Globe Trot: Show of strength on the Korean peninsula

The U.S. military flew F-22 Stealth fighters to South Korea Sunday in response to stepped-up threats from North Korea. Kim Jong Un recently posed in front of maps portraying missile strikes on Hawaii and other U.S. Pacific bases.

What’s obvious but bears repeating: Of the nuclear crises the Obama administration faces, North Korea is far more advanced in weaponizing nuclear material than Iran, which currently has no atomic weapons in its arsenal. “Everything we fear Iran will do in the future, North Korea largely already has done,” a former Bush administration official told The Wall Street Journal.

The Obama administration contends it’s difficult to impossible to know whether or not Syrian rebels or the regime have used chemical weapons on civilians as suspected last month. People in northern Iraq, where Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in the 1980s against his own people, would disagree: It can be medically confirmed examining the victims of such an attack. To do that you have to push for access and put humanitarian workers on the ground—something the United States in the past has been noted for. And Khan al-Assal, where the suspected attack took place, is under an hour’s drive from the Turkish border.

A U.S. Army veteran has been charged in U.S. District Court with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction for participating in military action with Syrian rebels linked to al-Qaeda.

What’s a 57-year-old Chinese vegetable farmer doing tending crops along the Blue Nile in Sudan? Exploiting arable African land to serve the Chinese in the country, that’s what. Up to eight large-scale Chinese vegetable farms in Sudan have been started around Khartoum to serve 20,000 Chinese workers and China’s oilfields along the border with South Sudan. This sort of “development” has its own challenges but bears no resemblance to reputable Western work in Africa that’s been putting destitute Africans on their feet.

So far, no reports of Easter violence from northern Nigeria and other hot spots notable for attacks during Christian holidays. Nigerian human rights lawyer Emmanuel Ogebe noted this morning, “Boko Haram has been more savvy and stealthy in their attacks this year going for more silent killings in rural churches. We will have to wait a little while more to know for sure.”

I’m reading: The Insanity of God by Nik Ripken, a new missionary epistle, and re-reading The Foreigner’s Gift by Fouad Ajami.