EsadeGeo - EsadeGeo Daily Digest, 27/10/2023

The Guardian - Jason Burke and Helen Livingstone / US strikes Iran-linked sites in Syria amid fears Israel-Hamas war could escalate

• The US military has launched airstrikes on two locations in eastern Syria linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), signalling a new willingness in Washington to engage its forces directly in the crisis in the Middle East.
• The strikes, which the Pentagon said hit a weapons storage facility and an ammunition storage facility used by the IRGC and militia it backs, came as fears grow that the war between Israel and Hamas could escalate into a regional conflict.
• US facilities in Iraq and Syria have been hit by a series of low-level attacks by drones and rockets over the past 10 days that have been claimed by Iran-backed militia.
• The attacks have injured at least 24 US servicemen and the death of one civilian contractor. There were three such attacks on Thursday, striking two US bases in Syria and one in western Iraq.

Financial Times - Alice Hancock, Laura Dubois and Henry Foy and Raphael Minder / Slovakia and Hungary threaten to break EU unity on Ukraine military aid

• Slovakia and Hungary threatened to scupper EU unity on providing military support to Ukraine, as the bloc’s leaders gathered in Brussels for a summit where the conflict in the Middle East was taking centre stage.
• The EU’s financial and military support has been critical in Kyiv’s 20-month-long defence against Russian aggression, but Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his newly elected Slovak counterpart Robert Fico have spoken out against continued military aid, which requires unanimity.
• Fico said on Thursday ahead of the EU summit that his government would not vote in favour of any new measures to help Ukraine or sanctions against Russia without a full assessment of how they could affect Slovakia.
• “This is a very worrisome development and changes the dynamic,” said a senior EU official involved in projects to supply weapons to Ukraine. “It could be a real problem.”

The Washington Post - Rachel Pannett / For New Zealand’s Maori communities, climate change is already hurting

• The wharenui, or meeting house, stood forlorn. Usually the hub of this remote Maori community, it had been stripped of its wooden carvings. The bare cinder block shell gave the building an unclothed appearance. Wind whistled through holes bashed out by floodwaters.
• An official red notice prohibited entry to the adjacent dining hall, where the walls were askew, jammed with twigs and debris. The preschool was shuttered, the children gone. Down the valley, dump trucks whirred as they hauled silt from ruined fields.
• Eight months have passed since a powerful cyclone struck northern New Zealand, killing 11 people and displacing more than 10,000. The storm’s path across the Hawke’s Bay region was indiscriminate: it pummeled low-rent housing alongside million-dollar homes, wineries, orchards and factories. But the barriers to recovery here highlight the double whammy dealt to Indigenous communities by climate change, as extreme weather events exacerbate already high rates of homelessness and economic disadvantage.
• In parts of Hawke’s Bay, February’s cyclone is in the rearview. Streets have been tidied up. Insurance claims lodged. Levees repaired. Meanwhile, communities like Tangoio face painful choices about their future after authorities declared their land too risky to reinhabit.

The New York Times - Emma Bubola / Denmark aims a wrecking ball at ‘Non-Western’ neighborhoods

• After they fled Iran decades ago, Nasrin Bahrampour and her husband settled in a bright public housing apartment overlooking the university city of Aarhus, Denmark. They filled it with potted plants, family photographs and Persian carpets, and raised two children there.
• Now they are being forced to leave their home under a government program that effectively mandates integration in certain low-income neighborhoods where many “non-Western” immigrants live.
• In practice, that means thousands of apartments will be demolished, sold to private investors or replaced with new housing catering to wealthier (and often nonimmigrant) residents, to increase the social mix.
• The Danish news media has called the program “the biggest social experiment of this century.” Critics say it is “social policy with a bulldozer.”

Our opinions reads for today:

• Project Syndicate - Jonathan Ira Levy / The evolution of modern political power
• Foreign Affairs - Salam Fayyad / A plan for peace in Gaza
• Al-Jazeera - Belén Fernández / Guterres, Gaza and the consequences of countering ‘Israelspeak’
• Haaretz - Editorial / Biden is right: after the war, it's time for two states