Recently in Global News Category
Kate Forbes has still won a significant victory - for religion in public life -- Daily Telegraph
Fraser Nelson on the deputy leader of the Scottish National Party:
"It's not just that she was born into the Free Church of Scotland: she converted into it, leaving the more liberal Presbyterian church. She disagrees with gay marriage, sex outside of marriage and even women ministers. She'd uphold everyone's rights, she says - but her faith is real. And far more important to her than politics....
"A Cambridge graduate, appointed Nicola Sturgeon's finance minister at the age of 29, Forbes has long stood out. Brought up in India to missionary parents, she first followed the normal pattern of dodging questions about her faith.
"Three years ago, she changed tack. 'To be straight, I believe in the person of Jesus Christ,' she told an astonished Nick Robinson. 'I believe that he died for me, he saved me. And that my calling is to serve and to love him and to serve and love my neighbours with all my heart and soul and mind and strength.'"
The Christian Canary Dying in the Coal Mine That Is India - The Stream
"Secret No. 2: a significant portion of North-East India is predominantly Christian. The mostly mountainous region of eight states and over 200 tribes experienced an unprecedented explosion of Christianity in the early part of the 20th century.
"Missiologists and anthropologists agree that the Gospel has been the "single most important catalyst" revolutionizing the North-East tribals in every area, from literacy to the emancipation of women.
"Most remarkably, even though it was Western missionaries who brought Christianity to the tribes, the churches of North-East India are fiercely independent and proudly indigenous, blending their own treasured heritage with the import of Western music and culture.
"Throw a stone in Nagaland, Mizoram or Meghalaya and it will hit a quartet of Christians singing hymns in four-part harmony."
Over a thousand false convictions, with owners of contract post offices blamed and charged criminally for errors caused by faulty software mandated by the UK Post Office. A complete failure of journalism and parliamentary oversight, resulting in bankruptcy, imprisonment, and suicide.
"I spoke to all the major media outlets. I briefed journalists at the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4 and ITV as well as all the national newspapers that I had all the proof that the Horizon scandal was the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history. Journalists were keen and excited, but none were allowed by their editors or executives above them to run the story.
"That it's been left to ITV to mine it for dramatic purposes - presumably with the aim of turning a profit - using the wrecked lives that its editors and journalists deliberately ignored for years, I find particularly foul. Some of these sub-postmasters killed themselves."
The late king, who reigned over Thailand for 70 years as Rama the 10th, had a keen interest in science and farming, and developed and patented a method of "super sandwich" cloud-seeding, combining warm-cloud and cold-cloud seeding. This article has illustrations of the techniques.
MORE: A photo of the king with sweat dripping from his nose, often seen on display in Thai restaurants: "His Majesty was working on irrigation projects to help the farmers, with his sweat running down his face and nose...Such was his concern for the well being of the people."
Old Brisbane Album | Gateway Bridge and Queensland corruption | Facebook
A fascinating post and comments from April 12, 2022, in a Facebook group called Old Brisbane Album. The item is a magazine ad highlighting the opening of the Gateway Bridge in 1986, which spans the Brisbane River near its outlet in Moreton Bay and is high enough to allow large cruise ships to pass beneath to the cruise port at Hamilton. The bridge also allows through traffic to bypass Brisbane. The ad depicts Russ Hinze, Minister for Local Government, Main Roads, and Racing for the State of Queensland. The comments on this item, about Hinze, popularly known as "the Minister for Everything," and the political machine run by his boss, longtime Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, are fascinating. Bribery, kickbacks, selective law enforcement, drugs, prostitution -- all from professed conservatives -- and yet some express nostalgia for a government that could "get things done." As with Oklahoma turnpikes, the toll bridge was promised to be free when the bonds were paid off, and there is still a toll today.
RELATED: ABC News interviews a woman who, as a prostitute in the early 1970s, helped uncover "The Joke" -- the massive, long-running system of illegal prostitution protected by corrupt policemen from the commissioner on down. It was 15 years later before the Fitzgerald Inquiry brought down Bjelke-Petersen and his government.
Fertiliser ban decimates Sri Lankan crops as government popularity ebbs | Reuters
Green policies starve people: "'Last year, we got 60 bags from these two acres. But this time it was just 10.' The dramatic fall in yields follows a decision last April by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ban all chemical fertilisers in Sri Lanka.... Sri Lanka is in the throes of its worst economic crisis in a decade, foreign exchange reserves are at a record low and inflation is soaring, especially for food. Fuel shortages have led to rolling power cuts across the country. The impact of the poor paddy crop could push up the retail price of rice by around 30%, said Buddhi Marambe, an agriculture professor at the University of Peradeniya, who blamed the decision to ban chemical fertilisers."
Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah, writing for the Breakthrough Institute in Foreign Policy: "Prior to the pandemic's outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflation and a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country's economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.
"The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country's political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture: the former for seizing on the organic agriculture pledge as a shortsighted measure to slash fertilizer subsidies and imports and the latter for suggesting that such a transformation of the nation's agricultural sector could ever possibly succeed."
Now Biden's head of the U. S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, hails fertilizer shortages in the US for forcing farmers to organic alternatives. "Never let a crisis go to waste."
Hungarian elections & liberal cruelty - by Titus Techera
What are American conservatives doing to identify and develop politicians like Viktor Orbán: "Conservatism is doing very badly in our times, in my opinion because it's too apolitical. I don't think PM Orbán can change that, but I do believe that if people were to learn about the political principles involved in his activity, they would find the resources to attempt something similar in many different countries. But this is most unlikely to happen, because conservatives are on principle opposed to great talent & the most important thing about PM Orbán is that he is a very talented politician. Recruiting his like, fostering the associations that could identify, possibly educate such a man, is of the essence of right-wing politics, & I've not heard yet of it being attempted anywhere..."
About Hungary - Hungary's parliamentary election system 101
An overview of the system used in the April 3, 2022, election for Hungarian Parliament: 106 members elected first-past-the-post in single-member districts; 93 elected proportionally nationwide from party lists, using D'Hondt method of allocation. Each voter casts a vote for candidates running in his local constituency and a separate vote for a national party list. Unlike many countries with a mix of single-member and party-list elections, this is not a top-up system that aims to make the overall result proportional to the national vote.
More post-election analysis from Titus Techera, writing at Substack as PostModernConservative: "Hungary is so hated because it opposes these transformations & the politics they require--indeed, the end of politics, the replacement of popular opinion, debate, & decision with administrative decisions by far-removed courts, which are of course unelected, but which have to redesign the most fundamental institutions of our ways of life."
The six-party coalition that tried to unseat Prime Minister Orban held a two-round primary election to select the candidate in each constituency and the coalition party leader who would be prime minister if victorious. The idea was to avoid the problem of trying to win a first-past-the-post election with multiple candidates.
Official results from the first round of the 2022 election for President of France, from the French Ministry of the Interior. Round 2, between incumbent Emmanuel Macron and Marine LePen, will occur on April 24, 2022.
What Really Is Behind the Latest Burst of Hamas Terror in Israel: Dov Fischer: American Spectator
"To force Ra'am's Mansour Abbas (no relation to Mahmoud Abbas aka Abu Mazen) to break off coalition talks, Hamas has fired more than 2,000 rockets into Israeli civilian centers, reaching even outskirts of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv suburbs like Holon, Bat Yam, and Rishon L'Tzion. That onslaught predictably compelled Israel to strike back vigorously in Gaza. Hamas bases many of its leading command centers and launches its rockets from civilian locations like hospitals, residential apartment buildings, and elementary school campuses so that unavoidable civilian deaths will result when Israel strikes back. As a result, amid the chaos, that Arab party predictably has been forced by Hamas into breaking off negotiations for forming a Knesset coalition. This aspect of Hamas's purposes in starting a war with Israel now should not be overlooked, but it is too complex for most media analysts to explain."
