Week in Review: Putin’s Media War With the EU, the Pope vs. Trump, Japan Snubs Obama, Pension Cuts, and More

Week in Review: Putin’s Media War With the EU, the Pope vs. Trump, Japan Snubs Obama, Pension Cuts, and More

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Week in Review: Putin’s Media War With the EU, the Pope vs. Trump, Japan Snubs Obama, Pension Cuts, and More

All you need to know about everything in the news this week

February 27, 2016

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Highlights:

Putin’s hybrid war against the EU

  • “It is not by crude force alone that Russia twists events to its advantage,” writes the New York Times. “By using its total control over the Russian news media to sow confusion in the West, Mr. Putin has managed … to ‘weaponize’ information.”
  • Among other things, Russia is weaponizing Europe’s migrant crisis, and it’s discussing proposals to build another natural gas pipeline as a way to divide the European Union.
  • As Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote, “Domestically, Putin has transformed the Russian media into a propaganda machine. He has severely curbed the power of democracy and emasculated Russia’s parliament.”

    • Saudi Arabia’s relations with Lebanon

  • Saudi Arabia’s nemesis, Iran, largely dominates Hezbollah—the terrorist group that’s increasingly dominating Lebanon. As a consequence, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies recently suspended $3 billion in aid to Lebanon.
  • But to what extent and for how long will the Saudis and their allies pull out of Lebanon?

    • Pensions going bust

  • The Central States Pension Fund, one of America’s largest multi-employer benefit funds with more than 400,000 participants across the country, will almost certainly go broke within the next decade.
  • ZeroHedge reported February 18 that the fund announced “massive” cuts that could be as high as 55 percent. “A controversial 2014 law allowed the pension to propose [deep] cuts, many of them by half or more, as a way to perhaps save the fund,” wrote the Kansas City Star.
  • Jay Perry, a longtime member of the Teamsters labor union, warned: “What’s happening to us is a microcosm of what’s going to happen to the rest of the pensions in the United States.”

    • Shinzo Abe snubs Barack Obama

  • On February 9, United States President Barack Obama appealed to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to postpone his trip to Russia in May, citing Washington’s differences with Moscow over Syria and Ukraine.
  • Abe will press ahead with the visit as scheduled.
  • As we wrote in our article “Don’t Worry, Putin, Asia Has Your Back,” “Prime Minister Abe apparently wants to knit a Japan-Russia alliance before someone applies a little pressure on that U.S. blanket and fully exposes its tattered condition to the world.”

    • The pope vs. Trump

  • According to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Pope Francis is a “very political person” who is “disgraceful” for questioning his faith.
  • This pope-Trump feud has “deeper implications with troubling threads that run through American history,” wrote Politico. “As crass as Trump’s attacks may seem, it was the pope who violated an unspoken gentleman’s agreement in American politics—one that has been in place since the election of John F. Kennedy. In his controversial plane interview, Pope Francis fessed up to being a ‘political animal,’ …. In Francis’s native Argentina, the Catholic Church enjoys the moral authority to speak out on plainly political matters. And it regularly employs that authority.”
  • For more on Francis’s politicking, read our articles “Papal Politicking” and “Restoring Europe’s Latin Empire.”

    • Other news:

  • The EU’s police chief warned that up to 5,000 jihadists have returned to Europe from the Middle East. “We can expect [the Islamic State] or other religious terror groups to stage an attack somewhere in Europe with the aim of achieving mass casualties among the civilian population,” he told Germany’s Neue Osnabrucker Zeitung newspaper.
  • The fear of terror is forcing Europeans to crack down on free speech across the Continent.
  • The time of decision is approaching for Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s return to German politics, according to Merkur.de and the Financial Times.
  • The Iranian elections will prove to be a litmus test for the nuclear deal.

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