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On May 12, the decades-old Israel-Palestine crisis erupted once more, with missiles fired from both sides. According to the most recent official reports, airstrikes have killed more than tens of Palestinians, including children and a woman, while five Israelis have died.
Hamas fired a new volley of deadly rockets at Israel on Wednesday in revenge for Israel’s destruction of a 14-story building in Gaza, ruling out an immediate truce. The 130 rockets fired by Hamas, which killed a six-year-old boy in southern Israel and triggered air raid warnings up to Tel Aviv, were said to be a response to the destruction of Gaza City’s Al-Farouk tower. In only three days, militants have launched over 1,000 missiles, according to the Israeli military. That’s almost a quarter of the total amount of rounds shot in the entire 2014 conflict.
INTO THE FIRE: 2021 Trends and Predictions from 21WIRE
NEW YEARS DAY SPECIAL
Looking forward into the New Year, here are but a few salient predictions and breaking trends to look out for in the coming year.
In last year’s
Trends and Predictions for 2020, we identified a number of important moves in the political, geopolitical, and financial worlds, but some of these ended up being affected in one way or another by the emergence of an epic
black swan – ‘the pandemic’ – which took the world by storm in February and March. The COVID crisis certainly created a speed bump for two of our 2020 predictions: Trump’s economic success and certain re-election, and also the surging global protest movement – both of which were gaining momentum in late 2019. Some will argue this was more than a mere coincidence, but we’ll leave that one for the
I have been warning about this for months here on this feed. The timeline continues to be filled in. Keep a sharp eye on events in Straits and the South China Sea in the near term. Now I m at the nervous level.
China Seems Ready for a Fight Over Taiwan t.co/rHp8mkWRzc
For decades China-watchers have debated what form a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) offensive against Taiwan might take. An onslaught seems to be coming. Saying
no to a cross-strait union is not an option Chinese Communist Party (CCP) supremo Xi Jinping means to grant the islanders. Beijing wrote its threat to use force into law back in 2005. Xi regularly reminds everyone that the party’s patience is finite. It seems the only question is timing.