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[anewaname]

They have elections in 5 months... their protesters understand their current administration is trying rig the election (voter suppression and misinformation, the Russian style).

[Strongpoint]

Georgian PM directly accused USA of trying to start a revolution

Heh, even Yanukovich wasn't spewing bullshit of this type. Neither did he dare to use this tone when speaking to the US.

Yeah, it is unlikely that it will end peacefully in Georgia. The pro-Russian "Georgian Dream" is burning bridges.

[martinuzz]

Well for lack of Middle East thread.

It is possible that the president of Iran, and some of his ministers are dead.
Their helicopter 'made a hard landing' near the Azerbaijan border.

The Iranian State television reports the helicopter has been found. The Iranian Red Half Moon denies this is the case and say search and rescue teams are still searching.

[hector13]

Iranian state media appear to be confirming they are dead.

Live updates from the BBC

[Strongpoint]

This is quite unimportant. He wasn't the ruler of Iran. Sure, some said that he was "the successor" but it always was nothing more than a rumor. I don't expect any major changes coming out of it.

[ChairmanPoo]

See, that IS a notable lack of perspective. Alive he might have been a nonentity but dead he can stir the pot quite a bit in the Middle East.

[martinuzz]

Khameini will not be happy. Raisi was being groomed to become the next ayatollah, Khameini is old and has cancer.

Let's hope this tragic accident will bring a fresh wind of change to Iran. I know the country has a lot of young progressives who would like to see a different Iran.

[Starver]

When I first head about it, the "stir the pot" came to mind. (Well, "this'll be interesting".) If it's him and the Foreign Minister (as per initial reports, not checked this morning), then it depends who is waiting (or suddenly very quickly manouvering!) in the wings to step into their roles. If there are moderates (nonetheless, poised to step in, which suggests some sort of 'line' they were holding) then it might spin the nation one way, but likely that there's just more of the same, and all it takes is a spurious misunderstanding/misinterpretation of how they got there...

All unknown, right now (or as of last night, haven't checked this morning, changes may well be afoot before I even typed this).

I was a bit confused about why the helicopter had gone from over on 'that' bit of northern Iran (for the publicised joint dam project) and headed to 'that' but of northern Iran (scraping some rather interesting geopolotical terrain, as well as ...as it turns out... scraping some actual physical terrain), but there are any number of reasons that someone who knew the region (transport links, other likely public business) or more advanced knowledge ('internal' government business, whilst in the region), but of course in that way of speculating lies madness. Or an international espionage thriller sceenplay. After a lot of tweaking to re-set it in "Ficticioustan"!


(And any Middle East thread is likely to get very heated, at times, especially given the current Near-Middle-East situation that I think has done for at least one well-meaning more localised thread, fortunately not this one. It's possible we even had one, either thankfully old and only necroable or possibly locked previously.  Such is the way of things. Even if it would have been nice to have had one specifically for this... at this time... no-fault regional incident.)

[anewaname]

Two bits of information that were repeated by the NPR/BBC radio clips were, "there was bad weather" and "the only other person who has been groomed as a potential successor is the ruling guy's son, which upsets political factions because they do not want the actuality or the appearance of a royal family".

Also, in an NPR interview, some guy just said that the helicopter was an American Bell Vietnam-era copter, so there is plenty of leeway for bad weather to be enough, and plenty of leeway for an engineered accident.

[bloop_bleep]

They don't got the right parts for that stuff because of sanctions. And it's 60 years old, flying in difficult conditions. Honestly not too surprising that it would happen.

[Strongpoint]

Hey, just curious.

Did the imminent famine in Gaza happen? Do we have visual evidence of thousands and thousands of malnourished or dead people? It was promised by all those experts and with Israel fighting in Rafah it should be worse, right? Or is this famine still imaginary imminent?

[Starver]

I think it's ongoing, overshadowed and outshone by the more obvious conflict (or 'death from above') hotspots going on there. Various places estimate that, on an given day, 85% or children have no food (can't speak for the veracity, nor sure of the mathematics behind it[1]), and deaths from starvation (and dehydration) are far from unknown[2].

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm not sure we're seeing the "reporter walking through the dusty open-air camp filled with emaciated and near-skeletal recugees laid all across the dry and unvegetated plain" sort of thing, as kick-started the modern 9bsession with 'biblical' famines, but it's clear that the supplies allowed/wrangled into the territory are only downgrading the problem, and there's no telling what it would be like if the threat of famine hadn't been recognised and efforts taken to offset it.

"No, it's ok. You don't need to worry about him walking around naked. I gave him a sock and a hat..."

Even in the most rose-tinted view of things, don't read "did not happen" as "will not happen", "never was going to happen" or "isn't currently on the edge of happening". Especially under the fog of war, as you should have some idea of. Are there Catastrophist spins on the situation? Probably, and charities aren't likely to balance their assessments with too much "but it's not all bad, so maybe we aren't needed after all", yet you can't dismiss established sources as having cut the whole imaginary thing from whole-cloth.

...ok?


[1] Just one day of missed meals may not be terrible (merely awful), but obviously you can't have more than 50% missing food for a day before you can't just have exactly half the population eating+not eating+eating in alternation whilst the other half don't eat+eat+don' eat in the 'least worst' version of the stat. 85% suggests everyone (close to) eating just one day a week, in strict rotation, which is clearly problematic. And obviously it'll be hard to justify such an egalitarian approach actually happening, with well-connected families being barely inconvenienced (rarely part of the 85%) and the most desperate very much so (more than their 'fair share' of hunger-days). For this mind of reason, I doubt that the straight "85%" figure is what it sells itself have, perhaps ignoring 'insufficient meals' like rice-water soup/etc that barely keep the person ticking over but might also mitigate the simultaneous shortage of clean water.

[2] Again, there's probably confounding factors, e.g. died through some other medical need, but lack of food(/water) definitely contributing to their inability to recover.

[hector13]

This’ll give you a good idea.

[Maximum Spin]

A core problem is that "famine", like "genocide", is a flexible word with clear emotive connotations. When we think of famine, we generally think of something like the Irish Potato Famine, a sudden catastrophe, not "the default state of many countries around the world".

Gaza is in about as much famine as Afghanistan and Somalia, a natural consequence of dysfunctional government, and the situation is not substantially worse than it has been for years. Lest this provoke some new stupid argument, let me put it on the record that I am not in any way suggesting that Israel is not a factor. My point is that the media love to sensationalize conditions that countries have been limping through for decades as if it's a new problem you have to worry about right now.

The question you should be asking yourself is - if Gaza were an independent country, is there any reason to think the famine would resolve itself? It's one thing to say Israel would stop making it worse - provided this new independent Gaza also stops bombing them - but look at comparable countries around the world and tell me that a tiny strip of overpopulated desert with minimal agricultural potential and limited freshwater has got many better options.

[hector13]

i don’t think that’s the right question; Israel controls all of the borders into Gaza, land air and sea, so it is well within their power to allow aid in, but they make it difficult and then try to blame the aid agencies for bottlenecks:

Israel says it has facilitated more than 350 aid trucks into northern Gaza over the past month. Aid agencies say the territory as a whole needs 500 a day.

"The bottleneck of this chain does not lie with the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]," said Colonel Moshe Tetro, head of the army's Coordination and Liaison Administration, which handles approvals for aid convoys.

He told the BBC that the army's job was to "facilitate the entrance of humanitarian aid into Gaza" and that the hold-ups lay with the logistical ability of aid agencies to distribute it on the other side.

He pointed to the trucks waiting to cross, saying the evidence was right in front of us. Twenty trucks had been approved to cross that night, he said, but only seven showed up.

"We took a lot of measures to enlarge the amount of humanitarian aid," he said. "But the UN and other international organisations have some bottlenecks regarding the amount of trucks, amount of truck drivers, manpower, working hours…"

Matthew Hollingworth, country director of the World Food Programme (WFP), was on one of the trucks idling by the border fence that night. He told the BBC there was a specific reason why the WFP had not been able to provide all 20 vehicles.

"On this particular convoy, we were given a limit of 15 vetted drivers by the IDF that were cleared to use this route, but only seven were available to us", he said.

Some of the approved drivers had gone to Gaza City the previous day, and were stuck there, he said. Even driving an empty lorry back through Gaza needs Israeli army approval.

How are they supposed to drive 20 trucks with 15 drivers, particularly when 8 of those drivers are waiting for approval to drive empty trucks out of Gaza?

This is assuming the aid even reaches Gaza before Israeli protesters attack the convoys before they get to the border anyway, apparently with the tacit support of the police.

So yeah, it wouldn’t matter if Gaza were independent if Israel still got to decide what got into Gaza.