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May 2025

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why India and Pakistan are on the brink of war The Kashmir terror attack has brought longstanding tensions to boiling point. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

By on May 1st, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/01/why-india-and-pakistan-are-on-the-brink-of-war/

Not for the first time, nuclear-armed rivals Pakistan and India have exchanged fire in the disputed territory of Kashmir. The fighting follows last week’s jihadist attack, in which 26 non-Muslim tourists were killed at a popular beauty spot in Pahalgam, Kashmir. Responsibility for the attack has since been claimed by the Resistance Front, an affiliate of the Pakistan-based jihadist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which orchestrated the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 175 people.

Although Islamabad denies any involvement, India’s response shows it doesn’t believe the denials. New Delhi has closed the border to Pakistan, expelled diplomats and ordered almost all Pakistani citizens to leave India. In an unprecedented move, it has also suspended the 65-year-old Indus Waters Treaty, which guarantees water supply to Pakistan and provides 80 per cent of the water Pakistan uses for agriculture. According to reports, the Indian authorities have now arrested 1,500 people in Kashmir and destroyed homes linked to the alleged attackers.

In turn, Pakistan has responded by shutting down airspace and halting trade, all the while insisting that the Pahalgam attack was a ‘false-flag operation’, supposedly staged by India as a pretext for war. Ominously, it has described the decision to restrict water supplies as an ‘act of war’. Pakistan says it has ‘reinforced’ its military on the grounds that an attack by India is ‘imminent’.

While a tentative ceasefire has existed between India and Pakistan since 2021, there are well-founded fears that current tensions will escalate well beyond cross-border gunfire and into a full-blown war. This is far from unimaginable, as India and Pakistan have fought four wars against each other since partition in 1947. A deep religious antagonism – Pakistan is a hardline Islamic society and India increasingly Hindu nationalist – makes them perennially uneasy bedfellows, even without the added complications of disputed borders.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

James R. Copland, Charles Yockey EU Regulatory Overreach Threatens American Sovereignty Brussels’s sweeping new environmental and labor mandates are an extraterritorial power grab. Congress and the executive branch should push back.

By on May 1st, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/eu-green-deal-parliament-environmental-labor-mandates

Most Americans pay little heed to the machinations of the European Parliament, the European Commission, or the various regulatory bodies of the European Union. They should. As part of its expansive EU Green Deal, Brussels bureaucrats have been working to put American companies that do business in Europe—or even those that merely do business with companies that do business in Europe—under the thumb of onerous environmental and human rights standards. This extraterritorial regulatory power grab would apply even when the European diktats directly conflict with American law.

The threat of overseas governments regulating American businesses is the “fifth horseman of the regulatory state,” to borrow a framing one of us (Copland) used in a 2018 City Journal article. In that article, subsequently expanded into a book, Copland described how regulation by administration, regulation by prosecution, regulation by litigation, and progressive anti-federalism combined to control huge swathes of economic activity largely untethered by national elections. To those four, we can now add: regulation from abroad.

This fifth horseman poses dangers similar to those of progressive anti-federalism. If we should worry about local officials in, say, New York City or San Mateo County, California affecting national policy, then we should be at least as concerned about far-reaching regulatory efforts from foreign governments that purport to transform American corporate governance.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

John D. Sailer Yale Professors Call Out University’s Bureaucracy A new open letter denounces administrative bloat and stresses the importance of focusing on the academic mission.

By on May 1st, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/yale-professors-open-letter-faculty-hiring

Nearly 100 Yale professors have signed a letter calling for the university to “freeze new administrative hires” and conduct a “faculty-led audit” of its sprawling bureaucracy. The missive, sent to Yale’s president and provost last month, proposes an audit aimed at “cutting or restructuring administrative roles” and aligning the university’s “resources . . . with its core academic mission.”

While faculty have long complained about administrative growth and overreach, the Yale letter is a rare example of organized pushback. Its publication could inspire faculty at other schools to follow suit and potentially provide a roadmap for a tacit alliance between reform-minded liberal professors and the Trump administration.

Like other elite universities, Yale’s bureaucracy has grown much faster than its professoriate. The signatories note that “over the last two decades, faculty hiring has stagnated while administrative ranks have by some estimates more than doubled—outpacing peer institutions and leaving Yale with five times as many administrators as tenured faculty.”

This out-of-control growth, the professors argue, clashes with the university’s mission. They call for a “top-to-bottom audit of non-academic positions,” which “would not only generate immediate savings—potentially in the hundreds of millions—but would send a resounding message: Yale prioritizes intellectual vitality over bureaucratic inertia.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Dehumanization of the Jews Pro-Hamas activists like to claim the Palestinians are being “dehumanized.” Actually their foes are. by Robert Spencer

By on May 1st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-dehumanization-of-the-jews/

The “dehumanization” of the Palestinian Arabs is a common feature of their victimhood propaganda against Israel as their never-ending jihad to destroy the Jewish state continues.

In late March, the far-left “journalist” Chris Hedges interviewed the deceptive anti-Israel propagandist Muhammad el-Kurd in a video decrying “the dehumanization and infantilization of Palestinians by Western activists and media, and the psychological toll it has on its subjects.” That video appeared shortly after another piece of Palestinian victimhood propaganda showcased a “Palestinian-Canadian doctor, Tarek Loubani, spinning tall tales of alleged Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

In describing the supposed dehumanization of the Palestinians, Loubani said: “Ask yourself: what did you feel the last time you killed a mosquito? A mosquito that bites and takes your blood is literally taking a drop of your blood to feed its children. They cannot complete the reproductive process without a tiny bit of your blood. And yet you felt nothing. That’s kind of a small window into dehumanization.”

Back in the real world, however, the dehumanization was all going in the other direction. In fact, the dehumanization of the Jews is deeply embedded in Islamic religious texts. The Qur’an is well known for describing Allah transforming the disobedient Jews into apes and pigs (2:63-66; 5:59-60; 7:166). To this day, Hamas and other jihadis delight in calling their opponents “the sons of apes and pigs.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump Counterrevolution and the Moral Ledger Trump’s counterrevolution presses on—quietly, methodically, and morally—while a flailing opposition offers only chaos, debt, and deflection in response. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 1st, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/01/the-trump-counterrevolution-and-the-moral-ledger/

Despite the media hysteria, Trump’s counterrevolution remains on course.

Its ultimate fate will probably rest with the state of the economy by the November 2026 midterm elections. But its success also hinges on accomplishing what is right and long overdue—and then making such reforms quietly, compassionately, and methodically.

No country can long endure without sovereignty and security—or with 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants crossing the border and half a million criminal foreign nationals roaming freely.

The prior administration found that it was easy to destroy the border and welcome the influx. But it is far harder for its successor to restore security, find those who broke the law, and insist on legal-only immigration. Trump is on the right side of all these issues and making substantial progress.

Everyone knew that a $2 trillion budget deficit, a $37 trillion national debt, and a $1.2 trillion trade deficit in goods were ultimately unsustainable.

Yet all prior politicians of the 21st century winced at the mere thought of reducing debts and deficits, given that it proved much easier just to print and spread around federal money. As long as the Trump administration dutifully cuts the budget, sends its regrets to displaced federal employees, seeks to expand private sector reemployment, and quietly presses ahead, it retains the moral high ground.

The elite universities have long hidden things from the American people that otherwise would have lost them all public support.

They deliberately sought to neuter Supreme Court rulings banning race-based preferences by stealthily continuing their often-segregated policies on campuses, from admissions and hiring to dorms and graduations.

They have taken billions of dollars from autocracies, such as communist China and Qatar. And they have partnered abroad with their foreign illiberal institutions and then disguised their quid pro quo subservience.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Sweeping Arrests, Torture, Censorship by Uzay Bulut

By on May 1st, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21582/turkey-arrests-torture-censorship

On March 19, just days before the March 23 primaries of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu — the CHP’s leading candidate who was thought by many possibly to win the next presidential election against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — was arrested on contested charges of “corruption and terrorism.”

A day earlier, on March 18, Imamoglu’s university degree was revoked, “citing ‘nullity’ and ‘clear error’ as grounds for cancellation… The decision affects Imamoglu and 27 other individuals whose academic credentials have now been invalidated….”

“All of the detainees, absolutely all of them, were tortured terribly while being detained. They were tortured terribly in the detention vehicle, while being taken to Gayrettepe [police station]. There are young people among them who are in really bad shape. What is terrible is that there is nothing [as evidence against them] in their investigation files, not even a photo against them. ….. [T]hese are revenge trials. The prosecutors who took testimonies of detainees yesterday, today do not talk with the lawyers, in any way… This is not a [proper] judiciary.” — Sezgin Tanrıkulu, MP from the CHP opposition party, March 27, 2025.

Meanwhile, Erdogan’s regime has arrested many dissident journalists and continues to apply financial and judicial pressure on media outlets that refuse to operate as mouthpieces for the regime.

“There was no chance for a defense…. The decision appears prepared beforehand.” — Elif Taşdöğen, attorney, medyanews.net, January 22, 2025.

Meanwhile, the government continues to pardon and release imprisoned Turkish Hizbullah terrorists.

The Erdogan regime’s support for Islamic terror groups such as Hamas and ISIS (Islamic State) is also well-documented…..

Meanwhile, do Europeans really want the possibility of up to 87 million more Turkish citizens flooding Europe?

On March 19, just days before the March 23 primaries of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu — the CHP’s leading candidate who was thought by many possibly to win the next presidential election against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — was arrested on contested charges of “corruption and terrorism.”

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