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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   871 thread views

Transnational Thursday for December 26, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Feliz navidad all! I've appreciated your comments over these past months.

French military is withdrawing/being ousted from more African country

Chinese AI lab Deepseek releases a model on par with the previous generation, trained for "just" $5M

Nigerian media is up in arms after a survey-based report estimated 2.2M kidnappings in the past year. The report estimates this through a survey-based method: 3.2% of households reported a kidnapping in the last year. I'm not convinced by the methodology—consider lizardman's constant—though they do interview 12K households. Though a friend with Nigerian family says these numbers are plausible?

Protests in Mozambique after election results, now over 100 deaths.

Conspiracy theory that Israel exploded a small nuclear bomb in Syria.

Trump Reportedly Offers To Hold High-level Nuclear Talks With Iran

Putin says Russia is ready to compromise with Trump on Ukraine war

Putin meets Slovak PM over gas imports

UK anti-corruption minister accused of taking £4bn bribe for Russia-funded nuclear plant in Bangladesh

FEWS.net removed a famine warning for Gaza after pressure from Israel and the US (which funds FEWS).

Famine continues in Sudan

Outage between undersea cable that connects Finish and Estonian power grids

Syrian opposition factions announce that they will dissolve and merge under the authority of the Ministry of Defense.

Guatemalan police rescue at least 160 children and 40 women held by a Jewish sect

Outage between undersea cable that connects Finish and Estonian power grids

This is not the first, or the second, cable that's gone out in the Baltic. It seems quite obvious that Russian and Chinese ships are cutting these from time to time deliberately.

This has been huge news in Finland, the Finnish Border Guards did specops to detain the suspected ship and the news have indicated the ship's been used for spying purposes. There's a wider discussion about Russian "shadow fleet", ie ships flying under third-country flags used for circumventing sanctions, operating in the Baltic, and increasing NATO presence in the Baltic to counteract this.

Looks like Ukrainians also starting to do something about the Russian fleet: https://maritime-executive.com/article/sanctioned-russian-ship-was-sunk-by-terrorist-attack-owner-claims

If so, we can expect more Russian-connected ships developing sudden mechanical problems and going under on high seas.

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