A Swiss canton has suspended its pilot of electronic voting after failing to count 2,048 votes cast in national referendums held on March 8.

Basel-Stadt announced the problem with its e-voting pilot, open to about 10,300 locals living abroad and 30 people with disabilities, last Friday afternoon. It encouraged participants to deliver a paper vote to the town hall or use a polling station but admitted this would not be possible for many.

By the close of polling on Sunday, its e-voting system had collected 2,048 votes, but Basel-Stadt officials were not able to decrypt them with the hardware provided, despite the involvement of IT experts.

"Three USB sticks were used, all with the correct code, but none of them worked," spokesperson Marco Greiner told the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Swissinfo service.

The canton has since commissioned an external analysis of the incident, adding that it deeply regrets the violation of affected voters' political rights.

Huh. A functioning government apologizing for disenfranchisement.

The Israeli state’s genocidal assault against the people of Gaza now appears to be the first installment in an ongoing series. The next episode is what the United States and Israel are doing to Lebanon and Iran. It’s not just the relentless bombings and missile launches with little regard for civilian life that’s so reminiscent of the war on Gaza. It’s not just the slaughtering of children followed by easily debunked denials. (The casual mendacity of both governments is jaw-dropping.) It’s not the assassinations of governmental and religious leaders. It’s the attempt to kill hope.

A source of hope and joy in Iran—as in Palestine—has always been organized sports. In Iran, soccer, wrestling (where Iran has achieved global acclaim), and volleyball are three of the main sporting ventures in which Iran competes internationally. Yet it’s difficult to play—and by extension impossible for a child to have dreams of athletic glory—when the sports infrastructure is destroyed. As I’ve pointed out for over a decade, Israel has long targeted sport facilities and athletes in Gaza. The logic is that if you kill the joy that comes with leisure pursuits and extracurricular activities, you kill the will to resist.

In yet another echo of Gaza, on March 5, one of the first bombing targets in Iran was the historic Azadi Sports Complex in Tehran. Perhaps the most iconic sports facility in the Middle East, Azadi has played host to many of the most storied moments in Iranian athletic history, including a 1998 World Cup qualifier match against Australia played in front of 128,000 people. The Azadi indoor facility, which holds 12,000 and is a central locale for basketball, martial arts, and volleyball, is now a smoldering husk.

Fucking disgusting. Can you imagine the apocalypse if Iran bombed the Rose Bowl?

Thousands of pets are being abandoned in Dubai as their owners flee the Middle East because of the Iran war, animal charities have said.

The RSPCA said pets of fleeing UK nationals could become “hidden victims” of the conflict as people who had relocated to the Gulf city scramble for an exit and struggle to bring their animals.

Last week, the UK government operated an emergency evacuation flight for people leaving the Middle East as the war continued. About 45,000 British nationals have left the Middle East since 1 March.

Hannah Mainds, the chief executive of the RSPCA Blackpool and north Lancashire branch, previously lived in Dubai and helped care for pets left behind after their owners suddenly left the country.

“Some [pets] were microchipped and clearly once loved, but their families had gone. It’s heartbreaking for rescuers and frightening for the animals,” Mainds said.

Overnight on March 7, Israel bombed fuel depots outside of Tehran, Iran’s capital city. Playwright and filmmaker Homayoun Ghanizadeh woke up the next day to black smoke and carnage. What follows is his account of a private citizen trying to maintain some normalcy in the face of a relentless bombing campaign.

I remember that before I went to sleep, Trump’s toys had bombed Tehran’s oil depots. My father calls American military equipment Trump’s toys. I like his fantasy and the way he describes Trump’s mental landscape. I wake up and sit in bed. My phone clock must be broken, because it is showing 8:45 in the morning, while the darkness outside suggests it is still the middle of the night. It is probably an internet disruption. Of course, there is no internet at all to be disrupted. It has been nine days since Khamenei was killed and Iran has suddenly fallen into the middle of a war. I realize that my phone clock is actually working correctly, but why is the sky still dark and the sun missing?

I step onto the terrace and see that a black and impenetrable layer of oily smoke has been drawn between us and the sun. My partner coughs. Her throat hurts. My eyes burn a little, too. Through the window, partly obscured by the thick crisscrossed strips of duct tape everyone is using to reinforce glass, I see that several birds are lying on the street. Seeing the bodies of dead birds lying on the street like the dry leaves of trees is becoming something ordinary for us in Tehran.

If anyone knows the emotional turmoil the Iranian football players have experienced in the past 48 hours, as they leave their homeland behind for a new life in Australian, it’s Tooba Sarwari.

The Afghanistan-born cricket player left everything behind when she fled to Australia on a humanitarian visa in 2021 amid the fall of Kabul.

The Iranian footballers’ individual experiences are as unique as they are unenviable, says Sarwari, ~~who arrived on a humanitarian visa amid the fall of Kabul.~~

(Seriously ... how did an editor not catch the same phrasing in consecutive sentences?)

“I don’t want this happening for none of the girls in the world,” she says, from her new home in Canberra.

She recalls her own first night in Australia in 2021, when she lay down on her bed and covered her head with her blanket.

“When I reached Australia, I realised that, ‘oh, my family is not with me’, I left everything.”

The Iranian women have chosen a life on the other side of the world from their home, from their loved ones. They have been granted temporary visas that provide a pathway to permanent residency. After four years, they may be able to apply for Australian citizenship.

On a steep hillside in western El Salvador, Oscar Leiva watches rainfall in December, a month that once marked the start of the dry season. During this harvest cycle, flowering came early and then stalled. A heatwave followed. What remains of the crop is uneven, lower in quality and more expensive to produce than the last.

For Leiva and his family, coffee has never been just a crop. His mother, Marina Marinero, remembers when the rains arrived on schedule and the harvest could be planned months in advance. Today, the calendar no longer holds. Decisions about pruning, fertilising and hiring labour feel like educated guesses. Each mistake carries a cost the family cannot afford.

For generations, coffee shaped El Salvador’s rural economy, structuring land use, labour and exports across much of the country. By the mid-1970s, El Salvador ranked among the world’s leading coffee producers, with harvests exceeding 5 million quintales (a quintal is equivalent to about 46kg). Now, national production struggles to reach 1 million quintales. The decline reflects more than market cycles.

The widening US-Israeli war with Iran is already reshaping the political and military contours of the Middle East. Much of the focus has been on the risk of regional escalation and the implications for Gulf security. But the war’s impact may be just as immediate and consequential for Gaza, where 2 million people are already living under conditions that leave no room to absorb new pressures. The crisis is complicating an already volatile situation for a place with no functioning governance, no open borders, no powerful supporters, and a humanitarian infrastructure that was already failing before the strikes on Tehran.

The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei removed the last remaining Middle East actor who, however cynically, saw Gaza as core to his agenda. For years, Iran helped arm and fund Hamas, not out of absolute alignment with the movement or out of solidarity with Palestinians, but because maintaining that front gave Tehran leverage in the wider region. As long as Iran had both the capacity and willingness to escalate—whether directly against Israel or through allied groups—Israel had to factor in the risk of a broader, multifront confrontation, a calculation that, until 2023, imposed at least some constraints on its actions in Gaza.

Those constraints are now gone. The Iranian leadership has been significantly degraded. The country’s missile and air defense infrastructure, which underpinned its regional deterrence, has been badly damaged. And with Khamenei dead and his successor, his relatively unknown son Motjaba, taking charge amid such turmoil, Iran’s political house will be consumed for the foreseeable future by an internal power struggle between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the clerical establishment, and whatever remains of civilian governance. Amid so many domestic crises, it seems highly unlikely that Gaza will be much of a priority, at least not in the foreseeable future.

In times of war, reality is often the first casualty—not only on the battlefield but in the narratives that travel across the global information system. As tensions surrounding Iran escalate, much of the international coverage has portrayed the country as teetering on the edge of internal panic and social breakdown. Yet recent reporting from foreign correspondents on the ground tells a far more complex story—one that challenges the dramatic narratives dominating headlines and raises uncomfortable questions about how wartime realities are framed for global audiences.

Recent reporting by CNN correspondent Fred Pleitgen offers a striking counterpoint to the dominant narrative that has circulated across much of Western media coverage of Iran’s internal situation amid escalating tensions. Reporting from inside Iranian cities, Pleitgen described scenes that diverge sharply from portrayals of widespread panic or societal breakdown. According to his observations, daily life in many areas continues with a degree of normalcy: markets remain stocked, fresh produce fills the stalls, cafés serve customers as usual, and fuel stations operate without the long queues or shortages that typically accompany wartime crises.

Perhaps most notable, the correspondent reported an absence of the collective panic frequently suggested in external commentary.

Such firsthand testimony from a Western journalist—broadcast through one of the world’s most influential news networks—raises important questions about the gap that can emerge between lived reality and the narratives constructed during periods of geopolitical confrontation.

I was at work last Saturday when I heard the blast. Since that moment, the world has been turned on its head. The school called asking me to come and pick up my child. I rushed to the metro and headed north in a carriage filled with anxious people calling their loved ones to ensure their safety, melancholy etched on their faces, uncertainty metastasising from one to another as they checked the latest news on their mobiles.

This is the second time within a year that Israel has decided to go for a war of choice with Iran, but I suppose that is the new normal. Israel has long enjoyed a unique position of near-total impunity when it comes to harassing Palestinians, and now the green light to aggression seems to extend to its unending wars and spreading of terror across the region. And it feels different this time. The pretence that there is some level of precision in the strikes is gone. Instead, the attacks appear indiscriminate, with targets ranging from schools to hospitals, from police stations to urban amenities – all hit with a level of might that seems aimed at demolition, total destruction, the flattening of the city.

“Beirutification” should become a word if it is not already. By that, I mean the slow normalisation of periodic attacks on a city by a capricious and violent state, until blasts and death become woven into the fabric of urban life. It is urban death by a thousand knives. It is the suffocation of imagination and the thwarting of any civil attempt at a better life, and the gradual dilapidation of a nation to the point where it can no longer stand again, condemned instead to rot in exhausted silence. That is what years of war have done to Beirut. Now something similar is unfolding in Tehran.

Anonymous has really stepped up their writing game.

As missiles and drones curtail energy production across the Persian Gulf, analysts warn that water, not oil, may be the resource most at risk in the energy-rich but arid region.

On Sunday, Bahrain accused Iran of damaging one of its desalination plants. Earlier, Iran said a U.S. airstrike had damaged an Iranian plant.

Hundreds of desalination plants sit along the Persian Gulf coast, putting individual systems that supply water to millions within range of Iranian missile or drone strikes. Without them, major cities could not sustain their current populations.

In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86% in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. The technology removes salt from seawater — most commonly by pushing it through ultrafine membranes in a process known as reverse osmosis — to produce the freshwater that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture across one of the world’s driest regions.

The things we do for false Christianity.

Sleeplessness, fear and exhaustion gripped residents of Tehran as successive waves of strikes struck the Iranian capital, judging from messages sent by people in the city after the latest overnight onslaught, which several described as the worst bombardment in six days of war.

With Iran imposing a near-total internet blackout, information emerging from inside the country is fragmentary and difficult to verify. But in a series of accounts sent through proxy connections, and calls with friends abroad, Tehranis described a night of intense explosions.

Zahra, a teacher and mother of one living in central Tehran, said the strikes, in what she said was the heaviest attack to date, had left her deeply worried for civilians who found themselves in danger not just from Iran’s attackers but from their own government.

“This is the first time since the war began that I am genuinely scared for my fellow Iranians,” said Zahra*. “We are trapped between the regime that is killing us with machine guns, and a foreign power has likely decided that we are collateral damage.”

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the assassinated Ali Khamenei, is being heavily tipped to succeed his father as supreme leader of Iran, which would pitch a hardliner into the task of steering the Islamic republic through the most turbulent period in its 48-year history and offer a powerful signal that, for now, it has no intention of changing course.

No official confirmation has been given and the announcement may be delayed until after the funeral of Ali Khamenei, which was on Wednesday postponed.

His son is believed to have been the choice of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Israeli defence minister, Gideon Saar, has warned he will be assassinated.

Ayatollah Seyed Khatani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses the new supreme leader, said the assembly was close to selecting a leader.

Rigid in his anti-western views, Mojtaba Khamenei is not the candidate Donald Trump would have wanted. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said on Tuesday that Iran was run by “religious fanatic lunatics” – and Khamenei’s appointment is hardly likely to dispel that opinion.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51743226

The Trump administration and its allies in Congress presented a shifting new justification Monday for the U.S. attack on Iran, with House Speaker Mike Johnson suggesting that the White House believed Israel was determined to act on its own, leaving the president with a “very difficult decision.”

Johnson said the attack on Iran was a “defensive operation” because Israel was ready to act against Iran, “with or without American support.” He said President Donald Trump and his team determined that Iran would immediately retaliate against U.S. personnel and assets.

The remarkable shift in the Trump administration’s stated rationale comes as the hostilities deepen and widen across the region. The president himself estimated the war could drag on for weeks. The administration plans to seek supplemental funds from Congress to support the effort.

Actually fun to read article.

The outcome and duration of the war in the Middle East may be decided by a grim calculus based on the size of Iran’s drone and missile stocks v vital air defence munitions held by the US, Israel and Gulf states, analysts and officials say.

Since Saturday, Iran and its proxies have sought to counter the intensive joint US and Israeli offensive with more than 1,000 strikes against targets across almost a dozen countries spread over 1,200 miles. With its antiquated air force unable to compete with those of Israel and the US, Tehran has relied on its arsenal of missiles and drones.

The geographical extent of Iran’s retaliatory attacks have made the conflict the widest in the Middle East since the second world war. Israeli and US aircraft and missiles have struck hundreds of sites across Iran, without losing a plane to hostile fire.

The US and Israel are seeking to destroy as much of Iran’s missile stockpile and infrastructure as possible, targeting launchers, stores and personnel.