Kahu 🇵🇸

Māori. Rotorua-Taupō, Aotearoa New Zealand. 320ppm.
[email protected]

[Al Jazeera Breaking News @AJENews]

BREAKING: India’s Shipping Minister Sarbananda Sonowal has said all three missing Indian seafarers have died after a US military strike on a tanker in the Gulf of Oman, Reuters reports.

🔴 More on https://t.co/5H0QqpfIYw

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is an absolutely major story and almost no Western media covered it: India's water minister CR Patil said on Tuesday that "it is certain, not a single drop of water will go (to Pakistan) in the coming years."

Patil said that India is "actively working on it" after "directives" from Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

As a reminder, Pakistan's dependence on water from India is close to total: the country is essentially built around the Indus river system, all of whose rivers flow through India before entering Pakistan.

The Indus system irrigates 80% of Pakistan's farmland, generates a third of its electricity, supplies its major cities with drinking water, and sustains the livelihoods of some 240 million people.

So, essentially, no water from India = annihilation of Pakistan as a state.

Pretty damn consequential, all the more given we're talking about 2 nuclear powers here. And all the more because, understandably, Pakistan's formal position is that water diversion would constitute "an act of war" (https://t.co/WLoDpGzc2W).

Unfortunately, Patil's statement isn't just talk: India already set up the legal framework to make this possible. Last year, they unilaterally suspended the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, despite the treaty containing no withdrawal clause.

It used to be the one piece of India-Pakistan relations that worked, and had survived multiple wars and over six decades of hostility. Now India is saying officially that it will "never be restored" (https://t.co/2SnUNevFbX).

The one mitigating factor here is physics: you don't just "turn off" a major Himalayan river system. Diverting rivers of this magnitude means building massive storage and canal infrastructure in Himalayan terrain: projects measured in years.

But India IS ACTUALLY BUILDING that infrastructure: for instance it just approved in May the building of the so-called "Chenab–Beas Link Tunnel," an 8.7km ₹2,352 crore (~$280M) tunnel designed to divert water from the Chenab basin into India's Beas river system. The Chenab is one of the main tributaries of the Indus - and one of the three "western rivers" (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) allocated to Pakistan under the 1960 Indus Water Treaty.

Which means that, unfortunately, Patil's "not a single drop of water in the coming years" looks like a roadmap: the infrastructure to strangle Pakistan's water supply is being approved and tendered in plain sight.

This is also a story about selective media coverage and double standards: I'm willing to bet that 99% of people in the West have never heard of any of this.

Now make this thought experiment: imagine China announced it was building infrastructure to cut off every drop of water flowing to India and its ministers proclaimed on television that "not a single drop" would cross the border. It would be wall-to-wall coverage, sanctions packages, and a thousand op-eds about Beijing "weaponizing water."

Heck we don't need to imagine because the simple fact of China merely building a hydropower dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo (the upstream Brahmaputra) generated exactly the wall-to-wall alarm I'm describing, even though China threatened nothing and even though Indian officials said the threat is a "myth" given the fact that the river gathers most of its volume inside India from monsoon rains (https://t.co/GBgBybBPoE). Malign intent was still presumed from the act of construction, because it's China.

In India's case, the intent couldn't possibly be clearer: it's proclaimed by ministers on the record, and backed by India's actions. But because they're a courted Western partner, what they're doing - arguably the most extreme form of economic warfare imaginable, directed at a nuclear state - largely gets silence.

Src for screenshot: https://t.co/qav4muNkij

[Seyed Mohammad Marandi @s_m_marandi]

Any ground assault or strike on Iran's critical infrastructure will lead to the immediate destruction of Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, and Emirati critical infrastructure, resulting in the immediate collapse of these regimes and a catastrophic global economic depression.

["Emmie" - Tauranga 2024 @Tauranga2020]

@cjsbishop Like "top cop" Ross Meurant who resigned as police superintendent AFTER he won the Hobson seat for National in 1987
If you require something more current here's the rules as at 2022 - no mention whatsoever of people who go into politics being investigated
https://t.co/zglPWuTMon

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Very good at dropping bombs on:

Schoolgirls.
Hospitals.
Universities.
Drinking water infrastructure.
Bridges.
Power and communications infrastructure.
Critical civilian infrastructure.
Historical sites.
Places of worship.

[John Brennan @jmbprime]

FiFA made a massive mistake in granting the United States the 2026 World Cup. This is a public relations disaster for FIFA.

[Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape]

Pres Trump just said 200 ships have secretly passed Hormuz since the war began

That’s compared to over 10,000 in the normal 100 days since the war

200 is 2% of the norm

World heading to historic energy crisis

[Kahu 🇵🇸 @Tukeke70]

@FranceskAlbs @RobinBoardmanUK Respect!

[Kahu 🇵🇸 @Tukeke70]

@EthanLevins2 Move over Nostradamus!

[Kahu 🇵🇸 @Tukeke70]

@SaulStaniforth 🤡

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

The head of the US World Cup task force is asked why Omar Artan was denied entry.

He says people communicating with bad actors planning harm against the US wont be admitted

He's then asked, was Artan communicating with bad actors & who were they?

He says he can't talk about it

[Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE]

@IbrahimMajed @TheLevantineMan A false flag carried out by Israel?

[Julia Macdonald @jumacdo]

World events are impacting New Zealanders' views of and trust in major powers. For the first time in a decade, New Zealanders are more likely to see China as a friend than the United States (43 percent versus 39 respectively).

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

After the US hit Iran about 20 times, Iran retaliated with strikes on US military bases across the region.

[IRAN EMBASSY in KENYA @IRANinKENYA]

Americans solved their helicopter crash investigation in less than 24 hours…
But after three months, they still “don’t know” how their Tomahawks slaughtered children in Minab school.
The lies are getting embarrassing.
#minab168 #IranWar‌ #kenya

[حمد @HamadAlMajidi]

في 1966 وقت استضافة انجلترا لكأس العالم، لم تكن هناك أي علاقات دبلوماسية لها مع كوريا الشمالية.. عد أن شاركت في الحرب بجانب كوريا الجنوبية ضد كوريا الشمالية

لكن الأخيرة تأهلت قانونيا للبطولة بعد أن تغلبت على أستراليا.. وانجلترا كانت تفكر بعدم منح تأشيرات للكوريين

لكن تدخلت فيفا و هددت انجلترا بأن البطولة سيتم نقلها لدولة أخرى في حال استخدمت التأشيرات كسلاح ضد دولة تأهلت رسميا لكأس العالم

و رضخت انجلترا و منحت تأشيرات للكوريين الشماليين جميعا

بينما اليوم حتى الحكم اللي ماله ذنب في شيء و يملك تأشيرة سارية المفعول، يتم طرده و تتجاهله فيفا كليا ولا كأنه عندها مسؤولية للتأكد من نزاهة البطولة وعدم تداخل السياسة والرياضة

بدون ذكر منع لاعبين من الدخول، مضايقة القادمين للبلد، حرمان أعضاء بعثات، و غيرها الكثير

[Kahu 🇵🇸 @Tukeke70]

@TruthSeek01011 @BreitbartNews 🤣🤣

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

In the West Bank Israeli soldiers will arrest 10 year old boys, put them in handcuffs and strap black plastic bags across their eyes… force them to sit like that in the sun for hours and even wet themselves… for the crime of “…appearing to have intended to throw stones…”

[AotearoaNZDeb @Daffwena]

'Shamefully, the current NZ government refuses to oppose the illegal US and Israeli attacks on Iran, and fails to oppose the genocide still happening in Gaza. They just wait for oil companies to determine NZ’s supply, and help mega corporations to profit.'

[Kahu 🇵🇸 @Tukeke70]

@MahyarTousi