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Bulletins and News Discussion from March 24th to March 30th, 2025 - The Genocide Continues - COTW: Qatar

Image is of Gazans breaking their fast with the Iftar meal during the ongoing Ramadan.

Due to a request by @miz@hexbear.net, this thread's COTW is Qatar.


The ceasefire deal broke down early last week after Israel unilaterally changed the terms of the agreement and then blamed Hamas for not meeting them. Violence against civilians has rapidly accelerated to pre-ceasefire levels, with many hundreds dead already, aid once again cut off, and Israeli soldiers once again entering and occupying the attritional labyrinth that is Gaza.

I'm not yet in a position to make any solid predictions or analysis, as the geopolitical situation in and around Israel has changed fairly substantially over the last 6 months; in some ways benefiting Israel, and in other ways not. We know for sure how Hamas and Ansarallah are reacting (thankfully, with open hostility to both Israel and the United States), but the state of Hezbollah has been a giant question mark for months now, and precisely what Iran plans to do (beyond the usual level of supplying weaponry and intelligence to all the allies it can) is unknown. Syria will be almost certainly be a big wildcard, and we'll have to see if the compradors in Damascus can weather the storm.


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  • US airstrikes continue on Yemen for the 16th night in a row, with multiple airstrikes targeting Sana'a Governorate.

    Quite a few more strikes reported in Sana'a Governorate.

    Al-Mayadeen reports more strikes in Sana'a Governorate.

    Lots of bad information circling around. The pictures of the "USS Harry Truman sinking" that are circulating on social media are six years old and of a different ship. Claims that the US Navy's E-2 Hawkeye AWACS aircraft has been shot down are also highly unlikely, nothing in Yemen's surface to air missile arsenal has the range to hit US assets in the rear like that, and with active SEAD operations going on from EA-18G Growlers, Ansarallah haven't shot down an MQ-9 Reaper drone over the past 16 days, yet alone a target as far away from the frontlines as an AWACS aircraft. They could try with some Jerry rigged anti radiation 'Hormuz' missiles to home in on the massive radome on the E-2, but such an attack is highly unlikely to succeed.

    Al Masirah TV twitter

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    The Yemeni Armed Forces have announced two operations in two separate statements:

    Cruise missile, naval and aerial drones launched at US Navy warships. No Anti Ship Ballistic Missiles. A Zulfiqar/Rezvan ballistic missile was also launched at Israel, a ballistic missile with a conventional ballistic flight path, no Palestine-2 missiles launched. Debris from the missile and an Israeli Arrow 3 interceptor landed in Israel.

    Israeli news site N12 revealed that the US operated THAAD air defence system has intercepted 6 Yemeni missiles already. If anyone is wondering why this is, it's because Israel don't really have a terminal phase intercept system for MaRV (Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle) capable ballistic missiles. THAAD is the only system that fits the bill and can plug the gaps. Arrow 3 is a midcourse interception system, it does not intercept ballistic missiles in the terminal stage of flight. So if Yemeni ballistic missiles bypass Arrow 3, and they are MaRV capable missiles, Israeli air defence systems are not adequate. I'll explain below:

    Arrow 2 has a maximum flight ceiling/altitude of 50km, and a range of 100km, and uses a fragmentation warhead, not a kinetic one. David's Sling has a longer range up to 300km and a kinetic warhead, but a flight ceiling of only 15km, allowing for only last second interceptions. These flight ceilings are all problems when intercepting MaRV capable missiles that can perform glide phases within the earth's atmosphere, gliding above or near the limit their flight ceilings in the terminal phase. A MaRV could perform two glide phases, first one above Arrow-2 and one above David's Sling. So THAAD is brought in to plug the gap. THAAD can engage targets at altitudes between 40-150km, and at ranges up to 200km. So MaRVs cannot glide above the engagement ceiling of THAAD. The way to defeat THAAD would be to perform an extremely long glide phase below 40km under the engagement envelope of THAAD, but that puts the MaRV firmly within the engagement envelope of Arrow-2. Arrow 2s minimum altitude is 8km, so gliding under that would put the MaRV firmly within the engagement envelope of David's Sling. Also, with thicker atmosphere/air at lower altitudes, long glide phases become increasingly difficult as drag increases.

  • Small and bizarre news, but still news:

    So there's a non-recognized nation in Africa called Republic of Annobon, which is a small island that is part of Equatorial Guinea. A small group of separatists declared independence in like 2022 or something and well, they travel around the world exposing their cause I guess. Many such cases.

    Anyway, a small delegation headed by their Prime Minister visited our university, something completely random, and attended to a session of our History Assembly, which is celebrated each week or so to discuss career-related things and such. They were allowed to speak of their struggle against the Equatorial Guinean government. I failed to attend so I missed this peculiar event. Oh and Equatorial Guinea's President, Theodoro Obiang Nguema, as been in power since 1982, so there's that.

    The world gets weirder and weirder each day.

    And btw, before I forget:

    death to "israel"

  • French court finds far-right leader Marine Le Pen guilty in embezzlement case - NPR

    PARIS — A French court found Marine Le Pen guilty on Monday in an embezzlement case but didn't immediately say what her sentence might be and how it might impact the far-right leader's political future.

    Le Pen, sitting in the front row in the Paris court, showed no immediate reaction as the chief judge declared her guilty. She later repeatedly nodded her head in disagreement as the judge went into greater detail, saying Le Pen's party had illegally used European Parliament money for its own benefit. "Incredible," she whispered at one point.

    The judge also handed down guilty verdicts to eight other current or former members of her party who, like her, previously served as European Parliament lawmakers. Le Pen and her co-defendants face up to 10 years in prison. They can appeal, which would lead to another trial.

    The biggest concern for Le Pen is that the court may declare her ineligible to run for office "with immediate effect" — even if she appeals. That could prevent her from running for president in 2027. She has described such scenario as a "political death." The verdict was shaping up as a resounding defeat for Le Pen and her party. As well as finding her and eight other former European lawmakers guilty of embezzling public funds, the court also handed down guilty verdicts to 12 other people who served as parliamentary aides for Le Pen and what is now the National Rally party, formerly the National Front.

    The chief judge, who read the ruling delivered by her and two other justices, said Le Pen had been at the heart of "a system" that her party used to siphon off EU parliament money. The judge said Le Pen and other co-defendants didn't enrich themselves personally. But the ruling described the embezzlement as "a democratic bypass" that deceived the parliament and voters.

    Le Pen and 24 other officials from the National Rally were accused of having used money intended for European Union parliamentary aides to pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc's regulations. Le Pen and her co-defendants denied wrongdoing.

    Le Pen, 56, was runner-up to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, and her party's electoral support has grown in recent years. During the nine-week trial that took place in late 2024, she argued that ineligibility "would have the effect of depriving me of being a presidential candidate" and disenfranchise her supporters.

    "There are 11 million people who voted for the movement I represent. So tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people would see themselves deprived of their candidate in the election," she told the panel of three judges. If Le Pen cannot run in 2027, her seeming natural successor would be Jordan Bardella, Le Pen's 29-year-old protégé who succeeded her at the helm of the party in 2021.

    Le Pen denied accusations she was at the head of the system meant to siphon off EU parliament money to benefit her party, which she led from 2011 to 2021. She argued instead that it was acceptable to adapt the work of the aides paid by the European Parliament to the needs of the lawmakers, including some political work related to the party.

    Hearings showed that some EU money was used to pay for Le Pen's bodyguard — who was once her father's bodyguard — as well as her personal assistant. Prosecutors requested a two-year prison sentence and a five-year period of ineligibility for Le Pen. Le Pen said she felt they were "only interested" in preventing her from running for president.

  • US airstrikes on Yemen continue for the 15th night in a row, with multiple airstrikes reported in Saada city and Saada Governorate.

    More strikes reported in Saada and Sana'a Governorates.

    No statement from the Yemeni Armed Forces tonight. This is the third night in a row of US airstrikes with no statement by them, and there have been no operations against Israel either during this time period (announced or unannounced), no ballistic or cruise missiles launched at Israel.

    Al Masirah TV twitter

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  • New Big Serge just dropped

    TL;DR Big Serge sees negotiations as untenable and theater. Russia is winning on the battlefield and Ukraine cannot, politically, make any meaningful concessions, which means that fighting will settle this and likely in Russia’s favor.

    Thesis:

    I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump’s self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia’s war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.

    Classic battlefield analysis of the Kursk offensive, good slop for you war nerds (Russia focused on the flanks while Ukraine mostly prioritized depth over breadth):

    Despite their tactical surprise and the early capture of Sudzha, the AFU was never able to parlay this into a meaningful penetration or exploitation in Kursk. Why? The answer seems to be a nexus of operational and technical problems the Ukrainians were unable to create a wide penetration into Russia (for the most part, the “opening” of their salient was less than 30 miles wide), which greatly reduced the number of roads available to them for supply and reinforcement. The narrow penetration and poor road access in turn allowed the Russians to concentrate strike systems on the few available lines of communication, to the effect that the Ukrainians struggled to either supply or reinforce the grouping based around Sudzha - this low logistical and reinforcement connectivity in turn made it impossible for the Ukrainians to stage additional forces to try and expand the salient. This created a positive feedback loop of confinement and isolation for the Ukrainian grouping which made their defeat more or less inevitable.

    At the risk of making a perilous historical analogy, the operational form was very similar to the famous 1944 Battle of the Bulge: taken by surprise by a German counteroffensive, Dwight Eisenhower prioritized limiting the width, rather than the depth of the German penetration, moving reinforcements to defend the “shoulders” of the salient.

    Operationally, the main distinctive of the fighting in Kursk is the orthogonal orientation of effort by the combatants. By this, we mean that Russian counteroffensives were directed at the flanks of the salient, steadily compressing the Ukrainians into a more narrow position (by the end of 2024, the Ukrainians had lost half of the territory they once held), while Ukrainian efforts to restart their progress were aimed at moving deeper into Russia.

    On a schematic level, the Ukrainian position in Kursk was doomed by mid-September when Russian troops recaptured Snagost. If the Ukrainians had successfully isolated the south bank of the Seym, they would have had the river as a valuable defensive barrier protecting their left flank as well as access to valuable space and additional supply roads. As it happened, the Ukrainian flank was crumpled early in the operation by the Russian victories at Korenevo and Snagost, which left Ukraine trying to fight its way out of a very compressed and road-poor salient. The (correct) Russian decision to concentrate its counterattacks on the flanks further compressed the space and left the Ukrainians with inadequate supply linkages subject to persistent Russian drone strikes.

    Confinement bred strangulation, and strangulation bred confinement. Fighting with a caved in flank for months, the Ukrainian grouping was doomed to operational sterility and eventual defeat almost at the outset.

    The state of the front (multiple ongoing collapses for Ukraine and more to come):

    The Kursk salient is the second front to be fully collapsed by the Russian Army in the past three months. The first was the southern Donetsk front, which was completely caved in over the course of December and then rolled up in the opening weeks of the year, which had the effect of not only knocking the AFU out of longstanding strongholds like Ugledar and Kurakhove, but also safeguarding the flank of the Russian advance towards Pokrovsk.

    There was no Toretsk counter-offensive. Rather Russia was claiming a victory it hadn’t achieved:

    It appears that what actually happened was rather that the Russian MoD announced the capture of the city while its extremities were still contested. Russian forces remain in control of the bulk of the city, but Ukrainian units remain dug at the periphery and fighting has continued in the “grey zone.” DeepState (a Ukrainian mapping project) confirmed that there was no general Ukrainian counterattack - rather, the fighting was simply part of a continuous struggle for the western periphery of the city.

    Negotiation is theater (return to thesis):

    So long as Russia continues to advance on the battlefield, they have no incentive to (as they would see it) rob themselves of a full victory by accepting a truncated and premature settlement.

    The problem for Ukraine, if history is any guide, is that it is not actually very easy to surrender. In the First World War, Germany surrendered while its army was still in the field, fighting in good order far from the German heartland. This was an anticipatory surrender, born of a realistic assessment of the battlefield which indicated that German defeat was an inevitability. Berlin therefore opted to bow out prematurely, saving the lives of its young men once the struggle had become hopeless. This decision, of course, was poorly received, and was widely denounced as betrayal and cowardice. It became a politically scarring watershed moment that shaped German sensibilities and revanchist drives for decades to come.

    So long as Zelensky’s government continues to receive western support and the AFU remains in the field - even if it is being steadily rolled back and chewed up all along the front - it is difficult to imagine Kiev acceding to an anticipatory surrender. Ukraine must choose between doing this the easy way and the hard way, as the parlance goes, but this is not really a choice at all, particularly given the Kremlin’s insistence that a change of government in Kiev is a prerequisite to peace as such. Any successful path to a negotiated piece runs through the ruins of Zelensky’s government, and is therefore largely precluded at the moment.

    So for all the diplomatic cinema, the brute reality of the battlefield remains the same. The battlefield is the first principle, and the ultimate repository of political power. The diplomat is a servant of the warrior, and Russia takes recourse to the fist and the boot and the bullet.

  • After ex-President Jair Bolsonaro was formally charged with leading an armed criminal organization to plot a military coup by the Supreme Court today, he said, "discussing hypotheses isn't a crime." Not only is he wrong, he's confessed again. I'll explain why here: Bolsonaro's argument that merely discussing a coup is not illegal fails because:

    1. Intent matters: If discussions involve planning, recruitment, or incitement, they cross into criminal conspiracy.
    1. National security laws do not require the coup to succeed—preparatory acts (like organizing meetings, securing weapons, or drafting plans) are already crimes;
    1. Brazilian courts have ruled that even theoretical planning can be punishable if it shows a concrete threat to democracy.

    In Tokyo, Brazil's President Lula said there's no use for ex-President Bolsonaro to pretend he's being persecuted. "It's clear that the ex-president tried to stage a coup in Brazil. It is clear that he tried to help plan my assassination. "and the assassinations of the vice president and the former president of the Brazilian Electoral Court. [...] He knows what he did. There's no use begging for amnesty before the trial, that amounts to saying, 'I'm guilty.' He should focus on trying to prove his innocence."

    Twitter

  • Renowned Japanese video game designer Hideki Kamiya has reflected on the recent Assassin's Creed Shadows controversies by asserting that "normal people" don't care about them. His remarks were offered alongside some high praise for the Assassin's Creed Shadows development team.

    The latest entry in Ubisoft's long-running series has been mired in controversy since its May 2024 reveal, which confirmed that the game would have a black protagonist, based on a real historical figure known as Yasuke. This fueled a lot of online vitriol, including cases of people vandalizing Yasuke's Wikipedia page and Elon Musk declaring "DEI kills art" while referencing Assassin's Creed Shadows.

    Famous Japanese game designer Hideki Kamiya has recently reflected on this state of affairs by stating that "a few super-intense people" made "a big fuss" about Assassin's Creed Shadows. At the same time, the creator of Okami and Bayonetta believes that these detractors are simply a loud minority, having said as much in a March 24 tweet. Elaborating on this notion, Kamiya asserted that most "normal people" adopt an "it's fine" stance when it comes to things like video game-related drama, noting that this phenomenon isn't exclusive to the Assassin's Creed Shadows controversies.

  • In my extremely local local news. The person I ran campaign for to get elected as local councillor is now being offered the role of mayor after just 4 months in the role.

    If the Labour party weren't doing everything they can to ruin their chances in the next election I sincerely believe I would be able to turn this person into an MP.

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