SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — A codefendant in the case against actor Alec Baldwin in the fatal 2021 shooting of a cinematographer on a movie set in New Mexico was convicted Friday of unsafe handling of a firearm and sentenced to six months of probation.
Safety coordinator and assistant director David Halls also must pay a $500 fine and complete a gun-safety course after agreeing to plead guilty to the charge related to the death of Halyna Hutchins on the set of the Western movie “Rust.”
Halls appeared briefly by video to waive his right to challenge the negligence charge, as state District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer approved terms of a plea agreement with prosecutors.
Defense attorney Lisa Torraco urged the court to not impose a prison sentence — the maximum possible penalty was 6 months behind bars — noting that Halls was “extremely traumatized and “rattled” with guilt.
Defenestration (getting tossed out a window) used to be a real political thing back in renaissance central Europe . Yeah, nothing to see here………
The chairman of Russian oil and gas giant Lukoil — which spoke out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — has died after falling out of a hospital window, state news agencies RIA Novosti and TASS reported Thursday.
Observation O’ The Day
“An obvious consequence of the war in Ukraine is that numerous states around the world will intensify their pursuit of nuclear arms. For nothing more clearly illustrates their value than the fate of Ukraine, which gave them up in 1994 in exchange for worthless assurances. The era of nonproliferation is over.” –Niall Ferguson
According to Foreign Policy Magazine, since the start of the war in Ukraine more than 2.3 million refugees have crossed the border into Poland, moving the country from 101st globally in the number of refugees hosted in 2021 to second place a bare three weeks later.
However, for one Kansas journalist, the refugee crisis spawned by the invasion is not just bare numbers on a page.
Gwen Baumgardner, Straight Arrow News
Former Kansas Journalist Gwen Baumgardner, a reporter for Straight Arrow News, was on the ground in Poland and western Ukraine and saw the human toll first hand.
“Just speaking to … especially the mothers, they have no idea if they will ever see their husbands again,” Baumgardner said in an exclusive interview with The Sentinel. “But their main priority is to take their kids to safety, which means going into a country where they have no resources.
“They cannot speak the language. They have no connections, but they are willing to do that for their family.”
Baumgardner said the “Ukrainian spirit” that is much-talked-about in the media is a real thing.
Remember: ‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ ?
The new version is: ‘When crises give you great power, everything looks like a crisis.’
COVID-19 has provided a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience for expertise. The science has been spectacular, but discourse on that science has often been abysmal.
The same-year development, testing, and approval of vaccines was remarkable. The mRNA platform behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could become the Swiss army knife of therapeutics. It’s already being mobilized against cancer and genetic illnesses.
I’m no virologist or geneticist, but experts I respect persuaded me of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. I got jabbed as soon as possible and regret that others chose not to. I wear masks in some situations, and not others. I see people socially but avoid large crowds. I favored lockdowns and school closings in early 2020 but think they lingered too long. My guess is that jurisdictions focused on the most vulnerable populations (elderly, immunocompromised, etc.) will seem wiser in hindsight than those that applied draconian mitigation strategies over their entire populations.
I think I’m right on these things, though I recognize that future evidence might say otherwise. I’m grateful for the scientists who developed the vaccines but strive to maintain an open mind on all scientific matters, along with a sense of humility and a generous spirit toward those who disagree with me. A proper understanding of science demands no less.
The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.
Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I’m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I’ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his tweet from May 5, 2020: “Look at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. … Be smart.”
Here’s why they shouldn’t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But “follow the science” makes no more sense than “follow the chainsaw.” The chainsaw doesn’t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science—let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it—can’t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries.
Science informs individual and collective choices, which depend not only on those scientific findings but also on subjective preferences and one’s degree of confidence in those scientific findings. As for “listen to the experts,” Cuomo wrote the book on COVID expertise, and that book’s fall has been as spectacular as its author’s plummet.
Medical history is littered with experts who were spectacularly wrong. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors employ antiseptic medical procedures (e.g., washing hands in maternity wards), medical experts were offended and conspired to destroy Semmelweis. When Stanley Prusiner suggested that misfolded proteins could cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, he was pilloried as a heretic—a pejorative that didn’t entirely vanish when he received a Nobel Prize for his work. As physicist Max Planck said, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
In October, novelist and essayist Ann Bauer wrote a poignant column, “I Have Been Through This Before,” on her discomfort with the parade of cocksure COVID experts issuing ever-changing diktats and pronouncements. When vaccines didn’t end the pandemic, she wrote, “doctors and officials blamed their audience of 3 billion for the disease. The more the cures failed, the greater the fault of the public.”
The title of her column referred to her personal experience as the mother of an autistic son born in the late 1980s. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had hypothesized that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who failed to show their children sufficient love—a theory we now know to be nonsense. But for a time, Bettelheim’s ideas were gospel-truth, showering mothers of autistic children with guilt and opprobrium. Today, he is regarded as something of a charlatan, but back then, he was a pop icon and celebrity expert on television. One questioned Bettelheim at one’s own peril.
During the pandemic, yard signs have sprouted with the message, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe.” For what it’s worth, chainsaws don’t care what you believe, either.
If Ford were a gun company, our betters in politics and the legacy media would be wringing their hands calling for accountability and liability right now. Against all rational thinking, they’d be shrieking on every cable news network that Ford should be sued by the victims of last weekend’s vehicular attack in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where a ridiculously powerful, high-speed Ford Escape killed 6 and injured at least 60 innocent Christmas parade goers.
They’d tell us that Ford encouraged the criminal misuse of its Escape product through an advertising campaign full of toxic masculinity that explicitly suggests a buyer “MAKE YOUR ESCAPE” with this SUV.
Indeed, this appears to be precisely what the perpetrator chose to do in last weekend’s murderous rampage through the parade route.
Obviously the criminal purchased this particular vehicle as a result of Ford’s testosterone-charged advertising campaign and reckless naming choice. Ford is clearly negligent for creating such excitement relating to the potential illegal uses of this dangerous vehicle and for designing an SUV capable of inflicting such carnage.
Nobody needs a 3,500-pound steel missile — a weapon of mass destruction — just to commute to and from work.
As commuting is the only valid purpose for civilian motoring, single-trip, single-passenger vehicles such as electric scooters with biometric activation are the only form of vehicle that should be legal to sell or own.
Naturally, though, police officers, as civilians tasked with performing law enforcement duties (many of which every citizen has the right to perform), should be the only citizens with access to unrestricted vehicles such as fully automatic Ford Escapes. Also police are racist murderers, but only when we aren’t discussing vehicle laws.
Ford is clearly responsible for the criminal misuse of its product. Yes, the company is selling a legal product through legal means, but it is ultimately Ford’s duty and moral obligation to ensure that criminals or those with potential future criminal intent are not able to acquire its products, whether through a Ford dealership, a used car dealer, a private party sale, or even by theft.
Obviously Ford’s ability to monitor and control sales made after the initial transfer from Ford to a licensed dealer is entirely non-existent, and the company has no ability to control what customers do with its vehicles, but anything that happens after that initial dealer transfer is still ultimately Ford’s responsibility.
No longer can we exempt these cavalier manufacturers of dangerous vehicular weapons from liability for end users’ misuse of their products. We must end the immunity vehicle manufacturers have taken advantage of for too long. No other industry has complete immunity from liability for the misuse of their products like auto manufacturers do. This must end now.
We should likewise identify and hold to account the gas station at which the Christmas parade massacre suspect purchased the gasoline that he so effectively used to murder innocent people. As irresponsibly dangerous as SUVs are, they are rendered impotent without the fuel to power them. The retailer that recklessly sold gasoline to this criminal must be held to account.
In fact, strict controls should be put in place related to the purchase of all gasoline, including background checks, special tax levies, education and permitting, and breathalyzer checks. Gasoline refiners and retailers need to be held financially and criminally liable any time a crime is enabled by the use of their products. For example, the drunk driving incident that made headlines just a few weeks ago.
If Ford were Remington, this is the level of insanity we’d have been subjected to since last Sunday afternoon. Case in point, and case in point…just two examples of hundreds. Attempts to bankrupt firearm manufacturers due to criminal misuse of their legal products were so rampant, in fact, that legislation had to be passed in 2005 to prevent this sort of disingenuous, bad-faith abuse of the tort system.
SEGREGATON NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER!
-Alabama governor George Wallace, 14 January 1963 inaugural speech.
What did Kipling write? “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”
American University [Washington D.C.] has created a Black-only course section, or classroom, for a class on racism, which freshmen are required to take.
Many universities use course sections to break larger cohorts into smaller-sized classrooms.
According to The Eagle, the university added a Black affinity course section to AUx2, a class where students learn about “race, social identity, and structures of power.” In the course, students will “evaluate how racism intersects with other systems of oppression.”
The student newspaper states that all-Black sections of the course began during the spring 2020 semester, an addition that had been considered for a few years.
“We’ve definitely heard from Black students and other students of color that the material can be a lot for them because it is part of their lived experiences,” Izzi Stern, the AUx program manager told the student newspaper. “And we wanted to create a space where they could be together in community and have an overall positive experience with the course.”
On the university’s webpage, a former AUx2 peer said this:
“The AUx Program is fundamentally shifting the culture, and students, of American University, while simultaneously fulfilling the institutions’ commitment to social justice and equity. I could not be more enthusiastic about my support for the transformative impact of the AUx2 course.”
Julien Hector a sophomore at American University, told The Eagle, “Having an all-Black space truly changes the way you interact in that space and the level of comfort you feel.”
Hector later on in the student newspaper article, went on to question why American University had not added more affinity groups based on race. The article goes on to say that AU might be adding affinity groups not just based on race, but based on other defining characteristics such as gender identity.
On Saturday night I had just sat down to have a drink with a friend when he got a call. He apologized for having to take it, but it was urgent: it was about the Afghan women’s orchestra. They were stuck in Kabul and desperate to get out. He was involved in the effort to extract them.
Twenty minutes later, we ordered another martini.
I’ve been thinking a lot these past two weeks about luck. The luck of where we are born. The luck of the parents we are born to. And, right now, the luck of who we know.
Knowing — or having proximity to someone who knows my well-placed friend, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — is a matter of life or death for untold numbers of Afghans.
Listen to the plea of just one of them:
The question of who will live and who will die — part of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer that all Jews say on the high holy days, which are just around the corner — is supposed to be in the hands of God. But right now, for so many Afghans, the answer to that question is in the hands of the Taliban. The chance to live relies on Americans: those who have the luck to live in freedom and those who are determined to right what the Biden administration has gotten so horribly wrong.
Melissa Chen is one of those people.
Melissa co-founded an organization called Ideas Beyond Borders, which digitizes and translates English books and articles into Arabic. And not just any books: Books like Orwell’s ‘“Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now,” and a graphic novel based on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Works that promote reason, pluralism and liberty. Suffice it to say the translators she works with in places like Egypt, Syria and Iraq do so at great risk.
Because of her connections in the Middle East — and because she is the kind of person who lives by her principles — it did not surprise me that she found herself involved in the efforts to save Afghans from the horrors of the Taliban. She shares some of the details of those remarkable efforts in the essay below.
The operation to get American allies out of Kabul has been dubbed the Underground Railroad and Digital Dunkirk. But I can’t help but think of the MS St. Louis. That’s the ship that came to this country in 1939 packed with more 900 Jews fleeing Germany. To our country’s eternal shame we turned the ship around and into the arms of the Third Reich. — BW
For the past two weeks I have been part of a 21st century Underground Railroad. We are a ragtag group — combat veterans, human rights activists, ex-special forces, State Department officials, intelligence agents, members of Congress, non-profit organizers, and private individuals with the resources to charter planes and helicopters — who have stepped into the vacuum left by the Biden administration.
Today the Pentagon announced the end of our 20-year war in Afghanistan. But there are hundreds of Americans and an estimated 250,000 Afghan allies who remain trapped there. Many of these Afghans, due to the nature of their work, their religious beliefs, their minority ethnic status or even just their appearance (say, sporting tattoos anywhere on their bodies), see escape as a matter of life and death. As Kabul descended into chaos, their pleas for help leaving were largely met with bureaucratic silence.
The operation to save them began before the Taliban were seen riding bumper cars in amusement parks and occupying the presidential palace. Many veterans and civilians who had deep ties to the country were under no illusions about the nature of the Taliban and what a deal with them would mean for the people who had worked with the U.S.
Long before Kabul fell, I noticed that military friends started using Facebook and Twitter to figure out how to help their “terps” — interpreters, linguists and translators who served alongside them during their tours in Afghanistan. WhatsApp groups, email threads, and ad hoc task forces with their own central command centers sprang up spontaneously. Google docs were cobbled together to compile and share resources for individuals assisting their Afghan friends in their evacuation and eventual resettlement. No one was relying on a White House that had voluntarily closed Bagram Airbase or a commander-in-chief who, as of last month, was assuring the American public that a Taliban takeover “is not inevitable.”
No One Left Behind, a charity that was founded to help interpreters through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program and resettle them in the U.S., has been at the vanguard of these efforts. Human Rights Foundation and Human Rights First were very effective in helping activists and dissidents secure political asylum. AfghanEvac, a self-organized group of beltway insiders and outsiders, have been logistical ninjas, chartering planes and requesting landing rights in neighboring countries. The Commercial Task Force set up shop in a conference room at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, D.C., and has so far helped evacuate 5,000 Afghan refugees. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton set up a war room office to take over the duties and responsibilities that the State Department had abdicated. Democratic Rep. Andy Kim had his office set up an email account to assist those seeking help evacuating allies.
And then there were the extraction teams like Task Force Pineapple and Task Force Dunkirk, informal, volunteer groups of U.S. veterans who took matters in their own hands to launch dangerous secret missions to save hundreds of at-risk Afghan allies and their families.
Because of my work with Ideas Beyond Borders, I wound up in one of these coalitions and joined several group chats on Telegram and WhatsApp. They would ping at all hours of the night with updates about the latest conditions on the ground and about assistance with particular cases. Any successful evacuation was announced and had its steps reverse-engineered in the hopes that it might help another hopeful evacuee.
It was in one of these groups that I met Esther Joy King.
Esther Joy King dancing in Kabul in 2008.
King, a 35-year-old lawyer from Illinois who recently announced a run for Congress, had spent time in Kabul as an aid worker in 2008. But the seeds of her connection to Afghanistan were planted long before: Esther’s grandparents had immigrated there under the last King of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah. Her grandfather taught at the American University of Kabul; her grandmother was a midwife; both were Christian missionaries. Esther’s mother, Susan King, was born in Kabul and spent the first nine years of her life there.
When Esther moved to Kabul for her aid work, Susan, together with her husband Robert, took the opportunity to visit. The Kings decided to stay on to start a K-12, co-ed school called Bahar International School in the Kart-e-Char neighborhood of Kabul. Susan taught English there until her cancer diagnosis just this year in February; she passed away in April. When she died, Esther filled in and took over her mom’s classes, teaching remotely until the end of the school term in May.
Robert and Susan King welcoming children to their school in Kabul.
Three girls — Rahima, Mursal and Spoogemi — stood out in her class. They were eager to learn more, so Esther continued tutoring them well into the summer and ultimately secured three student visas for them in the U.S. The plan was for the girls to attend boarding school in Nebraska.
The story of one of those girls, 15-year-old Rahima, paints as accurate a picture as any about the chaos involved in, and the fortune required to get people out of Kabul.
Rahima on Skype with Esther the night before Kabul fell.
Rahima made her first attempt at Karzai International Airport on August 16 with her student visa in hand. Amid the chaos, she Skyped Esther from 7,000 miles away. “Miss Esther,” she said, “I saw someone fall from the sky to die.” Flights shut down that day, so Rahima went to a safehouse to wait for further instruction.
Five days later, she made her second attempt. Rahima and her 13-year-old brother made it within 200 feet of the airport’s Abbey Gate. By this point, the State Department had outsourced visa and identity verification to the Taliban, quite literally putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. It was nightfall and the gates were already closed, so the siblings had no choice but to spend the night there, in front of the Taliban guards, who harassed them and beat them.
It was at this point that Esther told me she found out about a WhatsApp group with roughly 15 members including a former CIA agent and a former Marine who had connections on the ground. They had successfully extracted other girls from the school and felt they could do the same for Rahima.
Three days later, on August 24, the teenager and her family made their third attempt, armed with a map of Taliban checkpoints sent by someone from the WhatsApp group. They made it to the Abbey Gate without any obstacles. But the Marines wouldn’t acknowledge Rahima. The crowd was increasingly out of control, pushing them further and further back till she could no longer see the gate. The entire time, Rahima was sharing updates with the WhatsApp group.
There she learned that a particular U.S. Marine would be willing to extract her and her brother from the crowd. The catch was that they would have to wait till 2 AM, after his shift guarding a separate entrance ended. The plan was to gather at a certain tower where they, and another family with a baby in a pink hat, would be personally escorted into the airport. Passwords were coordinated: Pedro and Jolly.
At go time, Rahima turned on her flashlight to signal to the tower, trying to draw the Marines’ attention to her. No response. After 45 minutes, the WhatsApp group informed her that she was at the wrong tower. By now, Rahima was exhausted and defeated. She begged Esther to ask the Marine to come to them and not the other way around.
Knowing that was an impossibility, one of the women in the WhatsApp group, Erica Jensen of Omaha, Nebraska, had an idea. Her neighbor was an Afghan woman, so she ran across the street and banged on her door. What they needed was a very clear explanation of where Rahima needed to go with exact directions to the right tower in her native language, Dari. Stepping over sleeping bodies in the crowd, Rahima and her family made the trek and eventually found the Marine waiting for them.
Once through to the airport, the family still had to undergo biometric screening, waiting in lines for another 20 hours. Their ordeal did not end there. After they boarded a plane bound for Qatar, the pilot informed them that the destination — a military base in Doha — was so overcrowded that they had no authorization to take-off. Another 24 hours elapsed as the family sat in a Boeing C-17. Esther reached out to Rahima on WhatsApp, telling her that she couldn’t wait for her to to arrive in America.
Rahima and her family just before boarding the plane where they sat for 24 hours.
Esther woke up early on Thursday morning to good news. Rahima and her family had made it to Kuwait. Asked how she even had cell phone reception, Rahima explained: “Oh, I borrowed a soldier’s hotspot.” The entire WhatsApp group received a message from the teenager that read: “I learned a precious lesson from you all, that I should always stand with people and help whenever I can.”
When I asked Esther how she did it, she replied, “miracles and persistence. Oh and WhatsApp. Thank God for WhatsApp.”
Esther Joy King (in pink pants) in her Situation Room, with volunteers filling out spreadsheets, passenger manifests and other paperwork.
As for me, as Esther had been working on getting Rahima out, I had been fretting over a list. On August 17, I was part of a group that was given access to a list of 500 names of Afghan aid workers, human rights activists, and religious and ethnic minorities. When it became clear that the American government wasn’t doing enough, such lists started circulating among various volunteers. My heart sank when the person in charge of flight manifests asked us to split the list into “high priority” and just “priority.”
By Wednesday night, August 25, shortly after receiving a memo from the U.S. military that signed off with a bleak “may God be with you all,” I was asked to cut my evacuation list down to just five people.
Message that Melissa received from a contact working with the Commercial Task Force shortly before the bombing at Kabul airport.
I struggled with this intensely, especially after reading hundreds of emails with personal pleas, and poring over documentation of entire Afghan families with real faces and identities. I could not do it. But I had to do it. Along with my co-worker, Faisal Al Mutar, I ultimately did pick just five based on a basic evaluation of relative risk and ease of extraction. The moral weight of such a decision was overwhelming. We should have never been in a position to make such a call in the first place.
A few hours later, we got the devastating news that a suicide bomb went off right outside the Abbey Gate, taking the lives of 13 American service members and more than 90 Afghans. It was the same gate where Rahima and so many of Esther’s students and teachers had attempted to gain access to a departing plane.
Tomorrow is August 31, the Biden administration’s “hard deadline” for withdrawal. It’s clear that we won’t be able to evacuate all the Afghans we promised to protect. It’s clear that we won’t be able to help those Afghans, especially women and girls, who will now face the barbarism of Taliban rule.
But people like Esther are not giving up. She and her father are determined to continue helping bring more at-risk Afghans to safety. So far, they helped more than 50 peopleescape.
Meanwhile, my WhatsApp groups keep buzzing. My email inbox swells with requests. A young singer and model begs me to save her life: “Being an Afghan woman under the Taliban is tough enough but being a Muslim who sings songs and models is even more difficult. My life is in danger. Please help.”
This is worse than Saigon America’s humiliation in Afghanistan confirms that the woke West is utterly incapable of standing up for itself.
Everyone is saying it’s like Saigon in 1975. Helicopters evacuating an American embassy. Chaotic, distressing scenes at the local airport as American allies, or just plain fearful people, desperately try to flee the country. American officials convincing absolutely nobody with their unhinged claims that the ‘mission has been successful’ (in Anthony Blinken’s words). It’s clear for all to see, commentators insist: Kabul in 2021 is a replay of Saigon in 1975. America humiliated, its enemies ascendant.
Yet here’s the brutal truth: what is happening right now is worse than Saigon. Yes, America’s defeat in Vietnam was an epoch-shaping humiliation for the self-styled defenders of freedom in the Cold War clash with the ‘Evil Empire’ and its communist allies. But the routing of the US in Afghanistan, the alarmingly swift collapse of its allies in the Afghan government, the fall of Kabul like a house of cards, and the fact that Operation Enduring Freedom, launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, has ended with the endurance of the Taliban instead, with victory for the bad guys – all of this represents the most significant moment of geopolitical decline for the US in decades. Indeed, it raises questions not only about America’s global standing, but also about its very purpose and meaning as a nation.
Taliban jihadists reportedly began seizing personal weapons from Afghans in Kabul on Sunday, claiming civilians “can now feel safe” and no longer need the firearms because the terrorists had taken over the country.
Taliban officials declared victory and the restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan after occupying the presidential palace in Kabul on Sunday.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar appeared in a Twitter video alongside other Taliban leaders, in which he pronounced victory in the battle for Afghanistan.
“We have achieved an unexpected victory. Now is the time to test, to show how we serve our people and ensure their future in the best possible way,” he reportedly said.
The Guardianreports that Baradar is the Taliban’s “political chief and it’s most public face.” He was released from “a Pakistani jail on the request of the U.S. less than three years ago.”
Within hours of Barader’s announcement, Reuters reported, citing a Taliban official, that the group had begun confiscating weapons in the capital. The outlet quoted him as saying, “We understand people kept weapons for personal safety. They can now feel safe. We are not here to harm innocent civilians.”
They noted MOBY Group media company’s Saad Mohseni, a Kabul resident, tweeted that “Taliban soldiers had come to his company compound to enquire [sic] about the weapons kept by his security team.”
The Moby Group is a news and entertainment provider operating in Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia. Moby serves “over 300 million people through its activities in broadcasting, digital and online, production, strategic communications, publishing, music, sports, and research.”
A tweet from TOLONews told the same story:
Taliban entered the TOLOnews compound in Kabul, checked the weapons of the security staff, collected govt-issued weapons, agreed to keep the compound safe. #Afghanistanpic.twitter.com/LhuMI7Z90u
Beijing may consider sending a peacekeeping force to Afghanistan if the security situation in the South Asian country poses a threat to the neighbouring Chinese province of Xinjiang after American troops pull out, analysts said.
US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he would withdraw all remaining US troops – about 2,500 – from Afghanistan by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attack in New York.
The withdrawal may pose a threat to Afghanistan’s security and stability, which could spill over into Xinjiang and disrupt China’s counterterrorism efforts.
In 2018, China trained Afghan troops and helped set up a mountain brigade. The training took place in China and the aim of the brigade was to counter possible attacks by al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
“The security forces of the Afghan government are not capable of ensuring Afghan security,” said Sun Qi, an international relations specialist at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
“The situation in Afghanistan might go further into chaos in the future. Cross-border crime, drug trafficking and smuggling of firearms may proliferate,” he said. Continue reading “”
With all the past history of the same thing happening every time a demoncrap does crap-for-brains idiocy like this, I’m starting to wonder if ‘unintended consequences’ really fits anymore.
“Anytime something comes out of Washington and they say the word ‘gun,’ everything goes up,” said Victor Bean, the owner of Southern Classic Gun and Knife Shows.
This weekend’s event attracted firstcomers and gun enthusiasts.
“Just a good selection of firearms, and today is my birthday, so maybe I will get myself a good birthday present,” Chris Carroll, who lives in Clay County, told News4Jax on Sunday.
Mike Chance, a Jacksonville resident, said he was looking forward to looking at ammunition.
“Well, it’s millions and millions of dollars’ worth of guns and ammo,” Bean said.
More than 283 vendors and 386 displays were at the show in Jacksonville, according to Bean.
“Everybody wants the self-defense right now, and the high-capacity mags, of course, they are talking about legislation right now,” Bean said.
I hope you have a fine day today and remember, that Daylight Saving Time is now in effect until further notice.
So set you clocks and watches forward, one hour.
Space; the final frontier.
‘Money makes the world solar system go around, the solar system go around……………
The U.S. military should consider investments in space “mobility and logistics” to prepare for the future, said Lt. Gen. John Shaw.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military over decades has built extensive infrastructure to move troops and equipment around the world. It may now need to start thinking about investing in foundation technologies to support future activities in space, said Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of U.S. Space Command.
“As we move forward, we’re going to want to find ways to be more mobile in space,” Shaw said Feb. 17 at a Washington Space Business Roundtable virtual event.
The U.S. military currently has no plans to deploy troops to space but should consider investments in “mobility and logistics” to prepare for the future, said Shaw.
“If we don’t address those requirements, that would be shutting a door that we need to keep open,” he said.
