Quote from: Solmyr on December 15, 2025, 08:07:24 AMQuote from: Syt on December 15, 2025, 02:45:19 AMBecause I have no impulse control I ordered: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/356080/the-elder-scrolls-betrayal-of-the-second-era
It's on backorder, but should arrive "soon"(TM)
As punishment for lack of impulse control you must post a full review here.![]()
) on sturdy paper etc.

Quote from: Tonitrus on March 18, 2026, 05:39:23 PMPerhaps the biggest blind spot being that they thought the President would almost unfailingly be a wise and judicious person.![]()
QuoteBelgian ex-diplomat, 93, to face trial over murder of Patrice Lumumba
Count Étienne Davignon is accused of 'war crimes' over the 1961 killing of the Congo's first post-colonial leader
Patrice Lumumba, left, was murdered in 1961. Étienne Davignon, right, stands accused of participation in "war crimes"
KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Foreign Staff
Tuesday March 17 2026, 8.35pm, The Times
A 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat was ordered on Tuesday to stand trial over the 1961 killing of the Congolese independence icon Patrice Lumumba, in a decision hailed as a major step towards confronting the country's colonial past.
Étienne Davignon, a one-time European commissioner and the only person still alive among ten Belgians accused by the Congolese leader's family of complicity in his murder, stands accused of participation in "war crimes".
The former prime minister's grandson, Mehdi Lumumba, welcomed the Brussels court decision — which remains subject to appeal — as "historic".
"We are all relieved," he said. "Belgium is finally confronting its history."
If the trial goes ahead, Davignon — who was made a count by King Philippe in 2018 — would be the first Belgian official to face justice in the 65 years since Lumumba was executed and his body dissolved in acid.
In its decision, the court went beyond prosecutors' submissions and extended the scope of the trial to cover Lumumba's political allies, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, who were murdered alongside him.
Lawyers for Davignon, who denies all charges, argued in a closed-door hearing in January that too much time had passed since the events, according to multiple sources.
Lumumba's relatives maintain the time is ripe for a long-overdue legal reckoning.
"It's a gigantic victory," Christophe Marchand, the family's lawyer, told the Agence France-Presse news agency on Tuesday.
"No one believed when we first brought the case in 2011 that Belgium would prove capable of seriously investigating this," he said. "It's very hard for a country to judge its own colonial crimes."
Prosecutors accused Davignon of "participation in war crimes" over his role in the "unlawful detention and transfer" of Lumumba, as well as "humiliating and degrading treatment".
Christophe Marchand, a Belgian lawyer left, with Lumumba's grandchildren, Yema Lumumba, centre, and Mehdi Lumumba, right
JOHN THYS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A fiery critic of Belgium's colonial rule, Lumumba became his country's first prime minister after it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.
But he fell out with the former colonial power and with the United States and was ousted in a coup a few months after taking office.
He was executed on January 17, 1961, aged 35, in the southern region of Katanga, with the support of Belgian mercenaries. His body was never recovered.
Davignon, who went on to become a vice-president of the European Commission in the 1980s, was a novice diplomat in his late twenties at the time of the assassination.
After entering the diplomatic service in 1959, Davignon rose through the ranks after his early involvement in Congolese independence talks.
Marchand had described the accused as "a link in the chain" of a "disastrous state-sponsored criminal enterprise".
The case — the latest step in Belgium's decades-long reckoning with the role it played in Lumumba's killing — had already led to one macabre discovery: one of Lumumba's teeth.
The only known remains of the assassinated leader was seized from the daughter of a deceased Belgian police officer who had been involved in the disappearance of the body.
It was returned in a coffin to the authorities in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, during an official ceremony in 2022 that aimed to turn a page on the grim chapter of its colonial past.
During the handover, Alexander De Croo, then the Belgian prime minister, reiterated the government's "apologies" for its "moral responsibility" in Lumumba's disappearance.
De Croo pointed the finger at Belgian officials who at the time "chose not to see" and "not to act".
QuoteHamidreza Azizi
@HamidRezaAz
#Iran War Update No. 18 (focus on Iranian strategic narrative):
🔹The maritime dimension of the war is moving toward a more dangerous phase. Reports suggest Israel may join the U.S. in expanding operations around the Strait of Hormuz, while Iranian discussions increasingly point to a possible shift from selective disruption to full closure, including the use of naval mines if pressure intensifies.
🔹At the same time, U.S. strikes are becoming more focused on degrading Iran's maritime disruption capabilities. CENTCOM confirmed the use of heavy bunker-busting munitions against Iranian anti-ship missile sites near the Strait of Hormuz, underscoring efforts to reopen the waterway by force if necessary.
🔹Iran continues signaling that escalation could extend to additional chokepoints. The Houthis remain a ready secondary front, with the potential to target shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb if pressure on Hormuz increases, forcing the U.S. to operate across multiple maritime theaters.
🔹Attacks on Gulf states continued, with the UAE facing one of the heaviest waves so far. Emirati officials report thousands of drone and missile strikes since the start of the war, raising the likelihood that Abu Dhabi may move toward a more active role in supporting the U.S. operation against Iran.
🔹This raises the risk of a sharper Iran-UAE confrontation. Iranian concerns about the UAE's role in the war and its potential ambitions regarding disputed islands in the Persian Gulf are resurfacing, suggesting that this front could escalate further.
🔹Iran has also expanded its warnings to additional regional actors. Statements directed at Jordan and Azerbaijan claimed that any country facilitating U.S. or Israeli operations could be treated as a legitimate target.
🔹Inside Iran, Israeli operations appear increasingly focused on internal security structures. Strikes on Basij forces and police units across Tehran suggest an effort to weaken the regime's domestic control apparatus rather than only its conventional military capabilities.
🔹This has heightened fears in Tehran of internal destabilization. Authorities are intensifying crackdowns, including arrests, asset seizures, and restrictions on communications such as Starlink, while also encouraging public mobilization – of their own support base – to deter unrest.
🔹The internal security dimension is becoming more acute following reports of targeted killings of senior figures, including Ali Larijani and Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani.
🔹Meanwhile, tensions in Iraq continue to rise. Attacks on U.S. diplomatic and military sites are increasing, while U.S. strikes on Iran-aligned armed groups are fueling a cycle of escalation that is pulling Iraq deeper into the conflict.
🔹The Iraq-Syria nexus is becoming more volatile. A Reuters report about potential Syrian involvement against Hezbollah surfaced alongside intensified U.S. strikes on PMF positions in Anbar province, following earlier attacks near the al-Qaim border crossing, raising concerns about a broader effort to weaken Iran-aligned forces along this corridor.
🔹Nuclear risks are also entering the picture. A reported strike near the Bushehr nuclear facility has raised concerns about the potential consequences of any direct hit on nuclear infrastructure, including the risk of regional contamination.
🔹Iran continues to leverage the Strait of Hormuz selectively. While most shipping remains disrupted, Iranian oil exports – primarily to China – continue, with estimates suggesting around $140 million per day in revenue and sustained flows, highlighting a strategy of controlled economic pressure rather than total shutdown of the strait.
🔹At the same time, Tehran is increasingly explicit about its conditions for ending the war. Iranian officials state that reopening the strait would require not only a ceasefire, but also compensation, sanctions relief, and an end to operations against its regional allies, including Hezbollah.
🔹This approach is reinforced by emerging patterns of bilateral arrangements. Countries such as India and Turkey are reportedly negotiating access to the strait directly with Iran, suggesting the early contours of a more fragmented and transactional maritime order.
🔹Iranian media is also framing developments in U.S. domestic politics as part of the battlefield. Reports of internal disagreements in Washington and political pressure on Donald Trump are interpreted as signs that Iran's cost-imposition strategy is having an effect.
🔹Overall, Iran appears to be using control over the Strait of Hormuz as leverage, while signs are growing that the United States and Israel are preparing to challenge that strategy more directly. As Tehran continues disruption without fully shutting the strait, recent strikes on coastal missile sites and discussions about expanded operations suggest that Washington and its allies may be moving toward a more forceful effort to reopen maritime routes.
QuoteIt is true that in the book Ehrlich exhorted readers to remember that his scenarios "are just possibilities, not predictions." But it is also true that he slipped into the language of prediction occasionally in the book, and more often in other settings. "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born," he promised in a 1969 magazine article. "Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come," Ehrlich told CBS News a year later. "And by 'the end' I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity."
Such statements contributed to a wave of population alarm then sweeping the world. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the Hugh Moore-backed Association for Voluntary Sterilization and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places. "The results were horrific," says Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, a classic 1987 exposé of the anti-population crusade. Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers' salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
In the 1970s and '80s, India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren't sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. ("At long last," World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, "India is moving to effectively address its population problem.") For its part, China adopted a "one-child" policy that led to huge numbers—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions, often in poor conditions contributing to infection, sterility and even death. Millions of forced sterilizations occurred.
5w Infographics; Sources: World Peace Foundation, Tufts; Food and Agriculture Organization, U.N.
Ehrlich does not see himself as responsible for such abuses. He strongly supported population-control measures like sterilization, and argued that the United States should pressure other governments to launch vasectomy campaigns, but he did not advocate for the programs' brutality and discrimination.
Equally strongly, he disputes the criticism that none of his scenarios came true. Famines did occur in the 1970s, as Ehrlich had warned. India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, West and East Africa—all were wracked, horribly, by hunger in that decade. Nonetheless, there was no "great increase in the death rate" around the world. According to a widely accepted count by the British economist Stephen Devereux, starvation claimed four to five million lives during that decade—with most of the deaths due to warfare, rather than environmental exhaustion from overpopulation.
In fact, famine has not been increasing but has become rarer. When The Population Bomb appeared, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, something like one out of four people in the world was hungry. Today the proportion of hungry is about one out of ten. Meanwhile, the world's population has more than doubled. People are surviving because they learned how to do things differently. They developed and adopted new agricultural techniques—improved seeds, high-intensity fertilizers, drip irrigation.
Quote from: Sheilbh on March 18, 2026, 03:19:25 PMLess regrettably, I see Paul Ehrlich has died.
Quote from: Sheilbh on March 18, 2026, 03:19:25 PMLess regrettably, I see Paul Ehrlich has died.
Quote from: Sheilbh on March 18, 2026, 05:34:40 PMQuote from: OttoVonBismarck on March 18, 2026, 05:29:43 PMThe two major pipelines that allow KSA and UAE to bypass the Strait with a portion of their production are both fully operational BTW. The issue is neither is capable of carrying the entirety of either country's production (the KSA pipeline is far more significant), and of course they offer no transit for the other gulf states.I thought the Iranians had hit Fujairah?
And as well as no transit for the rest I think all that infrastructure is for oil not gas?
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