North Korea rocket man Cartoons

China Orders N. Korean Businesses Within Borders to Close, U.S. to Boost Military in S. Korea

China is ordering all North Korean businesses operating within its borders to close in accordance with recently approved U.N. sanctions.
The country’s commerce ministry said ventures within Chinese territory will have until the end of the year to shutdown.
Overseas joint ventures between Chinese and North Korean companies will also be dissolved, but specific deadlines for those businesses remain unclear.
The move comes as U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson begins his second official trip to China amid rising tensions in the region.
Meanwhile, the president of South Korea urges Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
President Moon Jae-in made the comments during his speech at the 69th Armed Forces Day in south Korea.
He stressed his government’s efforts to help contain the rogue state’s nuclear aspirations, adding he does not want to see North Korea collapse.
He also emphasized the importance of South Korea’s cooperation with the international community to tackle the issue.
Moon also vowed to strengthen his country’s military alliance with the U.S.
On Thursday, South Korean security officials said American assets would be stationed in the region on a rotating basis before January.
This comes after the Pentagon confirmed the deployment as agreed to by Moon and President Trump at the U.N. last week.
Details on the type of assets to be sent to the region have not been confirmed but may include B-52 bombers, nuclear submarines, and aircraft carriers.

Rush Limbaugh on NFL anthem controversy: 'The left has hijacked this game'

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh weighed in Thursday on the ongoing furor over NFL players kneeling during "The Star-Spangled Banner," telling Fox News' "Hannity" that "the left has hijacked this game."

Previously a devoted pro football fan, Limbaugh told Sean Hannity that he did not watch Sunday's slate of games after hearing of the planned protests by players and vowed "I'm going to be playing golf on Sundays now."

The act of taking a knee during the pregame playing of the national anthem was started by then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick last year. Kaepernick said his action was a protest of racial inequality and police brutality.
President Trump brought the protests back into the national spotlight Friday when he asked the crowd at an Alabama rally, "Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say 'get that son of a b---- off the field right now, out, he's fired?'"
Those comments were condemned by NFL owners and dozens of players took a knee prior to the weekend's games, which in turn brought a backlash from some fans.
On Thursday night, Limbaugh told Hannity that the league's owners "have to be scared to death" by the protests and their fallout.
"I don’t think they understand what’s happening to them. I don’t think they understand what’s going on," the veteran radio host said. "They think they’re relating to the majority of their fan base, they’re not! They’re driving them away.
"And I hate it," Limbaugh continued. "I don’t want the NFL to get smaller, I don’t want it to become insignificant, I don’t want it to be taken over by a bunch of wusses. I don’t want it to be taken over by left-wing social justice causes.
Addressing the player protesters, Limbaugh concluded, "Use something besides the NFL sideline, use something besides the flag, use something besides something that people use to escape."

John Stossel: The incredible threat to free speech that no one is talking about

FILE -- In this photo, people walk through Sproul Plaza near the Sather Gate on the University of California, Berkeley campus in Berkeley, Calif. The university suspended a class on Sept. 13, 2016, amid complaints that it shared anti-Semitic viewpoints and was designed to indoctrinate students against Israel.  (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

A third threat to free speech at University of California, Berkeley has led to more censorship than political rioters or college administrators.

Berkeley is expensive. Out of state students must pay $60,000 a year. But for five years, Berkeley generously posted 20,000 of its professors' lectures online. Anyone could watch them for free.
Then government regulators stepped in.
The Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates, "No qualified individual with a disability shall ... be denied the benefits of ... services."
As with most laws, people can spend years debating what terms like "denied," "benefits" and "services" mean.
President Obama's eager regulators, in response to a complaint from activists, decided that Berkeley's videos violated the ADA. The Justice Department sent the school a threatening letter: "Berkeley is in violation of title II ... (T)he Attorney General may initiate a lawsuit."
What Berkeley had done wrong, said the government, was failing to caption the videos for the hearing impaired. The ADA makes it illegal to "deny" deaf people services available to others.
Equality is a noble goal, but closed captioning is expensive.
Computers are learning to turn speech into text, but so far they're not good at it. A speech-to-text program transcribed a Harvard lecturer's comment "on our campus" as "hot Kampen good."
Captions that meet government's standards must be typed out by a person who listens to each word. Captioning Berkley's 20,000 lectures would cost millions. The school decided that, to be safe, it would just stop offering its videos. The administration even removed the existing videos from its website.
So now, instead of some deaf people struggling to understand university lectures, no one gets to hear them.
Politicians mean well when they pass rules like the ADA, but every regulation has unintended consequences. Most are bad.
In this case, fortunately, an angry entrepreneur came to the rescue. Jeremy Kauffman hates to see valuable things disappear, so right before Berkeley deleted its website, Kauffman copied the videos and posted them on his website, called LBRY (as in Library).
He says the Berkeley videos are just the start of what LBRY has planned. He wants the site to be YouTube -- but without the content restrictions.
LBRY uses a new technology that operates like Bitcoin. It's "decentralized," meaning videos posted are stored on thousands of computers around the world. That makes it nearly impossible for governments -- or even Kauffman himself -- to remove them.
"LBRY is designed to be much more decentralized, much more controlled by users" and "absolutely freer," Kauffman explains in a video I posted this week.
He acknowledges that with no censorship, his invention may end up hosting videos of bad things -- beheadings, child porn, who knows what else. But he argues that if he creates a system with censorship, "it allows us to keep the bad stuff out, which is great, but it also allows dictatorial regimes to keep content off. Do we want to make videos available to the people in Turkey, Iran and China? We say yes."
LBRY will let users flag videos depicting illegal actions. Those videos may no longer be shown on LBRY. However, other websites can show the illegal content using LBRY's technology, and Kauffman can't stop that.
Kauffman says he won't remove the Berkeley videos from his site even if he's sued because there aren't captions for deaf people.
"Is that a reason that content shouldn't be available to everyone?" asks Kauffman.
Government is force whether it is deliberately doing something cruel or just trying to solve one group's problems by imposing restrictions on others. "Do you want to put a gun to someone's face and say 'Caption those videos'? It's absurd."
It is absurd. What government does is often absurd.
Thank goodness for the internet and for people like Kauffman, someone willing to spend his own money to keep information free.
John Stossel is the author of "No They Can't! Why Government Fails -- But Individuals Succeed." Click here for more information on John Stossel.

Dershowitz mulls UC Berkeley lawsuit over possible 'content-based discrimination'

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said Thursday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that he is considering suing the University of California, Berkeley over a stipulation that would prevent him to speak on campus.

Dershowitz told Tucker Carlson that the school prevented him from speaking on Israel because he did not give the school eight-week advance notice.

He said the school, however, usually waives the stipulation for speakers who are invited by a department, but those speakers tend to be anti-Israel, liberals and radicals.
“If no department invites us, having invited people from the other side, we will sue them arguing that the eight-week rule is a cover for content-based discrimination against moderates, liberals, conservatives and supporters of Israel,” Dershowitz said.
Dershowitz, who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, said he was certain to find that Berkeley has already invited anti-Israel speakers from across the U.S. and that he would not receive an invitation.
“We’re testing Berkeley at this point to see if it happens there,” he said. “I wanted to speak at the school and I wanted to present to students the liberal case for Israel and if Berkeley won’t let me do it, I have a legal recourse in which I intend to take.”
Dershowitz said he hopes Berkeley will allow him to speak, whether it is a department inviting him or the school changing the rule.