The Chinese Ambassador to Japan warned that Beijing would not concede on the demand or relinquish their sovereignty over the South China Sea even if it meant the two countries went to war.
On Saturday, diplomatic sources confirmed that China had issued a severe warning to Tokyo in late June demanding that Japan refrain from dispatching Self-Defense Forces to join US operations testing the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Japan will “cross a red line” if SDF vessels take part in the freedom of navigation operations, Chinese Ambassador Cheng Yonghua conveyed to Tokyo at the time. Cheng threatened military action if Japan failed to comply with the ultimatum.
Beijing has become irate over international pressure calling for it to comply with the court order in the name of international law, which China views the ruling itself violates, coming predominantly from regional competitors Japan and Australia as well as from the United States.
Those tensions risk spilling over with a Chinese state-run newspaper already issuing a warning to Australia that it would be the "ideal target for a strike" and repeated warnings to Japan to avoid intervening. Further complicating tensions, Reuters misreported that Vietnam had installed rocket launchers pointing at Chinese military assets over the territorial dispute leading China’s press to caution Hanoi to remember the consequence of the last-time the two countries went to war in 1979.
The statement of measured and reserve action comes after revelations that Chinese Ambassador Cheng Yonghua told Japan explicitly not to take part in "joint military actions with the US forces that is aimed at excluding China in the South China Sea" and stating that China "will not concede on sovereignty issues and is not afraid of military provocations."
In the most direct public warning to Moscow and Damascus to date, the new US commander of American troops in Iraq and Syria is vowing to defend US special operations forces in northern Syria if regime warplanes and artillery again attack in areas where troops are located.
"We've informed the Russians where we're at ... (they) tell us they've informed the Syrians, and I'd just say that we will defend ourselves if we feel threatened," Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend told CNN in a telephone interview Saturday from his Baghdad headquarters.
Townsend is the first senior military commander to speak on the record about the US possibly challenging the Syrian Air Force in the wake of an incident just days ago.
Townsend, who took command this week, made the remarks following what defense officials described as an "unusual" incident Thursday in northern Syria in which the regime of President Bashar al-Assad used warplanes to attack an area near where US special operations forces were operating in support of Kurdish forces, which are the Americans' key ally in the conflict.
Several US troops had to be quickly moved, and US jet patrols over northern Syria have been beefed up.
Hillary Clinton’s top campaign aide, and the woman who might be the future White House chief of staff to the first female US president, for a decade edited a radical Muslim publication that opposed women’s rights and blamed the US for 9/11.
One of Clinton’s biggest accomplishments listed on her campaign Web site is her support for the UN women’s conference in Bejing in 1995, when she famously declared, “Women’s rights are human rights.” Her speech has emerged as a focal point of her campaign, featured prominently in last month’s Morgan Freeman-narrated convention video introducing her as the Democratic nominee.
However, soon after that “historic and transformational” 1995 event, as Clinton recently described it, her top aide Huma Abedin published articles in a Saudi journal taking Clinton’s feminist platform apart, piece by piece. At the time, Abedin was assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs working under her mother, who remains editor-in-chief. She was also working in the White House as an intern for then-First Lady Clinton.
Headlined “Women’s Rights are Islamic Rights,” a 1996 article argues that single moms, working moms and gay couples with children should not be recognized as families. It also states that more revealing dress ushered in by women’s liberation “directly translates into unwanted results of sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility and indirectly promote violence against women.” In other words, sexually liberated women are just asking to be raped.
“A conjugal family established through a marriage contract between a man and a woman, and extended through procreation is the only definition of family a Muslim can accept,” the author, a Saudi official with the Muslim World League, asserted, while warning of “the dangers of alternative lifestyles.” (Abedin’s journal was founded and funded by the former head of the Muslim World League.)
In a separate January 1996 article, Abedin’s mother — who was the Muslim World League’s delegate to the UN conference — wrote that Clinton and other speakers were advancing a “very aggressive and radically feminist” agenda that was un-Islamic and wrong because it focused on empowering women.
She seemed to rationalize domestic abuse as a result of “the stress and frustrations that men encounter in their daily lives.” While denouncing such violence, she didn’t think it did much good to punish men for it.
Huma continued to work for her mother’s journal through 2008. She is listed as “assistant editor” on the masthead of the 2002 issue in which her mother suggested the US was doomed to be attacked on 9/11 because of “sanctions” it leveled against Iraq and other “injustices” allegedly heaped on the Muslim world. Here is an excerpt:
Huma Abedin is Clinton’s longest-serving and, by all accounts, most loyal aide. The devout, Saudi-raised Muslim started working for her in the White House, then followed her to the Senate and later the State Department. She’s now helping run Clinton’s presidential campaign as vice chair and may end up back in the White House.
The contradictions are hard to reconcile. The campaign is not talking, despite repeated requests for interviews.
Until now, these articles which Abedin helped edit and publish have remained under wraps. Perhaps Clinton was unaware she and her mother took such opposing views.
But that’s hard to believe. Her closest adviser served as an editor for that same Saudi propaganda organ for a dozen years. The same one that in 1999 published a book, edited by her mother, that justifies the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation under Islamic law, while claiming “man-made laws have in fact enslaved women.”
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the German government plans to tell citizens to stockpile food and water in case of an attack or catastrophe, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper reported on Sunday.
Following Angela Merkel's proclamation that Islamic terrorism is not a function of the massive influx of muslim immigrants into Germany thanks to he immigration policy, we could not help but be a little surprised that, as TagesSchau reports, the federal government, according to a newspaper report wants to encourage the population to begin stockpiling food and water again, so that they temporarily can take care of themself in the case of a disaster or an armed attack. As Reuters details,
Germany is currently on high alert after two Islamist attacks and a shooting rampage by a mentally unstable teenager last month. Berlin announced measures earlier this month to spend considerably more on its police and security forces and to create a special unit to counter cyber crime and terrorism.
"The population will be obliged to hold an individual supply of food for ten days," the newspaper quoted the government's "Concept for Civil Defence" - which has been prepared by the Interior Ministry - as saying.
The paper said a parliamentary committee had originally commissioned the civil defense strategy in 2012.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said the plan would be discussed by the cabinet on Wednesday and presented by the minister that afternoon. He declined to give any details on the content.
People will be required to stockpile enough drinking water to last for five days, according to the plan, the paper said.
...the precautionary measures demand that people "prepare appropriately for a development that could threaten our existence and cannot be categorically ruled out in the future," the paper cited the report as saying.
A further priority should be more support of the armed forces by civilians, it added.
Germany's Defence Minister said earlier this month the country lay in the "crosshairs of terrorism" and pressed for plans for the military to train more closely with police in preparing for potential large-scale militant attacks.
So apart from stockpiling enough food and water for 10 days; supporting the military; protecting yourself from "a threat to our existence," everything is awesome and Merkel's immigration policy has helped?
We ask - what do they know? Or is this simply more scare-mongering since "A nation in fear is even better influenced and controlled."
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