This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

Chinese now drink more red wine than the French

China has overtaken France and Italy to become the world’s number oneconsumer of red wine, consuming 155 million nine-litre cases, comparedto 150 million for France, 141 million for Italy, 134 million forAmerica, and 112 million for Germany. According to one analyst, thereare Chinese superstitions over colors:

Red is the color of luck and good fortune and whiteis the color of death [in China]. So you don’t want to drinkwhite, why would you?

However, the U.S. is still the world leader in consumption of allforms of wine together. France 24

Syria replaces Pakistan as the center of al-Qaeda jihadist activity

US intelligence chief James Clapper said Wednesday that Syria isreplacing Pakistan as the primary breeding ground for al-Qaeda-linkedterrorists. According to Clapper, “Syria has become a huge magnet forextremists,” who can now recruit, train, and equip a growing number ofmilitants there:

What’s going on there and the attraction of theseforeign fighters is very, very worrisome.

We estimate at this point in excess of 7,000 foreign fighters havebeen attracted from some 50 countries, many of them in Europe andthe Mideast. We’re seeing now the appearance of trainingcomplexes in Syria to train people to go back to their countriesand of course conduct more terrorist acts.

This will not be a surprise to any reader. As I’ve been saying formonths, Russia and Iran are at fault here for supplying weapons to agenocidal monster, Bashar al-Assad, allowing him “industrial level”torture and murder against his Sunni opponents, drawing Sunnijihadists from all over the world. Vladimir Putin is a war criminalfor supplying weapons to al-Assad who is committing crimes againsthumanity. Time and US News

Syria may be developing biological weapons

Several months ago, Syria agreed to give up production of chemicalweapons, such as the sarin that al-Assad used to slaughter his ownpeople. However, apparently al-Assad and the Russianssnookered the West again, because they forgot to ask aboutbiological weapons. According to Clapper’s written report:

We judge that some elements of Syria’s biologicalwarfare (BW) program might have advanced beyond the research anddevelopment stage and might be capable of limited agentproduction, based on the duration of its longstanding program. Tothe best of our knowledge, Syria has not successfully weaponizedbiological agents in an effective delivery system, but itpossesses conventional weapon systems that could be modified forbiological-agent delivery.

AFP and Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community

Permanent web link to this article
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail