NBN: Australia Has Slower Internet Than Kenya

(Bloomberg article from The SYDNEY MORNING HERALD on 04 October 2017.)

Only true-blue Aussies would get this cartoon.

The $49 billion National Broadband Network was meant to spearhead a digital revolution. Instead, the botched project risks becoming a poster child for government mismanagement. Australia's biggest-ever infrastructure investment has turned into a political football, plagued by cost overruns and construction delays.

With the network years behind the original schedule and only about half finished, Australia has slumped to 50th place on a global ladder of internet speeds, behind Kenya and a string of former Soviet bloc nations.

Public frustration with the project is boiling over amid mounting criticism that politics is trumping policy across a host of areas from housing to energy and damaging economic prospects. "We are really an example of how not to do it," said Paul Budde, a Sydney-based former adviser to the United Nations on the social and economic benefits of digital development. "We have ended up with the worst possible solution."

NBN: The Aussie White Elephant Is The World Slowest?

(Staff articles from The AUSTRALIAN &  The CONVERSATION in June 2017.)

Australia now stands at 50 and falling faster.

The white elephant NBN started life on a coaster on a plane: Kevin Rudd was a very busy prime minister. Weighed down by the ­affairs of state, even his most senior ministers found it hard to get an audience with him.

Once, Stephen Conroy, as broadband, communications and the digital economy minister, had to fly with him to Perth simply to meet. It was on board that VIP flight that Conroy, scribbling on a drinks coaster, persuaded the prime minister to support a proposal to spend $43 billion on a ­national broadband network. Talk about pie in the sky.

What followed, to much fanfare, was an announcement on April 7, 2009, that the Rudd government would establish a company to build and operate a “super-fast national broadband network”. This network would be built in partnership with the private sector. It would be “the single largest nation building infrastructure project in Australian history”.

Trump Border Wall: Prototypes Stop US Commandos

(AP article from The BREITBART NEWS on 19 January 2018.)

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Recent assaults by tactical teams on prototypes of President Donald Trump’s proposed wall with Mexico indicate their imposing heights should stop border crossers, a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the rigorous assessment told The Associated Press.

Military special forces based in Florida and U.S. Customs and Border Protection special units spent three weeks trying to breach and scale the eight models in San Diego, using jackhammers, saws, torches and other tools and climbing devices, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was not authorized for public release.

A Customs and Border Protection report on the tests identifies strengths and flaws of each design but does not pick an overall winner or rank them, though it does point to see-through steel barriers topped by concrete as the best overall design, the official said. The report recommends combining elements of each, depending on the terrain. The official likened it to a Lego design, pulling pieces from different prototypes.

Pakistan A Failed State: Living-Hell For Non-Muslims

(Rahat Austin’s article from The GATESTONE INSTITUTE on 28 January 2018.)

A Muslim-convert to Christian being burned alive in Pakistan.

According to the official results of Pakistan's 2017 census, as of August 25, 2017, the population of Islamic Republic of Pakistan is 207.74 million. The country is divided into an overwhelmingly Muslim majority of 96.28%; and the remaining 3.72% are Christian, Bahais, Buddhists, Hindus, Ahmadis, Jains, Kalasha, Parsis and Sikhs, who are identified as non-Muslim minority Pakistanis.

Religious minorities in the territory of present-day Pakistan, at the time of the partition of India in 1947, were almost 23% of Pakistan's population. But instead of their numbers increasing, they have decreased to the current 3.72%. If the Muslim population has grown, why have non-Muslim minorities not grown also?

This 23% represents millions of people; how have they vanished? According to the same census, from 1998 to 2017, Pakistan's overall population grew by 57%. Presumably, non-Muslim minorities should have increased at the same rate. Instead, their numbers have dangerously fallen.

London Crimes Soar Under Sadiq Khan’s Thought Police

(Staff article from The GUARDIAN & The BREITBART NEWS on 25 January 2018.)

Sadiq Khan turning London Met officers into Though Police.
(900+ officers now sit at computers and check Facebook posts.)

Rise in recorded crime is accelerating in England and Wales: Police figures show offences up 14% in a year, with knife and gun crime rising even more steeply. The rise in crime in England and Wales is accelerating, according to police figures, which show a 14% year-on-year increase in offences recorded by forces across England and Wales.

Knife crime has gone up even more steeply, by 21% in the 12 months to September, and gun crime has risen by 20%, according to quarterly figures released on Thursday. Police chiefs said the increases – including a 32% rise in domestic burglary to 261,965 offences and an 18% rise in vehicle-related crimes (443,577 offences) alongside the sharp rises in violent crime – marked a turning point after more than 20 years of sustained falls in these categories.

“Today’s police officers are dealing with more complex crime, more safeguarding and protecting vulnerable people and an unprecedented terror threat, as well as tackling some of the genuine rises in knife and gun crime, robbery, burglary and vehicle-related crime – crimes which turn the trend on many years of reductions,” said chief constable Bill Skelly, of the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

Muslim Imams Spewing Jews-hatred In US Mosques

(Paul Sperry’s article from The NEW YORK POST on 27 January 2018.)

Calling for the annihilation of Jews and their "Filth"

Radical imams are spewing anti-Semitism in the US with impunity: Imam Ammar Shahin called Jews "filth" during a sermon in California. Courtesy of The Middle East Media Research Institute.

Muslim clerics are threatening the lives of Jews from the pulpits of American mosques, and they are doing it with virtual impunity, say former US law-enforcement officials who worry that the rhetoric could lead to violent attacks.

Over the past six months, at least five prominent US imams have been caught on tape preaching violence against Jews in sermons at mosques across America. Yet these radical preachers inciting anti-Semitic violence aren’t prosecuted or even permanently banished by the leadership of their mosques.

Trump’s The Reason Iran Islamic Republic Is Falling

(Robert Spencer’s articlefrom The FRONTPAGE MAG on 01 January 2018.)

In 2009, Iran was swept by demonstrations, just as it is now. But at that time, the protesters were shouting “Allahu akbar,” and there was no indication that they wanted anything but reform of the Islamic regime, not the end of the regime itself.

This time, however, the protesters have been chanting: “We don’t want an Islamic Republic!” “Clerics shame on you, let go of our country!” Some have even chanted: “Reza Shah, bless your soul!” What has changed? Donald Trump.

Reza Shah was the Shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941 and the father of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah who was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Reza Shah admired Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk and set Iran on a similar path of Westernization and secularization.

In chanting this, the protesters are emphasizing that they do not just want economic reforms, as has been the line of the establishment media in the West. Nor do they want an Islamic Republic that is less corrupt. They don’t want an Islamic Republic at all.

Al-Qaeda’s Khalid Batarfi: Muslims Must Kill Americans

(Meira Svirsky’s article from The CLARION PROJECT on 25 January 2018.)

Al-Qaeda: Muslims Should Kill ‘Americans Everywhere’: A senior Al-Qaeda leader has called on all Muslims to “rise and attack the Jews and the Americans everywhere.”

In a video released this week, Khalid Batarfi, a top commander with the group’s  Yemen-based operation (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), said “killing them is one of the most important things.”

The response was ostensibly aimed at the decision by U.S. President Donald Trump’s to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The next day, the State Department named Batarfi  a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”

Turkey Attacks Kurds In Syria Despite US Warnings

(Selcan Hacaoglu’s article from The BLOOMBERG VIEW on 22 January 2018.)

Turkey pushed ahead with a ground offensive against Kurdish forces in northwest Syria -- in defiance of the U.S. -- to create what it called a security buffer along the border.

Turkish soldiers moved into the town of Afrin at 11 a.m. local time on Sunday, penetrating 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the Turkish border, NTV television reported, citing Prime Minister Binali Yildirim’s comments to reporters in Istanbul. Turkish F-16s and artillery units hit about 200 targets, the army said.

The move pits Turkey against a U.S.-backed force that played a crucial role in defeating Islamic State in Syria. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist group linked to Kurdish separatists fighting government forces at home. Turkish military action also complicates Russian efforts to end the seven-year conflict in favor of President Bashar Al-Assad.