear weapons program, and no fear of impotent threats from a US president.

The Iranian regime at least deserves credit for honesty. The mullahs want to preserve its uranium enrichment program: it gives the regime a loaded gun pointed at the world.

This cat-and-mouse game has been Iran’s playbook for nearly 20 years. The regime pretends to comply with some dismissible Westerner, dial back enrichment slightly to satisfy desperate Western politicians who want to score short-term diplomatic victories, and in return, they extract billions of dollars in sanctions relief, economic benefits and especially political legitimacy.

One thing is certain: the minute it is clear that Iran has acquired nuclear weapons, every country in the Middle East, except for Israel, will submit to it rather than risk being bombed.

Mr. President, you have a choice. You can leave behind a legacy as the great, historic global leader who had the courage to save the entire free world from the Iranian nuclear threat. Or you can seek a meaningless political victory by signing a deal that will just paper over the crisis for twenty minutes. If you negotiate a weak agreement, history will remember you not as a success, but as a gigantic “loser” – and regard you with the same derision as Chamberlain. Chamberlain never got a Nobel Peace Prize and neither will you. But if you save the world from a nuclear Iran, you will go down in history as a second Winston Churchill.

Continuing to negotiate with an Iran that has bluntly stated that it will never give up its claimed “right to enrich uranium” is not diplomacy, it is surrender. Any agreement that allows even limited enrichment is a betrayal of everything the West stands for. We must not walk down that path again.

Mr. President, act now, decisively, and ensure that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are buried forever — and most of all that your legacy as the greatest leader of the 21st Century is enshrined forever.

Iran’s true intentions could not have been made any clearer: Last week, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi flatly declared the issue of uranium enrichment is “non-negotiable.”

Iran has called President Donald J. Trump’s bluff about bombing the country if the regime does not voluntarily dismantle its uranium enrichment centrifuges, ballistic missiles and the rest of its nuclear program. Trump immediately folded. Now the president seems to be backing down and trying to dodge: “I think we can make a deal without the attack.”