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6 months agoThis isn’t going to go well for the Taliban’s effort to increase tourism in Afghanistan.
athos77
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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
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The US has been Hamas ever since they said they were holding back bombs that might be used in Rafah.
the aid trucks will be unloaded on the shore in an area secured by Israeli forces […] Israeli forces will be in charge of security on the shore
Right … those same Israeli forces that have refused to let aid trucks into Gaza, have refused to let aid trucks move through Gaza, who have let Israelis loot burn and destroy aid trucks, who have deliberately and repeatedly targeted aid trucks and aid workers, repeatedly killing them? Those Israeli forces? I’m sure this’ll be fine …
There have been decades of tensions on the archipelago between Indigenous Kanaks seeking independence and descendants of colonizers who want to remain part of France. […] The unrest started on Monday with a protest over France’s efforts to expand voter lists that would benefit pro-France politicians on New Caledonia and further marginalize the Kanak people, who once suffered from strict segregation policies and widespread discrimination.
Sullivan said that the Israeli state had hindered aid deliveries in the recent past but had improved the flow sufficiently, so as not to be subject to restrictions on military aid that might have been required under US law.
So they’ve found that sweet spot, have they? Just enough aid ‘let through’ to pacify the Americans, and nowhere near enough to help the Palestinians.
I wonder what his position is on who should pay to rebuild Gaza …
But there are too many people with huge sums of money invested to allow a cataclysmic event to happen, and for swathes of cities to become ghost towns. […] vacated commercial buildings are set to be updated, transforming areas formerly packed with office workers during workweeks, and nearly deserted over weekends, into “hybrid destinations” filled with greater green spaces, pedestrianised areas and leisure options that keep a more consistent weekly footfall. […] Developers might be forced to the cliff edge to be creative, but they have around five years to prepare, mobilise and get ready for the future that’s coming.
Lol, this guy imagining that they’re going to spend their time accepting massive losses and making plans to convert their buildings, instead of spending massive amounts of time and money re-writing laws and codes so they don’t get stuck with the losses.
I mean, I could see what he’s saying if this was one city, or some percentage of cities. But this is every city, plus half the suburbs, all at the same time, all trying to offset the same trillions of dollars of losses.
From what I understand, you can convert a lot of buildings that were built before the middle of the century; it’s the massive onees that are the issue. Older buildings were designed to let in light and air from the outside. If you break them into apartments, you can get something that’s a reasonable size with windows.
But if you try to convert one of those massive square skyscrapers, you run into issues. You could break each floor into a set of massive apartments, but there aren’t enough people who can afford them. You can make really long, thin apartments with windows at one end, but most people don’t want to live in something that’s 10-15 feet wide, a third of a city block long, with windows at one end. Or you can put the apartments around the edges and then do something with the center space; say, put tenant storage space every 3 floors, a gym every 8 floors, a play area every 5 floors, etc. But that raises the cost of the apartments and incurs monthly fees to clean and maintain those areas.
Why would anyone listen to anything said by the man who singlehandedly created Brexit?
destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities
"scuse us while we move some goalposts here …
and ensure that Gaza does not pose a threat to Israel in the future
And suddenly it’s not ‘Hamas’ that’s a threat, but ‘Gaza’. More moving goalposts, and revealing Israel’s real aim: the elimination of Gaza itself. Except, like the Republicans, who constantly have to create a new threat to ‘defend’ themselves against, after Gaza it’ll be the West Bank. And after that it’ll be something else …
Aren’t we currently sanctioning Russia, North Korea and Iran?
Israel would "move people out of Rafah, the main humanitarian hub in the enclave, to al-Mawasi
Yeah, that’s not their plan. There’s 1.42 million people in Rafah right now, which is 25 square miles. That gives it a population density of 56,800 per square mile, making it the 25th most densely populated city in the world - and with intact infrastructure enough for only a tiny fraction of that number.
So, Israel supposedly wants to move all these people to al-Mawasi. Now, al-Mawasi is barren, with; the last official count I could find said there were about 1500 people living there in a small Bedouin town. It’s also only about six square miles total.
Let’s say that Hamas is 10% of the population - I don’t think it is, but let’s use that number. That means there’s 1,278,000 innocent civilians they want to move to al-Mawasi. That would mean a population density of 213,000 per square mile. That would be twice the population density of Manila. And there is no infrastructure. They’re just taking a million people and throwing them into a barren desert next to the sea and saying, “Not our problem.” There’s no food, no water, no toilets, no shelter, no medical facilities, no electricity, no shelter from the heat - and no way to quickly make any of these things appear in enough quantity to matter.
The Palestinians are already on the verge of famine. This will make things worse, and disease is absolutely going to decimate the population. And then they’ll decide that al-Mawasi is hiding Hamas, and they’ll go after that as well.
Fuck Israel.
As always, things at the end of the alphabet get shafted. They should do one on reverse alphabetical order.
Found it - Miles Routledge, and he wasn’t murdered, “just” captured and held prisoner by the Taliban for eight months.
Wasn’t there some influencer who went there last year to prove he was safer there than in the West and they murdered him?
Thing is, €5 isn’t all that much. I’m not sure who this is going to deter other than shoestring backpackers and people who fly RyanAir. I’d fully expect that price to increase in the future.
I’ve been angry for a while, that the EU hasn’t seemed to take Ukraine’s defense too seriously (or at least once it became clear it would be a slogging war). They’ve given old weapons, and pitched in money to buy munitions and stuff, but it’s been clear from close to the start that the lack of munitions-building capacity was a big block, on both sides.
Instead of setting up new munitions factories, the EU has been content to send out old materiel, place orders from the same places everyone else is trying to order from, and let the States fraud the lead for European security. And Russia has used those exact same two years to set up munitions factories and secure supply chains from China, India, North Korea and Iran. It took eight months of Republicans dithering on Ukraine aid for the EU to finally step up and say, “Hey, maybe we should build a munitions factory!” – and it’ll be another two years before it’s up and running.
I keep coming back to something one of the Ukrainians (not Zelenskyy, maybe the head of the Army?) said in the fall of 2022: something like the West is sending Ukraine barely enough weapons to defend itself, but not enough to win. And if it comes down to a war of attrition, Russia’s resources will last much longer than the attention spans of Ukraine’s allies.
Seriously. I’ve been angry that Europe has had two years, and only now (after eight months of Republican dithering) are they considering setting up a new munitions factory. Which will take another two years to get up and running. If they’d started it earlier, when it became clear that the war was going to drag on, Ukraine could’ve had munitions by now. :/
The New York Times did an article on it last fall. Here’s a non-paywalled copy of the article or, if you prefer audio, here’s the episode of The Daily where they discuss it.