Very relevant rn

🇺🇦🇬🇪Snipers trained in Ukraine are arriving in Georgia to organize provocations during mass protests, sources in the region tell TASS.

New euromaidan?

Hexbear News Mega America desk, I have caught the electoralist bug and want a sitrep on the upcoming US presidential election - which are the key swing states? what are the battlegrounds to look out for? where are the biggest upsets likely to happen for Harris and Trump?

Give me your informed analysis, give me your spicy takes, give me your conspiracy theories, but please keep them realistic and not the wishful thinking ones. I want to become an “expert” on US electoralism.

Someone in the PNW burnt a ballot box cw: link

edit: guess they got a few

https://apnews.com/article/vote-ballot-drop-box-democracy-fire-f66c52f774955106fb9e7c8172825cff

Since everyone's talking about that alleged comedian's racist joke about Puerto Rico being a garbage patch, and I can't think of an interesting discussion topic about Japan:

What strategic value does Puerto Rico currently represent to empire? Previously, a staging ground to place American bases in the Caribbean near Cuba was an absolutely critically important point in the Cold War. As US-Cuba relations cool down, and as the Puerto Rican debt crisis and failure to recover electrical infrastructure from 2017's hurricane Maria post privatization of the electric grid, it seems like our value to empire is reduced. Puerto Rico receives more money in federal funds every year than we produce with our entire manufacturing sector, and the usual culprits for embezzlement, Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) make up a comparatively very small portion of the economy. Previously, I had concluded that the reason the US keeps us around as a colony was just that, the strategic value. But how is it realized?

Follow up question, how could whatever strategic value Puerto Rico has for the US, in the event of a successful PR independence movement, be leveraged against US empire?

Edit: the claim that the federal funds are greater than the manufacturing GDP is entirely wrong actually, I misremembered that from when I had looked this up before and skimmed the sources and came to the wrong conclusion. I just checked and GDP from manufacturing is around 5x federal funding. Still, there's a huge debt problem that's being handled via austerity instead of economic development. I doubt there's too much potential for development in a country with an enormous brain drain problem and inflated US dollar wages, at least under the colonial status quo. So it still begs the question, what's the plan long term?

https://x.com/GUAN_FAHRANZAYD/status/1850253566855832016

Good twitter thread about the algerian missiles program. For anyone that is interested. It is in Arabic.

English article from Fereshteh Sadeghi on the US-israeli attack on Iran last week.

The Iranian army later in the day announced the death of at least four officers, including a colonel, killed during Israeli air raids in Khuzestan. An informed source speaking to The Cradle on condition of anonymity reveals that the number of Iranian casualties is higher than what is officially being reported.

Details about the Israeli air raids or the extent of the harm to the Iranian military are unclear and patchy at best. Both sides have a vested interest in controlling the narrative: Tel Aviv to project power and deterrence, and Tehran to maintain an image of resilience and minimize perceived vulnerabilities.

Israel says it deployed over 100 F-35 fighter jets to conduct the offensive. However, an Iranian conservative lawmaker on Saturday morning claimed that the strikes in Tehran were actually carried out by small drones or quadcopters.

Hamid Rasaei wrote on his Telegram channel that “the Zionist regime’s agents in Tehran were involved in those attacks and Iranian anti-aircraft guns fired at those microdrones.”

The narrative in the west of the country was different. Images of an Israeli missile’s booster falling in Iraq’s Salahuddin province suggest Israel used the Golden Horizon Air launched Ballistic Missile to hit Iranian radars in the western belt of the country.

The use of Iraqi airspace by Israel was confirmed by the Khatam Al-Anbiya Air Defense Base. It has blamed the US military for allowing Israel to fire air-launched ballistic missiles into Iranian territory from 100 kilometers deep inside the Iraqi soil. No such permission had been granted from Iraqi authorities.

...

Although the official Iranian media have downplayed the extent and strength of the Israeli strikes, University of Tehran academic and political analyst Mohammad Marandi tells The Cradle that “it was a big operation on the side of Israel and actually a considerable one, as Israelis did harm Iranian radar and defense systems.”

Fouad Izadi points to a stellar performance by Iran's air defense systems, in which “Iran was basically able to minimize the effect of this aggression” by Israel.

Marandi, who served as a consultant for the Iranian negotiating team at the last round of Vienna nuclear talks, agrees with the assessment that Iran’s air defenses performed well: “Iranians had conducted security and intelligence operations ahead of the strikes and succeeded in limiting the extent of damage by dummies and decoys as well as spreading misinformation about sensitive sites.”

As he tells The Cradle, the damage inflicted on Iranian military sites was not grave because “the possibility of a direct confrontation with the United States convinced Iranians many years ago to relocate almost all sensitive sites and strategic production facilities underground. Neither warplanes nor missiles are able to penetrate into those underground facilities.”

“What remains on the ground are small workshops producing missile spare parts and they are scattered across the country, but not near borders, that’s why the strike failed to leave a significant harm,” Marandi adds.

is this some hidden cia caucus inside dsa? The fuck north star stands for

Another ballot drop-off arson attack has occurred (I believe this is the third), this time in Vancouver, WA.

https://www.katu.com/news/local/vancouver-ballot-box-seen-smoking-same-morning-as-portland-ballot-box-arson

There is something morbidly funny to me in the Zionist line that Yahya Sinwar "died like a dog." Basically just confessing that they regularly kill dogs using drone surveillance and tank shells.

It never looks quite good to compare the killing of your enemies to killing a dog, but if you're gonna use it it needs to be embarrassing for the victim and not your own side, like death by starvation or just plain execution.

"Israel" is trying to pass a bill to completely ban UNRWA. The bill will very likely be adopted.