In a potato field in Yanggu county, 80 miles (130km) north-east of Seoul, Lee Sang-hyuk dug into the soil and found nothing worth saving.

A week earlier the crop, located in Gangwon province, had looked fine. Now the potatoes came up soft and collapsing, “like boiled potatoes”, spoiled by heat that had turned the ground into something closer to an oven.

(Emphasis added)

Do you have a web, video, or Lemmy post about it somewhere? I’d be curious about the story?

A. This paper says it is intended to Western promoted narratives of BRI ‘failure’, ‘vulnerability trap’, ‘road of corruption’, and ‘debt traps’.

B. Quarterly Journal of International Politics (国际政治科学) is a paywalled journal, which is highly respected but is unlikely to be read by western readers.

Doesn’t mean they are wrong, but just like listening to the US government, you have to take it with skepticism.

Instead of grappling with this dilemma, the Trump administration appears to be making it more acute. As the prospect of near-term regime change fades, both the United States and Israel seem to be flirting with fomenting internal fragmentation as a fallback. Reports indicate that the CIA is arming Iranian Kurdish militia forces in northern Iraq, while Israel bombs frontier posts, police stations, and military positions along the northern Iran-Iraq border to clear a path. In recent days, Trump has suggested he is backing away from this scheme, but Israel has not. Indeed, Israeli leaders seem to view the destabilization of Iran as a preferable backup if regime change proves impossible, potentially pushing Iran into the kind of state fragmentation seen in Libya, Syria, and post-2003 Iraq. In a country of 90 million people at the crossroads of Eurasia, that outcome would be profoundly destabilizing, not just for Iranians but for U.S. interests in the region and beyond.

From: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/what-endgame-iran

My guess is that they are moving replacement AN/TPY-2 radar and AN/FPS-132 as there are claims of 4 of the radars have been taken out across the middle east.

Reading into what this means strategically as well as for both the THAAD operability and Patriot systems probably guarding the high altitude ballistic defense is something I’m curious about, but am not going to speculate about at the moment.

I will say that was probably a good choice on the part of whatever Iranian’s which targeted them. The US needs to pull it’s head out of it’s ass on this.

Anyone know the missiles fired to landing ratio? I figure it’s got to be a large number of missiles/drones to get through the various missile defense systems.

TACO thinks the world’s being hard huh? Not the deal maker he thought he was?

A monkeys tail! Third hand, balancing, grabbing, etc.

The graph doesn’t give enough context, nor does the article IMO. China is a third party in this, as well as the Ukraine War, etc. And Trump seems unlikely to be good for the economy in his time in office so next year might be up, but there are many more factors.

With Donald Trump preparing to cut taxes and increase tariffs, US inflation is forecast to stay above 2 per cent throughout the whole of 2025, according to predictions compiled by Consensus Economics. Eurozone inflation is on the other hand forecast to drop below the ECB’s target of 2 per cent as soon as February.

“We expect a divergence to open up between the loosening cycles of the Fed and the ECB as mounting inflation risks cause the former to take a fairly cautious approach, while the latter responds forcefully to economic weakness,” said Jennifer McKeown, chief global economist at Capital Economics.