Netanyahu indicted on corruption charges today. Recent polling indicates his current coalition would not get a majority if he was indicted: However, that "Current Center-Left-Arab Opposition-Y.B" is not a workable coalition. No way the Arab parties (Hadash-Taal and Raam-Balad) would sit in a government headed by Lapid or Gantz (or that they'd be asked to in the first place) and neither would UTJ, because of the Haredi draft issue. They'd have to peel off Kulanu, which is possible, but that would be a pretty shaky coalition with Meretz involved.
Take the children, machine gun the rest https://www.yahoo.com/news/defiant-families-militants-leave-held-area-syria-121508958.html
They've committed crimes against the Syrian state, turning them over to Assad doesn't sound so bad at this point.
Mutlu CivirogluVerified account @mutludc 7m7 minutes ago Mutlu Civiroglu Retweeted Ernesto Dragon Coalition jets hit the caves where ISIS militants were hiding in #Baghouz @_ErnestoDragon #SDF
"The United States and other NATO allies that own F-35s fear the radar on the Russian S-400 missile system will learn how to spot and track the jet, making it less able to evade Russian weapons in the future." So the S-400 is going to make the F-35 less effective? How/why does that affect us?
The idea is it doesn't make it less effective, but instead gives Russian operators of the S400 the ability to practice tracking the F35. They can also tweak the system to be more effective against the F35. If Turkey has a couple F35s, they can fly them around letting the Russians improve the S400 against it and share any classified capabilities with Russia if they wanted. We have used F22s previously in Syria against Russian built systems. If the Russians sell the S400 to someone we have to fight, it could potentially hurt us in the long run.
Took me over a week to finish the two part series by Shane Bauer (supposed to take 2 hours straight through) but I thought it was really an excellent present history of all sides of the Syrian conflict. I think Mother Jones is supposed to be big time libtards but this isn’t politicized imo. Well it is, everybody has fucked up. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/06/behind-the-lines-syria-part-one/
Skimmed it but yes everyone fucked up. It always been pretty telling that no one could put forth a realistic option for what would happen down the road in any kind of intervention scenario to depose Assad. The rebels have always been a total mess and it was their undoing.
Sure feels like things are about to kick off in Iran. US killed a bunch of Iranian backed militia, yesterday protesters stormed the US embassy in Baghdad and set fire to a guard house.
Brother just got put on standby to short-notice deploy as early as today, so that’s fun. He just got back from Afghanistan so he’s pretty pissed.
Currently in the process of reading this book, good history perspective of Hafez's rise to power through the civil war.
UN says 80% of the population requires humanitarian aid, 10 million people are “a step away from famine” with an estimated 3.5 million children experiencing acute malnutrition, and the largest ever recorded outbreak of cholera in a country where nearly 80% of its population has no access to healthcare or sanitation. Add COVID-19 to that. Here’s a post from Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders about the COVID situation and its pretty grim. https://www.msf.org/covid-19-has-made-yemen-health-system-collapse-complete
This just happened so no analysis on the internet yet but I'm guessing either thermobaric bomb or they hit a POL tank.