Saturday, January 20, 2018

Headlines below the fold

It's the corruption stupid. Gambia's expresident is fighting extradition for his crimes.

  Follow the money. when he fled, he took the government's money with him, along with all of his Bentlys and Rolls Royces.

Aides of Mr Barrow (the new president who threw him out) said at least GBP 8.8 million was missing, a considerable sum for a country of just 1.9 million people.
nor was he the only dictator to do so:


Mr Jammeh is the latest in a series of dictators to flee abroad with suitcases of state treasure. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his wife allegedly flew out of Tunisia in 2011 with 1.5 tonnes of gold bars purloined from the central bank, while Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos left the Philippines with 24 suitcases of gold bricks and 22 crates of cash.
the Philippines has been suing to get that money back, but of course, Marcos' family claims it was not stolen from the Philippine people, but Yamashita's gold (i.e. stolen by the Japanese from Malaysia etc. and hidden and found by a gentleman named Roxas and then stolen from him by Marcos).

Here is a list of ten similar dictators who looted their countries to get rich... hmm. they left out Hugo Chavez and a lot of other guys.

But you can see why I am sarcastic when the Pope condemns ordinary folks who try to live quietly and follow the rules while staying silent on corruption, be it sexual or money, especially if these bozos are PC.

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Speaking of the Philippines: StrategyPage has an article on our lovely country, including a lot of stuff about China's sea grab of the west Philippines sea.

The Chinese first tried to buy (bribe Gloria via the ZTE scandal) to get the Spratlys, then they simply moved into the area while Aquino was president, and President Obama told him not to oppose their aggression but take it to court. Now they are dug in (litereally: They destroyed the reef and ecology to build artificial islands which are now armed) and then Duterte is criticized for making nice with China.


n late 2017 China appeared to have succeeded in buying cooperation from the Philippines. The Filipino government is willing to accept all the legal gifts (aid, investment, loans) China offers in return for the Philippines not resisting Chinese claims in the South China Sea.
President Duterte pointed out earlier in 2017 that China threatened war if the Philippines went ahead with plans to drill for oil in offshore areas that international law recognizes as Filipino but that China claims actually belongs to them.
Duterte openly criticizes other nations for not confronting China and sees no point in the Philippines trying to take on China by itself or at least not without a massive amount of support.
Obama talked about stopping this, but actually did nothing. Has anyone followed the money here to explain why the US didn't help the Philippines? or was he just a naive pacifist?

and now, nothing short of a shooting war will get China out of the Spratlys. And in the long term, they are aiming at Luzon: something sometimes discussed in their media but ignored in the western media...

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SPage also has a discussion of Russia in the world. Bookmarked for later reading.
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Fajr music festival (in Iran)
The annual Fajr International Music Festival held in Tehran dedicated some of its musical selections to the November quake victims of Iranian Kurdistan as well as some 30 Iranian seafarers who went missing when their oil tanker collided with a cargo ship off of the coast of China earlier this month..
A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck the Iraq-Iran border in November killing 620 people and wounding another 12,000 in Iranian Kurdistan. It also left many homeless due to collapsed or damaged infrastructure. The November 11 earthquake was the world’s deadliest in 2017..

I knew about the tanker accident which caused a huge oil spill, but that earthquake didn't get a lot of publicity.

Sigh. In our prayers.

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