Beyond headlines about the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, and the Biden administration’s failure to prevent them, the Indian Ocean and its inlets garner little U.S. media attention. Off the coast of East Africa, however, another battle is brewing—one that pits the United States against the Chinese Communist Party.
The Indian Ocean sits between Beijing and Africa, where Xi Jinping plans to overthrow the U.S.-led international order in part by using the Belt and Road initiative to “extract resources from Africa, turn them into manufactured goods in China, and export them to developed economies such as Europe and the United States,” the Hudson Institute’s Mike Watson writes from Oman. But Xi’s interest in the ocean isn’t just economic. China’s special envoy to the Middle East has vowed to use it for military aims as well.
Central to the CCP’s plan are the Chagos Islands, which the British control (for now). When U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer visits Washington next week, he’ll spend part of the trip requesting Donald Trump’s approval to give the islands away to nearby Mauritius.
“The turnover would be a disaster for the United States, since Diego Garcia is one of these islands,” Watson writes. “The British cleared out the Chagossians about 50 years ago to construct an American base there that, among other things, can host heavy bombers. Starmer claims to have secured a 99-year-lease, but there are reasons to doubt that it will hold.”
The Mauritian government is known for its corruption and it’s long been a Chinese ally. “China already has a free trade agreement with Mauritius as well as a lot of investments there, and it is far better at exploiting that weakness than Western powers are. Beijing also flagrantly violates its own transfer agreement with Britain over Hong Kong,” Watson warns. “In foreign policy, opportunities to do good and do well are few and far between. Vetoing this deal should be a no-brainer for Trump.”
Read more: Trump, Xi, and a Brewing Battle Over the Indian Ocean
On Friday, as Israelis anguished over the macabre scenes of Gazans celebrating the murder of innocent children, as well as Hamas’s failure to return the body of Shiri Bibas, they took another punch to the gut. A forensic review of the bodies of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas and his four-year-old brother, Ariel, found that Hamas terrorists strangled them with their bare hands just weeks after abducting them from their home in kibbutz Nir Oz.
“Contrary to Hamas’s lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a devastating video statement. “The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys—they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.” Israel shared the intelligence behind that assessment with U.S. intelligence officials, who concurred with the findings.
Benjamin Netanyahu promised retribution, saying on Friday that he “will not rest until the savages who executed our hostages are brought to justice. They do not deserve to walk this earth. Nothing will stop me. Nothing.” Hours later, Donald Trump gave his own assessment and told Bibi he has a green light to restart the war effort in Gaza and annihilate Hamas’s remaining forces.
“He’s actually not torn, I mean, you know where he stands, he would like to go in, and he just is so angry and he should be,” Trump said of Netanyahu in an interview with Fox News. “They were babies. And it’s rough stuff. It’s rough stuff. And it looks like they were celebrating as they were bringing the bodies back. … It’s so barbaric.” Asked whether he would be “OK” with Netanyahu restarting the war, Trump said, “I am. I really am.”
Read more: Hamas Terrorists ‘Brutally Murdered’ Bibas Children With Their Hands, IDF Announces
First CNN, now NBC. Just weeks after CNN settled a high-profile defamation lawsuit brought by Navy veteran Zachary Young, the network’s left-wing friends at NBC followed suit, settling a defamation suit with Georgia obstetrician Mahendra Amin.
Top anchors from Rachel Maddow to Nicolle Wallace and Chris Hayes falsely accused Amin of performing “mass hysterectomies” on women detained at a Georgia immigration facility and dubbed him “the uterus collector.” Last year, a federal judge ruled that the MSNBC hosts made 39 “verifiably false” statements about Amin, setting the stage for explosive proceedings that, much like CNN trial, were likely to expose embarrassing internal communications and end with an even more humiliating verdict.
NBC mostly avoided that fate by settling with Amin. Still, the case did reveal messages between top network journos like Jacob Soboroff and Danielle Silva in which the pair expressed concern about the Amin story’s veracity. It also pulled back the curtain on conference calls between Hayes and MSNBC standards executive Chris Scholl, who said, “We just don’t know if any of this is true,” and, “We don’t know the facts here.”
“Right, right, right, right,” Hayes responded.
CNN paid Young $5 million in economic and emotional damages and a separate amount for punitive damages that remains confidential. Amin sought $30 million from NBC but the terms of his settlement are unknown. With those cases out of the way, attention will turn to CBS, which is eyeing a settlement with Donald Trump over his lawsuit targeting the network’s sloppy edit of Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview.
Away from the Beacon:
- Global “internet watchdogs” that scour the web to “fight disinformation” are “slashing operations and laying off employees” after DOGE cut off their U.S. taxpayer funds, Bloomberg reported. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer set of people.
- Two-term congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, purportedly a “rising star” of the Democratic Party, said she finds herself “rooting for Canada” and “rooting for Mexico” over the United States because “they are really the ones that are speaking truth to power right now.” You go, girl!
- Jerry Nadler, best known for wearing his pants nearly up to his nipples and for his status as the “smelliest member of Congress,” may face a primary fight against nepo baby journalist and Cruella de Vil lookalike Molly Jong-Fast, according to Politico. Get your popcorn ready.
Check out our full lineup below. Enjoy your weekend, we’re back on Monday.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
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