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In this mailing:
* Gordon G. Chang: China Just 'Folded' in the Trade War
* Amir Taheri: The Next Pope: Kerygma or Catechism?


** China Just 'Folded' in the Trade War ([link removed])
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by Gordon G. Chang • April 27, 2025 at 5:00 am
* Xi Jinping's regime simply cannot admit it is not able to stand up to Washington.
* [O]n April 24 about a dozen Chinese officials, including a "high-ranking official from the Chinese Ministry of Finance," were seen entering the U.S. Treasury's main building in Washington at 7:00 in the morning as Chinese security officials attempted to prevent photographers from recording the entry.
* "In fact, the tariff waivers underscore that not only does Beijing need access to the American market far more than Americans need the China market but also that the United States makes vital products that simply aren't Made in China, and won't be for years at best." — Alan Tonelson, trade expert at RealityChek, to Gatestone, April 25, 2025.
* When Trump has to raise the temperature, Beijing has just shown him which U.S. products China believes it cannot do without.
* Beijing has ordered its airlines not to take delivery of Boeing aircraft, and the plane maker has now flown back, from China to the U.S., three 737 Max aircraft that were about to be delivered. Due to the long order backlogs at both Boeing and Airbus, this punishment imposes, as a practical matter, almost no cost on Boeing. Yet if Trump were to order Boeing not to deliver parts or provide services to Chinese airlines, China would soon have to ground a large number of its airliners.

China is making significant trade concessions without saying it is making concessions. Xi Jinping's regime simply cannot admit it is not able to stand up to Washington. When Trump has to raise the temperature, Beijing has just shown him which U.S. products China believes it cannot do without. (Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

China, according to Reuters and Financial Times reporting on April 25, is not uniformly imposing its new 125% across-the-board tariff on American goods. In short, certain imports from the U.S. are in fact coming in tariff-free. Beijing's new policy has not been announced and is not official.

"Companies in sectors including aviation and industrial chemicals said that some of their products had already been granted a reprieve, while local media reported that some semiconductors had been spared tariffs," the Financial Times noted.

American Chamber of Commerce in China President Michael Hart told Reuters that some pharmaceutical company members of his organization had said they were now able to import products tariff-free.

China is also exempting aircraft engines, nacelles, landing gear, and parts.

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** The Next Pope: Kerygma or Catechism? ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • April 27, 2025 at 4:00 am
* Today, the problem is that religion, in most of its forms, is trying to imitate philosophy, which is the realm of doubt, or replace ideology as a means of organizing political action.
* The question is: religion in which of its many forms?
* There are those who see kerygma as a poetic conceit, focusing on catechism, or its Islamic version the Shari'a, as a means of social and political control and domination. Then there are those who, having asserted the kerygma, allow the elastic to be pulled in the opposite direction as far as possible. The problem is that, at some point, the elastic might snap.
* The global mood has changed from the time Francis was chosen, and Benedict's zeitgeist seems to be making a comeback in a world disappointed with the empty promises of progressivism.

The global mood has changed from the time Pope Francis was chosen, and Pope Benedict's zeitgeist seems to be making a comeback in a world disappointed with the empty promises of progressivism. Pictured: Francis delivers a public address on the main balcony of St. Peter's basilica, in the Vatican on April 20, 2025. (Photo by Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images)

In 2013 when a little-known cardinal from Argentina was elected the Pope of the Catholic Church, taking the title of Francis, many wondered in which direction he might walk in Saint Peter's shoes.

The election came as a surprise in the wake of the unprecedented decision of Pope Benedict XVI to abdicate the pontificate. Benedict, a German, had been revealed as a conservative pontiff focused on the doctrine in what he called "a time of upheavals." That was the time when globalism was in the ascendancy and all religions appeared to be on the defensive in the face of political and cultural forces advocating multiculturalism and secularism.

In his book Values in a Time of Upheavals, Benedict spoke of "the three myths" that threaten mankind: science, progress and freedom which, transformed into absolutes, pretend to replace religious faith.

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