Obama in Cuba

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t remember where I read it, but someone said that Obama has improved US relations with two countries during his administration: Iran and Cuba.

That about says it. But here’s more on Obama’s current Cuban visit:

Cuban dissidents have reportedly been forbidden from meeting with President Obama during his trip to Cuba, some apparently placed under house arrest to prevent going to such meetings…

For the Castro government there’s no concern that Obama, in his coming speech to the Cuban people, would demand that they be given freedom, that a democratic government replace the old-style communism of the Castros replicated only in North Korea and China, or that the Cuban people be allowed access to news, Internet, and telephone services that might open Cuba to the kind of speech, thought, and debate that enable freedom. No, there’s no worry about that.

Obama, the first American president to visit Cuba in about ninety years, has chosen a different mission for himself: to teach Latin America the lesson he’s taught the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and North Koreans, that the United States will grant major diplomatic, military, and economic concessions without receiving any in return.

It’s not so much Obama’s visit as the lack of conditions he sets for it, or for much of anything else regarding repressive governments.

Here’s what Ted Cruz has to say on the subject.

[NOTE: That first article I linked in this post also mentions one of Obama’s initial foreign policy actions as president, his stance towards Honduras. That is something I wrote about extensively at the the time, and considered an extremely ominous sign. I summarized what it meant here.]

The consent of children

The New Neo Posted on by

Photographer Sally Mann wrote a lengthy article in which she justifies, explains, expounds, and defends some controversial photos she took of her own children. She asserts that, since her children had the final say over every photo and whether it should be published, how could they have been exploited? But Mann ignores an essential element of the equations, which is that, because of their very nature as children, they could not give informed consent.

There is a need to take great care before assuming, in activities where one person has power over another (parent/child, for example), and that the less powerful is able to give consent to something the person with more power wants. It’s especially perilous when the powerful person is in a position in which he/she is supposed to protect the other. The child cannot consent to that which fails to protect that child; the child’s judgement is colored both by the greater influence of the powerful one (the parent) as well as the fact of the child’s age detracting from a child’s ability to make informed decisions in general. Not for nothing is it said that a child has not reached the age of consent; that’s what the term means.

Does Mann not know that? As a person, and as a parent?

That is the reason that even post-pubescent adolescents cannot consent in the legal sense to seemingly consensual sexual relationships with adults, and especially with teachers or clergy or scout leaders or others who have abused their position of power and influence. In addition, even if a child is not one of the parties, differentials of power make it impossible for an adult patient to legally consent to sex with a therapist or a priest and do away with the therapist or priest’s obligation not to exploit that person. The obligation always remains, whatever the patient might say.

Sally Mann did not have sex with her children. But she has been accused of taking sensual photos of her children that border on the sexual. Mann is of the opinion that her photos are not sexual in nature, although the children are often naked. But she is well aware that by putting those images out into the world, she might expose her children to the eyes of pedophiles who could easily think otherwise. What she does not appear to be aware of—even after all this time, at least not from the evidence of the article—is that children cannot possibly give consent to that process.

Mann says that her children have suffered, just as some critics of her work had predicted they would:

One New York Times letter-­writer predicted an outcome for my children that did, in fact, come to pass: a “third eye,” as this writer eloquently put it. By this she meant a shameful self-­consciousness, a feeling of guilt and moral doubt about the pictures. And of the three kids, this most afflicted my youngest, Virginia ”” my carefree, lissome river sprite.

There were also demented letter-writers, including a stalker who seemed obsessed. All of this appears to have come as a surprise to Mann, who comes across as having been both ambitious and naive. She thought she could create a world apart—in the country far from the madding crowd—and she did. But when she recorded images of it and brought it back into the marketplace, how could she have expected to have preserved that innocence?

There used to be a vogue for taking photos of young children, sometimes naked, which were perceived as expressing their innocence and purity. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) worked in that tradition. These days, with so much sexualization of children, people find it hard to believe that he was not a child molester. But I am convinced that he was not, and that an impulse similar to that of Mann’s drove him.

[NOTE: For more background on Dodgson and the cult of the child, see this.]

GOP convention delegates: bound and unbound

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an informative article about an issue that’s currently being speculated about—delegates at the RNC and what they are required by the rules to do. How much leeway do they have? It depends on the state, but the basic idea is that they have quite a bit.

That’s a relic of our republican (as opposed to Republican) form of government. Primaries are not some sort of direct, populist way of choosing a nominee, despite rhetoric from some candidates and a popular belief to that effect. Voters elect delegates to the party’s national convention, where the delegates choose the nominee. You may or may not like that—and whether you like it depends on whether you’re a populist or a republican, and it might depend on whether you think it benefits or doesn’t benefit your candidate this year.

As I see the current GOP primary system, it’s a blend of populism and republicanism (or elitism, if you happen to see it that way). I think a blend is a good idea, because the pure version of either system is too extreme. But this neither-fish-nor-fowl system causes problems too (I’ve already suggested my version of primary reform).

And this is pretty much what I think about objections to the possibility of Trump not being the GOP standard-bearer even if he gets a majority (that is, a plurality) of delegate votes. A party has a right to choose its own candidate and make its own rules, and that’s what I had thought long before Trump ever came on the scene. Of course, voters also have the right to reject the party’s choice. This year, if Trump fails to win outright by getting the requisite number of delegates at the party convention, the GOP will have a big decision to make, and a large part of that decision will be ascertaining which party move will alienate the most voters and which the least—because they’re going to alienate a lot no matter what they do.

The bottom line is that the GOP is a political party. Political parties are entities that have grown up in America over the centuries, and they change and shift as conditions change and shift. But they are political entities that exist outside the Constitution, which does not require them. The two-party system has been around for a long time, and I happen to think it’s worked well, but nothing about the two-party system is set in stone.

Political parties make their own rules about how they will function and who they will nominate and why. They stop no one from running for president, but they can stop anyone from running for president under the banner of that party if the party wishes to do so. If the party can make rules and break them, voters can vote or not vote for the nominee of that party as they wish, and other candidates can run for the nomination of third parties or run independently, as they wish.

The GOP has set rules (also prior to Trump’s candidacy, not in reaction to it) that require a certain threshold of votes for electors that then vote for the nominee at a convention, and if Trump or anyone else fails to reach that threshold on the first ballot, most of the electors at GOP conventions are not bound to vote for the candidate they represent even on the first ballot.

If a party wants to say it is bound, absolutely bound, to nominate whoever registers in its primaries and gets a plurality of votes in the primaries, it is perfectly free to do that. Even then one could argue that the voters in the case of the 2016 campaign year so far have voted majority against Trump, but that’s not the issue. The issue is how much the party wants to set itself against the vocal and angry group of Trump voters who insist on his being the nominee. For example we have:

Curly Haugland is an unbound delegate from North Dakota who is one of a select group of 168 Republican National Committee members who will be vital in determining the rules at the convention in July.

Haugland made headlines last week for saying in an interview on CNBC that the sole responsibility for selecting the nominee belongs to the delegates, whether bound or unbound, and that the “media has created the perception that the voters choose the nomination.”

In an interview with The Hill, Haugland said those comments have provoked an avalanche of online bullying and threats directed towards him and his family…

“I’m trying to educate the delegates about this so they know precisely their rights and responsibilities and duties, and I’m defending the rights of party members to choose the nominee, rather than surrendering that responsibility to voters in open primaries where anyone can participate,” Haugland said. “We have the right to defend our party, which is what I’m trying to do, and it’s not very popular in some circles.”

“Not very popular” is probably the understatement of the century.

The animus towards the party was already palpable and enormous prior to this election year, and that will continue no matter what the GOP does. There are plenty who will abandon the GOP nominee if it’s Trump, and there are plenty of Trump supporters who will abandon the GOP nominee if it’s not Trump. In the end, the war in the GOP benefits the eventual Democratic nominee, who in my opinion will be Hillary Clinton. And whoever the eventual GOP nominee is, if he loses the general election, GOP civil war will continue and most likely will become even more bitter.

David Brooks, the “establishment,” and “social mingling”

The New Neo Posted on by

From David Brooks’ recent NY Times column:

Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

Ace is not impressed:

The current trajectory we’re on — taking a shot at the Establishment princelimgs with Trump, then getting blown out in the general and thereby confirming the alleged wisdom of the Capital Class — would be a case of assassin’s aiming at the king, but then all of their guns exploding in their own faces.

* BTW, a******, you don’t have to “socially mingle” with anybody. People do not need to “socially mingle” with other people to know what the news is. They just have to buy a newspaper…

What you a******* need to do is let your intellects occasionally wander off the well-worn paths you’ve been treading down for 60 years. You just need to read someone who disagrees with you occasionally.

These fools live in a bubble completely insulated from popular thought but then presume to tell the nation what it really thinks.

I don’t “socially mingle” with a lot of people myself—not in the flesh, anyway. And the great bulk of what social mingling I do is with liberals. The small number of people on the right I do mingle with are mostly changers like me. Most happen to not be Trump supporters; I know a few Trump supporters personally, but very few.

Nevertheless there’s a very very simple way to have learned about the anger of the right’s base at the GOP. Very simple, and it wouldn’t have required any pressing of flesh at all. I know, because I’ve done this sort of “social mingling” aplenty with the angry GOP base over a period of many many years, on this blog and others. In fact, I think it would have taken a concerted effort for me to have avoided encountering the rage of the GOP voters. If a person has spent any time at all in the right blogosphere, it would be in his/her face and undeniable.

Years ago it was suggested that the blogosphere would replace the MSM. It certainly hasn’t, but it has had a huge influence (not all of it good, by the way) on political discourse and opinion. However, the few people in the MSM I know (perhaps “know” is way too strong a word; “personally encountered” might be more appropriate) seem unaware of a lot that goes on in the blogophere and among what used to be quaintly known as “the people.” To have ignored all of this for the last few years, and especially since 2010, would have been to exist not just in a bubble, but in a hermetically sealed chamber.

I keep going back to my prediction post-election 2012 that the GOP would tear itself apart if Romney lost. I don’t keep pointing it out to show some sort of brilliant and esoteric insight on my part. I go back to it because it has come true, sure; but at the time I said it, I thought it was a gimme, something obvious to even the most casual observer of the scene. I don’t think David Brooks and company were bothering to even casually observe that scene.

The “xenophobia” of “Islamophobia”

The New Neo Posted on by

Like “Islamophobia,” the word “xenophobia” is a way to pathologize a logical reaction to a phenomenon and give it a label that makes it appear to be irrational and emotion-based.

This whole really loooong article manages to do it in a condescending, distant tone that never once tries to deal with the question of whether the phenomenon it tries to label xenophobia is based on anything that would make it a valid response, or anything other than the vague term “phobia.”

Phobias are by definition irrational and overblown:

A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational.

Xenophobia indicates a general fear of what is foreign or strange, but it’s really being used here to describe a specific kind of fear of a particular kind of stranger—the kind who has vowed to either kill us or convert us and take over our culture and replace it with theirs. The culture the same people are trying, in a sort of reverse colonialism, to impose on us is not only opposed to many of our deeply-held beliefs and values, but it is intolerant of tolerance itself—except for the tolerance that is extended by the west towards it.

This “xenophobia” is not a turning away from all the practitioners of the religion as a whole. It’s merely a recognition of several things at once: (a) a significant proportion of Muslims are intolerant of the West and its values, its religions, and its tolerance (b) that group is not necessarily the majority, but it is nevertheless a very large group (3) that group is especially activist and willing to use violence as well as to lie (4) much of that group has vowed to infiltrate us through the process of immigration in order to ultimately dominate and convert us, and (5) our leaders don’t seem to be able to either see this or stop it.

That’s no phobia. That’s the reality Europe and America in the Obama years (and even before) has been facing. Calling it a phobia purposely denies that reality.

Trump: losing their religion

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t remember any campaign in my lifetime in which any candidate has questioned another candidate’s religious sincerity.

I’m old enough to remember that JFK’s Catholicism was an issue for some people, but Nixon certainly never mentioned it. Same of Romney in 2012; some weren’t comfortable voting for a Mormon, but I don’t recall a candidate talking about it. And no one questioned JFK’s or Romney’s sincerity about their faiths; they questioned whether someone of that religion ought be president.

But in this campaign it’s been different, as have so many things.

Initially, though, it was Ben Carson who wondered about Trump’s faith and whether Trump’s adherence to it was bona fide, based on Trump’s lack of humility:

“By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches and honor and life and that’s a very big part of who I am. I don’t get that impression with him,” Carson said of Trump. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t get that.”

Trump said this in reply:

I never heard faith was a big thing ”¦ until [Carson] started running, I don’t know about Ben Carson’s faith, all of a sudden he becomes this great religious figure, I don’t think he’s a great religious figure. You look at his faith and I think you’re not going to find so much ”¦ who is he to question my faith when I am, he doesn’t even know me.

And then Carson quickly apologized for what he’d said:

“I think I did slip, and that’s why I apologized,” Carson said on Fox News’ “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” “There is no reason ever to question anybody’s faith. That’s something between them and God.”

However, about a month later, Trump said this about Carson’s Seventh Day Adventist faith:

I’m Presbyterian. Boy, that’s down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about.

This time it was a criticism more akin to the traditional doubts that someone of a certain faith should be president (although those doubts were never expressed directly by a previous candidate, as far as I know), rather than questioning the person’s sincerity within the faith. Here Trump is insinuating that Seventh Day Adventists are a bit wacky and out of the mainstream, as opposed to Trump’s own Presbyterian affiliation (sincere or insincere). Trump never apologized, claiming he hadn’t said anything bad about Carson’s faith, just that he didn’t know about it.

Carson only did this faith-questioning business once. Since the Carson/Trump exchange on the subject, Trump has made a regular habit of it, despite his “who is Carson to question my faith?” statement about Carson. For example, back in December Trump questioned Ted Cruz’s faith
:

With Ted Cruz surging in Iowa and some national polls, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump took a jab at the Texas Senator’s faith, saying, “not a lot of Evangelicals come out of Cuba.”

That seems to be a dig about Cruz’s sincerity within his faith—although, as with many Trump statements, it’s hard to tell because it’s obscure and odd enough that he can issue a disclaimer about what he meant. It’s also a twofer, because Trump seems to be combining that criticism with some of his usual birther stuff about Cruz—who did not actually “come out of Cuba,” because Cruz has a Cuban-born (evangelical) father and an American mother, and Cruz was born in Canada. (“Cruz” means “cross” in Spanish, by the way, for what that’s worth, and Cruz’s paternal grandfather was from Spain.)

In February, Trump questioned Ted Cruz’s faith again (as well as his veracity) even more directly and clearly:

“How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?” he tweeted.

Then yesterday, when Mitt Romney said that he would be supporting Ted Cruz in Utah, Trump turned to one of his favorite accusative ploys:

“Do I love the Mormons? I have many friends that live in Salt Lake City — and by the way, Mitt Romney is not one of them,” Trump said to applause. “Are you sure he’s a Mormon? Are we sure?”

So, some of his best friends are Mormons. Love those Mormons. Hate Mitt. He’s not a Mormon, maybe.

Trump supporters ordinarily shrug this sort of thing off (“Trump just being Trump”). Or they praise it: so clever, so strategic, so smart and ballsy and funny to diss Romney’s religious commitment when Trump’s making a speech in Salt Lake City, of all places.

It matters not that Romney’s membership in the Mormon church and his activity and service as a Mormon elder is beyond question (see also this). This is one of Trump’s accusations/jokes/insinuations that has no substance at all—purely strategic, purely imaginary. It is Orwellian, the opposite of the truth.

But if Trump thinks it will work against someone who criticizes him and backs a rival, he does it, and his supporters applaud no matter how low the blow. How low can he go? I think there’s no bottom.

Crows perceive death

The New Neo Posted on by

Crows are very smart birds, although they’ve long been thought to be harbingers of bad news:

A crow’s brain is the size of a human thumb, huge relative to its body, putting their intelligence on par with primates and allowing them to solve complex problems. The PBS series “Nature” showed an experiment where a crow figured out how to use a small stick to retrieve a larger stick and then use that to retrieve a piece of food that was well out of reach.

Marzluff and his team conduct research with masks, wearing them on campus and recording what kind of sounds the crows make. They discovered crows recognize and remember individual faces. By sedating the birds and putting them through a PET scan, they found different areas of a crow’s brain light up when they see a person they perceive as friendly or threatening.

“They recognize individual people that are important to them and when somebody does something dangerous, they mark that person, remember that person, as far as I can tell, for their life,” Marzluff said.

Now researchers have learned something else about the brains of crows:

Using masks that look creepily human, researchers showed up at Seattle parks carrying a stuffed crow.

They recorded the reactions. It takes one crow to signal an alarm, and then dozens show up. They all surround the dead crow, looking at it as they perch on trees or fly above it, a behavior called mobbing.

‘Crows have evolved to have these complex social relationships, and they have a big brain,’ said Kaeli Swift, a University of Washington graduate student who led the study.

How big of a brain? Crows are on par with smart mammals, like dolphins and primates, in brain-to-body proportion…

In another part of the experiment, using slightly radioactive tracers, researchers measured the brain activity of crows after they were shown a dead bird.

The scans showed the section of the hippocampus ”” the part involved in memory formation ”” light up at the sight of death.

‘In that particular situation at least, that crow was learning about a place, or a face, or a situation and associated it with that dead crow,’ said John Marzluff, the lead researcher.

It’s not at all clear that crows have any concept of death even remotely akin to that of humans. But they certainly seem to notice and remember something about death—as they notice and remember a tremendous number of other things.

Does this change your attitude towards crows?

Why it made sense for the GOP Senate NOT to change the filibuster rule

The New Neo Posted on by

The GOP won control of the Senate in the 2014 election. This meant that the party controlled both houses of Congress for the first time since the earlier years of the Bush administration, when they also had the presidency. But in neither case did they control the Senate with a majority large enough (over 60) to be able to stop the minority party from blocking legislation by voting against cloture. And of course in 2014 the Republican Senate also had to deal with a left-leaning Democratic president determined to thwart them.

One of the many things that hamstrung the effectiveness of the majority-GOP Senate since January of 2015, despite their gaining control in the 2014 election, was the filibuster/cloture rule. Some people who are angry at the GOP for not doing more don’t even take into account the problem of filibuster/cloture, or the veto. But others are well aware of the rule and are very angry at the GOP establishment because of their reluctance to change that rule. They could do it; they chose not to.

I also have been very frustrated by this state of affairs. But although I go back and forth on the issue, I’m not at all sure that ending the filibuster/cloture rule would have been a good move, and I certainly can see why a Republican senator might decide in good faith not to go that route. As long as the GOP didn’t have the presidency, all that ending the filibuster/cloture rule would mean would have been sending a lot of bills to Obama’s desk that he would then veto.

The argument, however, is that this would have been worth it, just to show good intent by the GOP and to show how determined Obama was to block anything the GOP did. It seems to me, however, that most voters wouldn’t have been paying all that much attention, and Obama’s supporters (and the MSM) would have spun it as GOP refusal to compromise. In addition, even those who advocate doing it anyway often seem to ignore the fact that it would have meant that if the Republicans were to lose the Senate in the next election, and to lose the presidency as well (two things that could easily happen), then the filibuster would be gone and it would have been the Republicans who had taken it away from themselves. Of course, the Democrats could do it themselves, but in this case the Republicans couldn’t even blame the Democrats for their own loss of power to block the Democrats in the Senate from doing whatever a simple majority wanted to do.

What a laugh that situation would be for the Democrats! And no doubt if that were to happen, the “trash the GOP establishment” crowd would criticize the GOP members of the Senate for it, too, without thinking it through. And all to gain what? A bunch of bills from January 2015 to January 2017 that Obama would have immediately vetoed, saying (with the support of the MSM) that Republicans were just wasting his time rather than doing something productive?

Let me reiterate that I’m not even a Republican, and have no particular interest in kneejerk defense of the Republican Party in the Senate or anywhere else. And sometimes I think they should have done away with the filibuster/cloture rule anyway. But certainly one needn’t posit horrible motives on the part of the more moderate GOP members of the Senate in order to understand why they might have acted as they did. There are very reasonable arguments for it.

Trump’s been running for president for a long long time

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d like to take up the following comment from “junior”:

Obama’s rise to power was already predicted in at least some circles well before he announced his candidacy. Supposedly, even as early as his assumption of his US Senate seat, some people were already introducing him as a future president of the US…

Trump, for all we know, might very well have flipped a coin when he decided to run (it’s doubtful, but possible). There was little to indicate that he was planning on running. No one expected him to run prior to the start of the primary season. And the result was that he almost overnight went from “uninvolved” to “party front-runner”.

It occurs to me that a lot of people may be unaware that Trump’s been circling and circling around a presidential run for a very long time. In fact, in that regard he’s practically a second Harold Stassen, and with about as much success as Stassen—till this year’s race, that is. His success at the moment is rather easy to explain, I think: he is the person who this year expresses perfectly the rage of a large percentage of GOP voters who feel angry at the party and at Obama, and he also happens to be the beneficiary of one of the largest and deepest fields in recent GOP history. If that last part sounds paradoxical, so be it. But just imagine if Trump had only had one strong opponent from the start. We’ll never know, but he might not have done this well—or rather, his 30-40 or so percent could have been matched by that other person’s 60-70 percent in such a case. But with the field divided into many small segments it helped him to capture the lion’s share of the anti-GOP protest vote compared to the others.

Trump’s success also rests to a huge extent on his being able to seize on a single issue—illegal immigration—and speak about it in a way that an angry electorate felt was channeling their own outrage and concern (I have discussed the evolution of how this came to seem to be his biggest issue). And the previous success of his reality show had made him more of a celebrity than ever, a person people are used to seeing in the role of the take-charge boss.

So it’s not hard to explain his success. But what about this statement by junior?: “There was little to indicate that [Trump] was planning on running. No one expected him to run prior to the start of the primary season.”

In fact, there was everything to indicate it, and everyone should have expected it. What they didn’t expect was that he’d do so well. But run? He’s been doing that for decades, or at least talking about it. The timeline begins in the late 80s with serious talk by Trump of a presidential run, then an actual albeit short-lived run in the year 2000 as a third-party candidate, and a discussion about a possible run in 2004, and another attempt in 2011 for the 2012 election.

If you’re interested in learning more about Trump’s 2000 run—where he was allied with party of Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot, see this:

Trump’s entrance into the Reform Party race coincided with that of paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan, whom Trump attacked throughout the campaign as a “Hitler-lover.”

Trump focused his campaign on the issues of fair trade, eliminating the national debt, and achieving universal healthcare as outlined in the campaign companion piece The America We Deserve, released in January 2000. He named media proprietor Oprah Winfrey as his ideal running mate and said he would instantly marry his girlfriend Melania Knauss to make her First Lady.

In 2011 Trump’s talk of running for president became serious again:

March 2011: A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows Trump leading all presidential contenders, including Mitt Romney.

April 2011: Amid more research polls indicating that he would be the preferred Republican presidential candidate among voters, Trump repeatedly calls for President Obama to release his long-form birth certificate, questioning whether Obama was actually born in the United States. (Obama eventually complies and releases the birth certificate.)

May 2011: Trump officially announces that he will not run for president.

In addition to all of that history, Trump had also been talking about running in the 2016 presidential election for quite some time:

2013: Trump forms a presidential exploratory committee and, despite a strong backing from Republican voters, announces that he has no interest in running for governor of New York in 2014.

February 2015: Trump decides not to renew his Apprentice contract, fueling speculation that he’s mulling a run for president.

His formal announcement came in June.

It may have seemed as though this came out of the blue, but it most assuredly did not.

Terrorist behind Paris attacks is captured alive

The New Neo Posted on by

In Belgium, naturally, in the Brussels district known as Molenbeek:

Salah Abdeslam was shot in the leg by police commandos following a four-month international manhunt and has been arrested in the district of Molenbeek in the Belgian capital.

The country’s minister for asylum and migration, Theo Francken, confirmed the capture this afternoon announcing: ‘We got him’…

Abdeslam was wounded, and then retreated into a house in Molenbeek with two men. At least one of the other men is wounded, and one may be dead, said the source.

It is thought that Abdeslam suffered a ‘flesh wound’ after escaping Tuesday’s raid before retreating to Molenbeek, where he was born and brought up.

[NOTE: Here’s a previous piece of mine about Molenbeek.]