RUTHFULLY YOURS

TransCanada took Uncle Sam to court last week to reclaim some of the damage done by the Obama Administration’s multiyear, drawn-out rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. It may not come up in the litigation, but someone should point out that the same Obama Administration that rejected Keystone seems to have no problem supporting a new oil pipeline project in Africa.

That was the story last week out of Kenya, where U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec told Kenya’s energy minister that Washington would help Nairobi raise $18 billion to finance its PowerAfrika project. The pipeline would stretch from Kenya’s Rift Valley to Lamu on the coast. “Kenya needs $18 billion worth of financing,” Mr. Godec said, according to a dispatch in Oilprice.com, “so one of the questions we are discussing is how we can work together with the private sector and governments to raise that sum, to find ways to make certain that this financing becomes available.”

Has Mr. Godec checked with Secretary of State John Kerry, or, perhaps more important, anti-oil Democratic financier Tom Steyer? Kenya and Northeast Africa could certainly use the investment and jobs that would come from the oil project. Then again, so could the United States. What’s with the double standard on pipelines?

PARIS—Europe needs to beef up its border controls to prevent Islamic State from using authentic-looking Syrian and Iraqi passports to smuggle its operatives into the region amid the mass of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Sunday.

Mr. Cazeneuve said he plans to discuss the issue with officials in Brussels before European interior ministers meet in Amsterdam later this month.

Mr. Cazeneuve’s remarks are part of a rush by European security authorities to respond to the threat that Islamic State can make Syrian and Iraqi passports that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Officials believe the group has obtained thousands of blank Syrian and Iraqi passports, plus equipment used by those governments to print the documents. Mr. Cazeneuve said several of the Islamic State operatives who killed 130 in the Paris attacks on Nov. 13 used false passports to slip into Europe undetected.

“It’s a central question,” he said in an interview with French media. “It’s a phenomenon that will continue if we are not able to halt it.”

Officials say Islamic State likely obtained those materials when it overran the cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. Without reliable lines of communication open, particularly to the Syrian government, Western officials have little clarity on what passport numbers are linked to stolen passport books containing fraudulent identities.

You’d think that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un wouldn’t have a friend in the world these days. His relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and willingness to starve his own people is evil madness. Last week even communist China condemned the supreme leader’s fourth nuclear test, which the chubby little psychopath called “the thrilling sound of our first hydrogen bomb explosion.”

But Mr. Kim is not all alone. He still has the Caribbean’s Cosa Nostra—aka the Castro family—as a friend and ally. The Cold War may be long over, but Cuba is sticking by the North Korean pariah.

This bond exposes Americans to grave risk. Analysts fret that Pyongyang is developing missiles and miniaturized warheads that will allow it to lob a bomb into the continental U.S. But having a desperate ideological pal 90 miles from U.S. shores magnifies the danger. In the past 21/2 years Cuba has tried to smuggle weapons to Pyongyang, engaged in high-level meetings with North Korean officials, and secured U.S. military technology. Anybody want to connect the dots?

Introduction: As the disturbing reports pour in about the New Year’s Eve Muslim sex assaults in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Finland and other European countries, it has become clear that the new Utopian Multicultural Europe that the Left has worked so hard to build is now here. Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker’s response to the assaults under her watch has been to reprimand the victims, suggesting that they had asked for it. She has vowed to make sure that women will change their behavior, so that they don’t provoke Muslims to sexually assault them again. There will now be published “online guidelines” for women to read so they can prepare themselves. One wonders if it will be the burqa or the niqab that will be the solution of choice.

These eerie developments are, of course, completely in line with why Naomi Wolf finds the hijab “sexy” and why Oslo Professor of Anthropology Dr. Unni Wikan’s solution for the high incidence of Muslims raping Norwegian women is not for the rapists to be punished, but for Norwegian women to “take their share of responsibility” for the rapes because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. Norwegian women, she has counseled, “must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”