After two years of negotiations, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Mauritius announced an agreement
on Oct. 3 that would grant the small Indian Ocean island nation sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, which includes the island of Diego Garcia
. That island, the largest in the archipelago, is home to a major military base that supports both British and American naval and air operations.
The joint operational use of the island dates back to a 50-year agreement that Washington and London signed in 1966, which provided for a 20-year extension to 2036 as long as neither party gave notice of termination for two years beginning in December 2014. Needless to say, neither the U.S. nor the U.K. had any interest in terminating the agreement.
The new agreement between Britain and Mauritius brought an end to their decades-long dispute regarding sovereignty over the archipelago. Beginning in the 1980s, the Mauritians had staked a claim to the archipelago, arguing that Britain had illegally hived it off and renamed it the British Indian Ocean Territory when Mauritius became fully independent from Britain in 1968. A 2019 ruling by the International Court of Justice upheld Mauritius’s claim. That same year, the United Nations General Assembly supported Mauritius
in an overwhelming (though nonbinding) vote.
The International Court of Justice ruling threatened to jeopardize not only Britain’s future military presence on Diego Garcia but that of the U.S. as well. Initially, Britain did not yield to the court’s ruling, arguing that it was not legally binding, and it ignored the U.N. General Assembly vote. Washington likewise did not recognize the court ruling and ignored the vote. Instead, both the U.S. and the U.K. continued to operate their forces from the island.
Despite Britain’s refusal to accept the court decision, there was a growing international consensus, which included American experts, that London ultimately would have to negotiate an arrangement yielding to Mauritian claims. However, when Mauritian officials first stated in 2020 that they would not object to ongoing American operations on Diego Garcia once their country obtained sovereignty over the archipelago, it became clear that a compromise arrangement regarding its status that included a special arrangement for Diego Garcia was now possible.
The October agreement, which anticipates a treaty that would extend “for an initial period of 99 years,” has done just that. It states that “the United Kingdom will be authorised to exercise with respect to Diego Garcia the sovereign rights and authorities of Mauritius required to ensure the continued operation of the base well into the next century.” These rights include those of the U.S. As London’s Foreign Office made clear in announcing the agreement, “for the first time in more than 50 years, the status of the base will be undisputed and legally secure” and therefore, “the deal ensures long term secure operation of the UK-US military base on Diego Garcia, a vital facility for maintaining international security.”
As a result of American upgrades in the1970s, the base at Diego Garcia includes two 12,000-foot runways, designed to support long-range heavy bomber operations. The B-2 bomber attack this month in Yemen, on what Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called
five Houthi “hardened underground weapons storage locations,” was launched from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri; the bomber has far more than half again the range to enable it to hit any target in Iran if it takes off from Diego Garcia.
B-2 bombers have previously operated in both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Their return to the Middle East this month, coupled with the resolution at long last of the sovereignty dispute between Britain and Mauritius, should send an unambiguous and strong deterrent signal to the Iranian ayatollahs, who already are reeling from Israel’s widespread attacks on their underground facilities. Indeed, the 99-year term of the agreement, and of the treaty that will enshrine it, should be especially worrying to Tehran.
The ayatollahs have been in power for the past 45 years, but the new agreement enables B-2 bombers and their successor aircraft to strike at Iran for more than twice as long; ultimately — and hopefully — the deal could well outlast the tyrants of Tehran.
Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.
As a nation, we now stand at the edge of a cliff from which there may be no return. In just a few short days, it’s possible that cackling Kamala could win the presidency.
A 15-year-old boy was wounded Thursday night on the North Side in the Rogers Park neighborhood, Chicago police said.
About 9:10 p.m., the boy was in the 7500 block of North Damen Avenue when he suffered gunshot wounds to the ankles. He was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston where he was listed in good condition, police said.
The boy was unable to provide details about the shooting and no one was in custody.
Soros-funded prosecutor George Gascon
recently debated his challenger for reelection as Los Angeles County district attorney. Gascon’s onstage performance was a perfect reflection of his failure as the head of the nation’s largest DA office: It was abysmal.
Former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman has led Gascon in the polls by 25 percentage points
since August, so it’s not surprising that many Angelinos have had enough of Gascon’s pro-criminal, anti-victim, cop-hating policies and rhetoric.
Gascon, one of the rogue prosecutors
whose campaigns were underwritten largely by liberal financier George Soros, proved himself an inarticulate, foppish debater against Hochman in the televised debate
co-hosted by KNX News (97.1 FM) and the Los Angeles Times.
Hochman, a former Republican running against Gascon as an independent, prosecuted drug dealers, human traffickers, and corrupt public officials as an assistant U.S. attorney in California
. He ran the Justice Department’s tax division in the final year of George W. Bush’s eight-year presidency.
If Gascon loses the race Tuesday to Hochman, the Democrat only has himself to blame. The former district attorney of San Francisco, Gascon unleashed a crime tsunami
across the largest county in the United States and thought the liberal residents of Los Angeles either would support his approach or not notice the spike in crime.
Topics of the Gascon-Hochman debate included crime rates, juvenile crime, the death penalty, and better solutions for public safety.
A reporter for the Los Angeles Times asked about crime rates, citing statistics from both the California Department of Justice
and the Los Angeles Police Department for 2019 to 2023.
Those statistics show an 8.5% increase in overall crime in Los Angeles County during Gascon’s tenure as district attorney, which began in December 2020.
In response, Hochman referenced the California Department of Justice and noted that violent crime and property crime during Gascon’s term are both up by double digits and shoplifting is up 133%. Fentanyl is the number one killer of young people in LA, which has become the capital of human trafficking.
Hochman called such statistics “a record of public safety failure.” It was a strong point.
The solution, Hochman said, was to get rid of Gascon’s “blanket policies”—which one of us wrote about here
—and empower prosecutors to do their jobs by holding criminals accountable.
Challenger Nathan Hochman, an independent, debates incumbent Democrat George Gascon on Oct. 8 in the race for Los Angeles County district attorney. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
When given a chance to respond, Gascon filibustered, saying that he had been working on crime statistics for decades while his opponent represented wealthy people.
That non-answer didn’t fly with the LA Times reporter, who followed up saying: “Mr. Gascon, the question was, ‘How does the DA actually impact day-to-day crime rates, and what would you do to lower violent crime? You didn’t answer the question.”
Ouch. When you lose the LA Times, you know you’re in hot water.
Gascon, clearly caught off guard, gave a strange response. He said that “the DA actually has very little impact on the micro level when it comes to violent crime.”
Gascon’s answer suggested that policies of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office don’t create incentives or disincentives for residents to violate or comply with the law, which defies common sense.
His answer is doubly troubling because of Gascon’s repeated false assertions on the campaign trail that crime has gone down on his watch, suggesting that his policies resulted in lower crime rates.
When the debate moderator asked Gascon about the official numbers, the incumbent district attorney blatantly disregarded the facts. He stated that although there was an increase in crime during the COVID-19 pandemic, “the good news is that violent crime is … down locally.”
This despite the fact that the reporters, the moderators, Hochman, and Angelinos know that simply is not true.
As if Gascon’s narrative weren’t confusing enough, he admitted that “we have a problem” with crime in Los Angeles, but then argued that “a lot of the unsafe conditions that we have today are the product of years of mass incarceration.” He didn’t explain how people in jail or prison cause crime to go up.
When the debate turned to the subject of juvenile crime, Gascon claimed that under his supervision, juveniles “don’t get a free pass” and are prosecuted as the law dictates.
But that was another lie as well.
In his first week in office, Gascon issued Special Directive 20-09, entitled “Youth Justice,” which made diversion the default for anyone under 18 who commits a crime.
The goal of Gascon’s directive, by its own language, was to keep “youth out of the criminal justice system.” The most radical aspect of the directive was that it prohibited prosecutors from transferring younger offenders to adult court, no matter how violent the crime.
All juveniles accused of a misdemeanor wouldn’t be prosecuted unless “deemed necessary,” and even in those cases, they would be sent to diversion programs.
Gascon said, without a hint of irony, “If you’re a victim of a crime, or you know someone who is a victim of a crime, … I’m here for you.”
Gascon let down scores of victims, including a 10-year-old girl and a 4-year-old girl who were sexually assaulted by 17-year-old James Tubbs in separate incidents. One of us chronicled such cases in a chapter on Gascon in the book “Rogue Prosecutors
: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities.”
Gascon, knowing that Tubbs had referred to his 10-year-old victim as a “piece of meat,” allowed him to be tried as a juvenile even though Tubbs had numerous criminal convictions. The prosecutor handling the case also had notified Gascon that Tubbs, who was convicted, had “the hallmarks of a sexual predator.”
When the topic of the death penalty came up during the debate, Gascon noted that he had no intention of upholding and applying California law
, which authorizes the ultimate punishment for the most heinous crimes.
Twice in the past 15 years, voters in California have been asked in a referendum whether they wanted to eliminate the state’s death penalty. In both instances, voters decided
to keep the death penalty on the books.
But, like all rogue prosecutors whose campaigns are underwritten largely by liberal financier George Soros
, Gascon thinks he has the right to ignore any criminal law he personally doesn’t like. It doesn’t matter that elected district attorneys are responsible for enforcing the laws as written.
And what was Gascon’s reason for not seeking the ultimate punishment in appropriate cases? He trotted out the old trope that “the death penalty isn’t a deterrent.”
That’s debatable at best. Some studies
indicate that the death penalty has a deterrent effect on violent crime when applied in the most egregious cases. Facts have never been Gascon’s strong suit, though.
From his inability to be honest about rising crime rates to his refusal to accept the fact that his policies (some adopted by other rogue DAs), contributed to the persistent spike in crime across America, Gascon showed viewers of the debate that nothing would change in Los Angeles County should he be reelected.
The co-hosts and reporters at the debate gave Gascon every opportunity to lay out a new approach for a second term as district attorney. But Gascon failed to see the long hanging curveball and doubled down on his vapid and tiresome political banalities.
For these reasons, among many, Gascon not only lost the debate, he seems to have lost the trust of Angelinos, making his removal from office quite likely.
In each case, the beneficiaries have been the residents who were supposed to be protected by those rogue prosecutors and whose safety suffered under a failing social experiment.
The Heritage Foundation is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not reflect any institutional position of Heritage or its Board of Trustees.
Thieves blew open the door of an art gallery in the southern Netherlands and stole two works from a famous series of screen prints by American pop artist Andy Warhol and left two more badly damaged in the street as they fled the scene of the botched heist, the gallery owner said Friday.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — It started with a simple question to Connor Bedard
and what seemed like an innocuous comment after the Chicago Blackhawks lost 4-2
to the Dallas Stars on Saturday.
Can you take solace in hanging for three periods with a Stanley Cup contender?
“No,” Bedard said after the game. “We’re not just going to be happy that we stayed in a game. We’re all NHL players. That’s not the goal, you know? It’s frustrating.
“Losing is not fun, so we’ve obviously got to figure it out.”
Those comments became fodder for internet and podcast speculation.
Is Bedard unhappy in Chicago? Will that supposed unrest spur the Hawks front office to swing for a big acquisition?
Sportsnet.ca journalist Elliotte Friedman said on his “32 Thoughts” podcast, “I listen to Bedard and I understand there’s frustration. I don’t think there’s any reason to panic at this point in time, it’s way too early for that. But if you’re internal in Chicago, you’re seeing that, like, OK, we know how much this guy cares, we know he wants to win, and you have to ask, ‘What’s our timeline here?’ We don’t want to be stupid, but how long do we really have?
Is Bedard not-so-secretly seething? Not quite.
“When you lose, you’re not going to be happy, so I feel like that’s kind of common sense on any team that didn’t get after the hottest start,” Bedard told the Tribune on Thursday before the Hawks lost to the San Jose Sharks 3-2. “We’re competitive people, we’re frustrated when we lose.
“But in the end, we all are here to win and to make us better, make everyone better. So I’m excited to keep doing that with these guys.”
Does Bedard believe that this group as assembled has the Hawks (3-7-1) headed in the right direction?
“Yeah, I think we feel that we’ve been in every game,” he said. “Obviously you’ve got to win. It’s a results league, so it doesn’t matter if you lose 3-2 or 10-1.
“But in the end, we feel like we could’ve won every single game we played. And if we can figure out how to close those out, then we’re going to be a tough team to beat.”
Also, if Bedard was at his wit’s end, it probably would have been after a particularly ugly 6-3 loss to the Vancouver Canucks
on Oct. 22.
He’s been doing a self-temperature check.
“It’s something I’ve been working on a lot, every year, trying to get a little better at flushing things,” he said after the Canucks game. “But probably that night, I’m not too happy for the rest of the night or whatever. Then in the morning you try to forget about it.”
On Thursday, he said he feels “maybe a little” more comfortable speaking up in the locker room than he did as a rookie last season.
“I’m not the loudest guy ever, and I’m still 19,” Bedard said. “We’ve got a lot of guys that have been really for 10, 15 years, so, yeah, I’m still not super loud. But I feel comfortable saying something if I want or if I feel like it’s necessary.”
The death toll from Israeli strikes in the central Gaza Strip rose to 25, including five children, as more bodies have been recovered, while three people were killed in an early morning airstrike near the Lebanese capital, officials said Friday.
When Joe Biden became president in 2021, one of the first things he did was hang a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt above the Oval Office fireplace. This was the first clue about how he planned to govern after the Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress.
Soon after, Biden won passage of the American Rescue Plan
, which contained $1.9 billion of assistance to families and businesses from the COVID-19 pandemic. He then unveiled the next phase of his agenda, the American Jobs Plan
, which called for federal spending of $2.1 trillion to expand public infrastructure, green energy and other projects. This was to be followed by another $2 trillion program of social programs designed to build “human infrastructure.”
The total price tag of these bills over a decade totaled $1.6 trillion, $550 billion of which came in the form of tax credits. The remaining amount authorized federal spending of more than $1 trillion on items such as highways, greenhouse gas reduction and semiconductor manufacturing.
Following the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre boasted that Biden had “more legislative success than any modern president
.” The administration’s plan was to get this message out to voters before the November midterm elections.
However, polling since then has repeatedly shown that the American public is not enamored with Bidenomics.
One reason is that the Inflation Reduction Act was passed just as inflation spiked to a four-decade high. Voters were fixated on paying soaring grocery bills, gasoline prices and housing costs. Republicans mocked the bill’s title as a misnomer because it added to a federal debt burden that already was on an unsustainable trajectory.
Beyond this, Biden’s programs also suffered from inadequate messaging due to a lack of transparency and accountability. Although the White House gave occasional updates about them, it did not provide a centralized way for the public to see how much had been formally awarded or spent.
To get at this issue, a team of researchers at Politico spent months assessing the implementation of the laws
that make up the backbone of Biden’s legacy. Last April, they found that less than 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion authorized for direct investments in climate, energy and infrastructure had actually been spent.
The administration announced roughly $60 billion in tentative funding out of $145 billion in direct spending on energy and climate programs in the act. Only $125 billion had been spent from the $884 billion provided by the infrastructure laws and from pandemic relief, and roughly $300 billion is not authorized until the next two fiscal years.
What lessons should we draw from all of this?
My take is that Biden’s legislation has not been received well received principally because the American public does not see direct benefits. When the federal government embarks on long-term investment projects, it needs to keep the public informed on the progress on a regular basis.
The federal government must also be accountable for whether these programs achieve their stated objectives. There has been considerable slippage in this regard since the early 1960s, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara implemented Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution
as a framework for military leaders to decide which programs to fund based on strategic objectives. This process was ultimately adopted by the Bureau of the Budget and various federal agencies.
One criticism of McNamara’s approach is that such procedures typically cost billions of dollars, take years to complete and follow a traditional model of research and development.
The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which has the best track record of various industrial policies
, is often cited as the role model for proactive government. It is credited with launching numerous successful innovations including the development of the internet, GPS and Apple’s personal assistant Siri
, among others.
The agency was created by President Eisenhower in 1957 to maintain U.S. military superiority following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, and other federal departments have strived to emulate its success.
Another lesson is that public investment does not necessarily displace private investment.
One of the Politico research findings was that the Inflation Reduction Act unleashed a gusher of private company investments in clean energy and manufacturing by way of tax breaks worth at least $525 billion.
Goldman Sachs contends the act will spur a third energy revolution
in which about $3 trillion in renewable energy technology could double the volume of energy produced by the shale revolution. Accordingly, the best chance of success is for government programs to target areas where its sponsorship creates incentives for the private sector to innovate.
Finally, what should Kamala Harris do differently Joe Biden if she becomes president?
My take is that federal programs targeted with specific objectives have a better chance of being accepted by the public than ones that are massive and difficult to discern. Harris has grasped this by advocating government programs directly targeting the middle class.
For this reason, I believe she needs to distance herself from Biden’s economic programs to gain political acceptance for her programs.
Nicholas Sargen, Ph.D. is an economic consultant for Fort Washington Investment Advisors and is affiliated with the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He has authored three books including” Investing in the Trump Era: How Economic Policies Impact Financial Markets.”
The comments were made late Thursday in Arizona during a campaign event with Tucker Carlson when Trump took a swipe at Cheney, a high-profile GOP surrogate for Harris, branding her a “warhawk” and imagining her “with the rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.”
Trump told the crowd:
“Let’s put her with the rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Trump’s team later clarified that he was speaking about Cheney’s willingness to send “America’s sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself.”
On Friday morning, in reaction, shared the Drudge Report’s top headline, which read “Trump Calls For Cheney Execution.” Sharing the homepage on screen, Scarborough proceeded to slam newspapers who had refused to endorse a candidate in the election and, again, attacked the Wall Street Journal’s mockery of the “fascist meme” it argued was being manufactured around Trump.
‘Nine barrels shooting at her face.’ This is, again, I want the Wall Street Journal editorial page to look at this. We’ve been spending a lot of time, rightly, about The Washington Post bending to the will of Donald Trump, and the Los Angeles Times bending to the will of Donald Trump. Actually banning… keep that up [the Drudge front page]… actually banning… keep that up, please… Actually banning editorials where their editorial team calls for Harris’s selection.
But let’s go back to the Wall Street Journal, who I have noted and I read to you every day, whether you want to hear it or not, I have. Because for most of the time, they have actually called out Donald Trump. But as we go to the final weeks of the campaign, Donald Trump goes on Bloomberg. He says the Wall Street Journal always gets it wrong. Says he is going to talk to Murdoch. Then what happens? They start making fun of people who are concerned about Donald Trump and his calls for violence. They laugh and jokingly say – this is, again, after Donald Trump has attacked them and says he is having a meeting with Rupert Murdoch – they write an editorial on Monday talking about a ‘fascist meme’, as if saying, ‘I’m going to use my military troops and I’m going to use my National Guard to attack my democratic political opponents’, as if that is a meme.
And then a few days later, as if they haven’t already humiliated themselves enough, Donald Trump keeps talking about violence against his political opponent. And they write another op-ed saying to all the billionaires reading and all of the guys driving around Maseratis, who have doubled their fortunes while going to country clubs, calling Kamala Harris a socialist, they double down and say: ‘There is nothing to see here. Why, the Democrats have been far worse.’
Then we see this. I wonder, can we put this up again, please? I wonder, Wall Street Journal editorial page, does this look like a meme to you?
