In a potato field in Yanggu county, 80 miles (130km) north-east of Seoul, Lee Sang-hyuk dug into the soil and found nothing worth saving.

A week earlier the crop, located in Gangwon province, had looked fine. Now the potatoes came up soft and collapsing, “like boiled potatoes”, spoiled by heat that had turned the ground into something closer to an oven.

(Emphasis added)

Do you have a web, video, or Lemmy post about it somewhere? I’d be curious about the story?

A. This paper says it is intended to Western promoted narratives of BRI ‘failure’, ‘vulnerability trap’, ‘road of corruption’, and ‘debt traps’.

B. Quarterly Journal of International Politics (国际政治科学) is a paywalled journal, which is highly respected but is unlikely to be read by western readers.

Doesn’t mean they are wrong, but just like listening to the US government, you have to take it with skepticism.

The White House also issued what is known as a ‘lid’ on Saturday, a notification to the press pool indicating the president would not be making any public appearances for the remainder of the day. Krassenstein noted that a lid at 11 am was unusual for Trump, adding that the president had not travelled to Mar-a-Lago as he typically does at weekends. A separate, unverified post on Bluesky from an anonymous user claimed that a major road near the hospital had been blocked off and that an emergency meeting was underway at the White House. Neither claim has been independently verified.

Better than newt Gingrich idea, and yet strangely still involving nuclear radiation.

Some just want a quick ride (lytic phase)
Some hide in your DNA (provirus nap)
Some need a mosquito’s flight (arbovirus date)
Some cause a fever’s height (dengue surprise)
Some swap their RNA to DNA (retro rewind)
Some want your cells to clone (replication grind)
Some party in your nose (rhino’s delight)
Some need BSL-4 lights (deadly nightlife)

Chorus twist:
Virus dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
They’ll hijack cells with such technique
You’re just a host to me!

Instead of grappling with this dilemma, the Trump administration appears to be making it more acute. As the prospect of near-term regime change fades, both the United States and Israel seem to be flirting with fomenting internal fragmentation as a fallback. Reports indicate that the CIA is arming Iranian Kurdish militia forces in northern Iraq, while Israel bombs frontier posts, police stations, and military positions along the northern Iran-Iraq border to clear a path. In recent days, Trump has suggested he is backing away from this scheme, but Israel has not. Indeed, Israeli leaders seem to view the destabilization of Iran as a preferable backup if regime change proves impossible, potentially pushing Iran into the kind of state fragmentation seen in Libya, Syria, and post-2003 Iraq. In a country of 90 million people at the crossroads of Eurasia, that outcome would be profoundly destabilizing, not just for Iranians but for U.S. interests in the region and beyond.

From: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/what-endgame-iran

My guess is that they are moving replacement AN/TPY-2 radar and AN/FPS-132 as there are claims of 4 of the radars have been taken out across the middle east.

Reading into what this means strategically as well as for both the THAAD operability and Patriot systems probably guarding the high altitude ballistic defense is something I’m curious about, but am not going to speculate about at the moment.

I will say that was probably a good choice on the part of whatever Iranian’s which targeted them. The US needs to pull it’s head out of it’s ass on this.