Have You Met Christiana?

  • She is a member of the Carbon Finance Advisory Panel
  • She is an Advisory Committee Member of Green Cross International, founded by Pres. Gorbachev
  • She is an invited member of the Clinton Global Initiative
  • She is a member of the Global Roundtable on Climate Change led by Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University
  • She is a technical advisor to the Prototype Carbon Fund at the World Bank
  • She was personally trained by Al Gore to deliver his presentation of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’
  • She is the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
  • She even blogs at the UNFCCC

Are you beginning to see a crusader here because there is notoriety and money and power involved? Wonder how many times she has visited the White House…

UN Climate Chief: We Are Remaking The World Economy

The United Nation’s climate chief says that reordering the global economy to fight climate change is the “most difficult” task the international body has ever undertaken.

“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” Christiana Figueres, who heads up the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, told reporters.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution,” Figueres said.

Figueres’s remarks come ahead of a meeting in Geneva next week where delegates will pour over draft treaty texts that the U.N. hopes countries will agree to in December. She doesn’t expect global warming to be solved by one treaty, but was optimistic in will be solved in the coming years. “That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change, be it COP 15, 21, 40 – you choose the number,” she said. “It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.”

The climate chief even held up President Obama as a shining example of steps countries can take to tackle global warming.

“The international community is quite grateful for the fact that in his second term, President Obama has turned his attention quite clearly and quite decisively to climate change,” Figueres told reporters.

“He has not only spoken about his commitment both to his national agenda on climate change, but also to the international process, and has been quite clear in his political leadership,” Figueres said, touting the EPA’s success cutting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

The EPA will finalize rules to cut carbon emissions from new and existing power plants this summer. Critics of these rules say they will hurt the economy through job losses and higher energy prices. Supporters, however, say it will spur green energy development and set an example for other countries to follow.

Obama’s 2016 budget proposal boosts EPA funding to help it finalize emissions rules for power plants. The budget would also give the EPA $4 billion to reward states that reduce emissions even more than federal mandates require.

Figueres also cheered Obama’s agreement with China to reduce carbon emissions by 2030 and to give the U.N.’s climate fund a $3 billion boost.

“So for all of these reasons, certainly a very welcome leadership from the United States as a single nation,” Figueres said. “Countries can attain a certain level of emission reductions on their own, but they can do much more if they collaborate with each other, in particular with certain specific sectors.”

But while Figueres seems rosy about a deal, there are already signs of countries backing away from a tough international climate treaty.

France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, told an audience at an event in New Delhi, India that a climate treaty should not hurt national economic growth. “An agreement that would leave some countries to consider their growth hampered by its provisions will not be accepted,” Fabius said. *** If you can stand this nonsense and fleecing of policy and global threats, you can read more here about Christiana. One more thing, controlling climate change brings gender equality….really?

 

The Cuban Adjustment Act ala Mexico

 

The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1996 (CAA) provides for a special procedure under which Cuban natives or citizens and their accompanying spouses and children may get a green card (permanent residence). The CAA gives the Attorney General the discretion to grant permanent residence to Cuban natives or citizens applying for a green card if:

They have been present in the United States for at least 1 year
They have been admitted or paroled
They are admissible as immigrants

HAVANA — President Obama’s opening to Cuba has accelerated a surge in Cuban migration to the United States, the latest U.S. statistics show, as many on the island grow worried that America’s long-standing immigration benefits for Cubans are now in jeopardy.

Last month the Coast Guard intercepted 481 Cubans in rickety boats and rafts, a 117 percent increase from December 2013. But the boaters account for only a fraction of those attempting to reach the United States. At the Miami airport and ports of entry along the Mexican border, the number of Cubans who arrived seeking refuge jumped to 8,624 during the last three months of 2014, a 65 percent increase from the previous year.

Many Cubans have heard warnings for years that their unique immigration privileges — which essentially treat anyone from the island who sets foot on U.S. terra firma as a political refugee — would not last forever.

Mexican border now a major entry point for Cuban migrants

Although a homemade raft overloaded with desperate people is the most enduring image of the decades-long migration to the U.S. from Cuba, that is not the way most Cubans without visas now arrive.

Most walk across the Mexican border.

“It is surprising. And it is surprising that we are now seeing those numbers officially reported,” said Jorge Duany, a Florida International University professor who studies migration patterns. During the last three months of 2014, nearly 6,500 Cubans arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That figure is up from 4,328 from the same period the previous year, an increase of 50 percent.

Sombrero Beach, in Marathon, Florida

The number of Cubans without visas processed through the agency’s Miami field office more than doubled over that same period, rising from 893 to 2,135. Many flew directly to Miami aboard flights from Spain, South America, the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands, using passports from Spain and other third countries.

The 1,900-mile long Southwest border, for years the main entry point for undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America, was also ground zero for a recent spike in Cuban migrants.

The spike includes arrivals of Cubans by air and sea, and was fueled in part by fears that talks between the Obama Administration and Cuba could result in changes in the preferential treatment undocumented Cuban migrants have enjoyed since 1966.

Rumors that the Adjustment Act — and the 1995 amendment providing for the so-called “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy – was at risk began to sweep the island in the wake of President Obama’s Dec. 17 speech in which he said the U.S. wanted to normalize relations with the Castro government. Existing policies allow Cubans who reach U.S. soil– with or without visas – to stay and within a year apply for permanent residency.

“The primary concern is the possibility of the Cuban Adjustment Act being affected,” said Oscar Rivera, director of the resettlement agency Church World Service in Doral. “That seems to be an issue in Cuba right now. That’s what we’re hearing.”

The surge in Cuban migrants triggered by the announcement may be most evident in the number of Coast Guard interdictions at sea. In December 2014, 331 Cubans in boats and rafts were stopped before they could reach the U.S. All were taken back to Cuba. During the last three months of 2014, 132 Cubans made it to shore in Florida, up from 105 during the same period in 2013, according to Border Patrol figures. Unknown is the number who landed without being detected and did not report to U.S. officials, or who perished at sea. But balseros, or rafters, make up only a fraction of those attempting to reach the U.S. “It is no longer chiefly the heroic individual who floats himself across,” said Duany, director of FIU’s Cuban Research Institute. “Much of the traffic in people now is well-organized by smuggling groups. It is how the coyotes (smugglers) make a living.”  Many of those Cubans who enter the U.S. through Mexico begin their journey in Ecuador. In the past six years, more than 100,000 Cubans have left the island for the Andean nation because Ecuador does not require a visa or special permission to visit.

Ramon Saul Sanchez, leader of the anti-Castro group Democracy Movement, said the Cuban government welcomes the flow of its citizens to South America, through Mexico and into Florida because it relieves social pressure on the island.

Once in the U.S., those arrivals then “refresh the source of income” to Cuba by sending money home to relatives on the island, Sanchez said.

Cubans also enter the U.S. with visas issued by the Interest Section in Havana. Current accords call for a minimum of 20,000 visas a year, but Duany said that recently the number of visas issued has averaged 32,000 annually.

Regardless of any changes to the Cuban Adjustment Act, or the lifting of the embargo, Duany predicts migration from Cuba will increase over the next decade. “The economic conditions, the living conditions in Cuba, don’t seem to improve, and the force of family ties remains strong,” he said. “I don’t see any indication that will change.”  David Abraham, a University of Miami law professor and expert in Cuban migration, agrees. “Change in Cuba comes slowly,” he said. “What’s driving people to come here doesn’t change. That’s economic opportunity.”

 

 

The Real Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast

One would have either had to attend the National Prayer Breakfast or would have had to watch it on C-Span to hear and see Barack Obama. He went either off script or someone in the White House edited the published version of his speech. The White House version is here for comparison. 

White House correspondent Neil Munro was kind enough to report the accurate spirit of Barack Obama’s presentation at the National Prayer Breakfast.

President Obama used a speech at the annual prayer breakfast Thursday to portray Americans’ routine criticism of Islam as “insults” and “attacks,” and to repeatedly suggest that Americans should curb their criticism of Islamic ideas.

“In modern, complicated, diverse societies, the functioning of these rights, the concern for the protection of these rights calls for each of us to exercise civility and restraint and judgment,” Obama said, one month after three Muslims shouted Islamic justifications while murdering 14 French journalists, police, shoppers and Jews in Paris.

Obama also suggested that free speech should be curbed or regulated to shield Islamic ideas and Muslims’ self-esteem from the rough-and-tumble world of modern democracies.

“And if, in fact, we defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s religion, we’re equally obligated to use our free speech to condemn such insults and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religious communities, particularly religious minorities who are the targets of such attacks,” Obama told his D.C. audience.

In his speech, Obama did not even try to describe his suggested distinction between legitimate criticism and illegitimate “insults” and “attacks.” In Islamic culture and laws, criticism of Islamic ideas is often treated as traitorous insults to Islam’s deity and its final prophet that deserve capital punishment.

In 2009 and 2012, Obama swore to uphold the constitution and laws of the United States.

Obama’s qualified endorsement of Islamic blasphemy laws echoed his 2012 statement to the United Nations General Assembly, when he said “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

The claim was made shortly after he blamed a California-based video-maker for the jihadi attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.

In his prayer breakfast speech, Obama repeatedly tried to excuse Islamic ideas from criticism by saying that Islamic attacks aren’t actually Islamic, despite the repeated professions of faith by attackers who are giving their lives for their cause.

Terrorist attacks by people who describe themselves as Muslims “are betraying” Islam, insisted Obama.

ISIL, or the Islamic State, is a “brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism… [incorrectly] claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions,” Obama told an audience of Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Obama’s defense of Islam is a variant of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, said Robert Spencer, the author of several books on Islam.

The fallacy is used when a group of people simply ignore members’ bad behavior by pretending the members are not part of the group.

But Obama’s claim is undermined by the jihadis’ repeated citation of Islamic justifications for their murders, bombings and attacks. For example, jihadis in northern Syria recently burned a Jordanian pilot with fuel, and then justified the burning by citing the Islamic notion of “qisa,” which says that murderers can be killed in the same manner that they killed their victims.

Obama’s defense of Islam was combined with repeated efforts to criticize Christianity, which provided the intellectual foundation for America’s culture of self-reliance and its small-government Constitution.

“How do we, as people of faith, reconcile… the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religion for their own murderous ends?” said Obama, whose religious experience was shaped by years of worship at Rev. Jeremiah Wrights’s African-American mega church in Chicago.

“Lest we get on our high horse and think this [combination of love and violence] is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” he said.

The Crusades began in 1095, roughly 906 years before the 9/11/2001 attack in New York, and roughly 450 years after Arabs occupied the Christian city of Jerusalem, which was then part of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The empire was eventually destroyed when Islamic armies used mercenary European gunners to capture and occupy Byzantium in 1453.

Obama also argued that Islam and Christianity share the same intellectual principles.

“Finally, let’s remember that if there is one law that we can all be most certain of that seems to bind people of all faiths… that one law, that Golden Rule [is] that we should treat one another as we wish to be treated,” he said.

“In Islam, there is a Hadith that states: ‘None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself,’” Obama said.

“The Holy Bible tells us to ‘put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony,’” Obama added, citing a letter to fellow Christians by Saint Paul, the leading Roman-era Christian missionary.

Obama did not mention that Islam only describes Muslim — not Christians or Jews — as “brothers,” while non-Muslims are described as polytheists, pagans or “kafirs.” Nor did Obama compare the Koran’s many recorded exhortations to violence to the Bible’s repeated descriptions of Jesus’s opposition to violence.

“When the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush,” says a passage in the fifth verse of Koran’s ninth book.

In contrast, the Biblical book of Matthew says that the Christian deity Jesus declared “blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

Obama “is once again articulating the fashionable moral equivalence claim that all religions are equally capable of inciting their adherents to violence,” responded Spencer.

“This claim is usually made to discourage examination of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism,” Spencer added.

Saudi King Salman, a Reformer?

Barack Obama visited the Saudi kingdom to pay respects for the passing of King Abdullah.

Let us remember when Hillary Clinton called Bashir al Assad, the tyrant Islamist ruler of Syria a reformer and many are calling King Abdullah’s replacement, King Salman the same thing. Head-scratch. Seems King Salman’s past and perhaps current nefarious connections need some real scrutiny.

Yet Salman has an ongoing track record of patronizing hateful extremists that is now getting downplayed for political convenience. As former CIA official Bruce Riedel astutely pointed out, Salman was the regime’s lead fundraiser for mujahideen, or Islamic holy warriors, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as well as for Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan struggles of the 1990s. In essence, he served as Saudi Arabia’s financial point man for bolstering fundamentalist proxies in war zones abroad.

As longtime governor of Riyadh, Salman was often charged with maintaining order and consensus among members of his family. Salman’s half brother King Khalid (who ruled from 1975 to 1982) therefore looked to him early on in the Afghan conflict to use these family contacts for international objectives, appointing Salman to run the fundraising committee that gathered support from the royal family and other Saudis to support the mujahideen against the Soviets.

Riedel writes that in this capacity, Salman “work[ed] very closely with the kingdom’s Wahhabi clerical establishment.” Another CIA officer who was stationed in Pakistan in the late 1980s estimates that private Saudi donations during that period reached between $20 million and $25 million every month. And as Rachel Bronson details in her book, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership With Saudi Arabia, Salman also helped recruit fighters for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan Salafist fighter who served as a mentor to both Osama bin Laden and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”

***

Saudi Arabia crowns new king who financed jihad

In 1978, the Saudi monarchy decided to expand the exportation of fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam across the world through the establishment of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). About 10 years later, IIRO’s Philippine branch was established by Osama Bin Laden’s brother-in-law, which subsequently funded Philippine terrorists. By the 2000s, IIRO’s branch in Indonesia began funding Al Qaeda training camps.

The Bush administration designated IIRO-Philippines and IIRO-Indonesia as terrorist entities in 2006. IIRO’s U.S. offices were closed at the time, although IIRO appeared to reopen an office in Florida 2010. IIRO is the fourth best-funded Islamic foundation in the world according to a 2011 study.

The man who selected the leadership of IIRO and approved its spending from its inception is the new king of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz:

Saudi Crown Prince Salman

From the Washington Free Beacon:

…[T]hroughout his public career in government, Salman has embraced radical Muslim clerics and has been tied to the funding of radical groups in Afghanistan, as well as an organization found to be plotting attacks against America, according to various reports and information provided by David Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

In 2001, an international raid of the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, which Salman founded in 1993, unearthed evidence of terrorist plots against America, according to separate exposés written by Dore Gold, an Israeli diplomat, and Robert Baer, a former CIA officer.

Salman is further accused by Baer of having “personally approved all important appointments and spending” at the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), a controversial Saudi charity that was hit with sanctions following the attacks of September 11, 2001, for purportedly providing material support to al Qaeda.

Salman also has been reported to be responsible for sending millions of dollars to the radical mujahedeen that waged jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, according to Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who is now director of the Brookings Intelligence Project.

“In the early years of the war—before the U.S. and the Kingdom ramped up their secret financial support for the anti-Soviet insurgency—this private Saudi funding was critical to the war effort,” according to Riedel. “At its peak, Salman was providing $25 million a month to the mujahedeen. He was also active in raising money for the Bosnian Muslims in the war with Serbia”…

 

Inside ‘No-Go’ Zones

  Video: Russian reporter pays a visit to Paris’s Muslim no-go zones    Paris video is here. The police force in Sweden has identified no go zones with the video here.

Russian TV made a program about Paris’s ever expanding Muslim no-go zones to show Russia where it is heading by letting in Muslim migrants. No one is safe from these vile, savaged, violent and horrid Muslim immigrants who contribute nothing but human degradation on society. The Muslims attack non-Muslims, threaten children in schools forcing them to eat only halal food whether they are Muslim or not, burn cars, buildings and surroundings to generate the fire brigade and police so they can attack them. Like in Britain these savages have filled France with rapes, murder, harassment, violence, threats, genital mutilation, honor murders – all typical for the followers of prophet Mohammed.
And like everywhere else these immigrants settle, they immediately exploit the welfare system and are dragging the French economy into a black endless abyss. In addition, as if that is not enough, Muslims are so criminalized that 70% of the entire prison population in the whole country is – Muslim.
France is the founding father of Eurabia and responsible for the enforced Muslim immigration on the Western world in a Euro-Arab pact signed in the 1970’s created by Charles de Gaulle.  The French should perhaps think to celebrate de Gaulle’s anniversary by urinating on his miserable grave for the treason and damage he did to his country, which has completely destroyed the structure of the French culture and the safety of the people.

*** Going deeper into what is behind no go zones:

In Britain, for example, a Muslim group called Muslims Against the Crusades has launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities – including what it calls “Londonistan” – into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence.

The Islamic Emirates Project names the British cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Derby, Dewsbury, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Sheffield, as well as Waltham Forest in northeast London and Tower Hamlets in East London as territories to be targeted for blanket Sharia rule.

In the Tower Hamlets area of East London (also known as the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets), for example, extremist Muslim preachers, called the Tower Hamlets Taliban, regularly issue death threats to women who refuse to wear Islamic veils. Neighborhood streets have been plastered with posters declaring “You are entering a Sharia controlled zone: Islamic rules enforced.” And street advertising deemed offensive to Muslims is regularly vandalized or blacked out with spray paint.

In the Bury Park area of Luton, Muslims have been accused of “ethnic cleansing” by harassing non-Muslims to the point that many of them move out of Muslim neighborhoods. In the West Midlands, two Christian preachers have been accused of “hate crimes” for handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham. In Leytonstone in east London, the Muslim extremist Abu Izzadeen heckled the former Home Secretary John Reid by saying: “How dare you come to a Muslim area.”

In France, large swaths of Muslim neighborhoods are now considered “no-go” zones by French police. At last count, there are 751 Sensitive Urban Zones (Zones Urbaines Sensibles, ZUS), as they are euphemistically called. A complete list of the ZUS can be found on a French government website, complete with satellite maps and precise street demarcations. An estimated 5 million Muslims live in the ZUS, parts of France over which the French state has lost control.