"An historical record of the Thermosphere Climate Index. Mlynczak and colleagues recently published a paper on the TCI showing that the state of the thermosphere can be discussed using a set of five plain language terms: Cold, Cool, Neutral, Warm, and Hot."

📱 ROBINMG

🇮🇷⚔️🇮🇱 Iran hit Israel’s Haifa oil refinery harder than authorities initially admitted.

The strike completely destroyed the main gasoline reservoir, disabled the internal power plant supplying steam and electricity, and damaged gas turbines, boilers, and control rooms with shrapnel. The attack eliminated around 60% of Israel’s domestic oil product production, leading to a sharp gasoline shortage that was offset by ramping up imports and maximizing output at the Ashdod refinery.

To speed up repairs, the government allowed work to bypass normal environmental and construction regulations, with full restoration now expected only in 2028. The true scale of the damage surfaced after Haifa’s municipality and environmental groups sued over the regulatory shortcuts, raising the possibility that Israel may be downplaying the impact of other Iranian strikes on critical infrastructure.

🔗 Rybar_MENA

🇵🇸🇺🇸 FROM DROPSITE:

🚨 Israeli Plan to Herd Palestinians Into Controlled “Shelters” to Begin “Within A Matter of Weeks”

🔸Israel is preparing to channel Palestinians into fenced “humanitarian shelters” in areas outside Hamas’s control, policed by a foreign force, while its military deepens its occupation of the rest of Gaza, according to the pro-Netanyahu paper Israel Hayom, which reported the plan approvingly.

🔸Under the plan, unarmed civilians would be directed to a first zone in Tel al-Sultan, near Rafah, an area Drop Site has documented Israel systematically razing.

🔸A “multinational force” - the ISF - operating under the Trump administration’s “Board of Peace” would deploy there from a newly built base, equipped to police the zones, while the Israeli military “continues to maintain and deepen its hold” beyond the Yellow Line.

🔸 The camp/base for the force “has already been built,” and the Board of Peace has “begun identifying sites” for logistics warehouses, with the groundwork underway now, and deployment in the coming weeks.

🔸The paper described the effort as a “pincer movement”: the military seizing more territory as the population is siphoned into the controlled zones, in the hope that Hamas is left “without a population, territory or resources.”

🔸Officials said the areas would receive caravans and aid, but not the concrete needed to actually rebuild Gaza.

◽️The plan matches what Drop Site has previously exposed through leaked documents: a surveilled, checkpoint-controlled “planned community” in Rafah designed to force Palestinians into what amounts to an Israeli panopticon, tracked and screened as a condition of receiving aid.

🔸An Israeli political source told the paper the military would keep up “the pace of targeted killings while remaining below the threshold of international criticism… as long as Hamas is unwilling to disarm.”

📸 The buildup is already visible: the “Board of Peace” itself posted images of tactical vehicles arriving at a logistics base on June 30, matching the article’s account of preparations underway.

🔴 @DDGeopolitics | Socials | Donate | Advertisin

🇺🇦📰🇷🇺 PR War Ramps Up in Ukraine

Untangling the latest media web

Having faded largely into the constant background noise of the mainstream news cycle in recent months, and having been overshadowed by unprecedented geopolitical events in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine is back in the headlines. Casual consumers of world news have been presented with a series of startling narratives and images indicating that after years of apparent stagnation, the war may be reaching an inflection point favoring Ukraine.

A string of pieces in The Economist gives a sense of the shift: Is Russia Being Out-Droned? (May 5), Vladimir Putin is Losing His Grip on Russia (May 6), Russia is Stumbling on the Battlefield (May 10), Russia’s Crimean Conquest is Turning into a Deadly Mess (June 23). In Foreign Affairs: Ukraine Turns the Tide (June 1). CNN: Russia’s Winning Streak in Ukraine is Over (May 14). Anne Applebaum’s June 7th piece in The Atlantic was given the fascinating title Ukraine is Not Losing. Russia is Not Winning.

The broad narrative is as follows: after a clear Russian advantage on the battlefield during the past year, the Ukrainians have emerged from an organizational restructuring significantly stronger. The AFU’s desertion problem has been largely solved. Increased drone production is giving the AFU a numerical advantage in standoff strikes for the first time. Russian casualties have never been higher, with losses totaling as many as 30,000 personnel a month, and the Russians are unable to generate the recruitment rate to replace them. The average life expectancy of a Russian soldier sent to the front lines can be measured in minutes. Ukrainian attacks on fuel logistics both in Russian-held territory in eastern Ukraine and in Russia proper threaten the Russian army and Russia’s economy as a whole. The situation is so catastrophic in Crimea that for the first time since the failure of the 2023 summer offensive, Ukraine may stand a chance of retaking it. Incredibly, the Ukrainians are achieving these victories without American support.

All of these issues are pushing a ceasefire ever closer, and the Russians may have no choice but to give in. Shocking images from Russia itself bolster these narratives. Last week saw the largest Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow since the war began. Hundreds of Muscovites (who face no legal repercussions for doing so, unlike in Ukraine) readily shared videos of a major Moscow refinery burning. And the Ukrainians are just getting started. Zelensky announced the beginning of a “40-day influence operation” two days ago. The explicit objective? To force the Russians to sue for peace.

Readers of this publication will be familiar by now with my preferred rhetorical structure for analysis of issues like this one. First describe the mainstream narrative in detail, then pick it apart in an attempt to glean the truth of it. And this piece will be no different.

First, the narrative should be viewed through the lens of the overriding pattern in Ukraine’s relationship with the western media. Long-term observers of the war will recognize this immediately from the experience of Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive, the 2023 summer offensive in Zaporozhye, the 2024 offensive into Russian territory around Sudzha, and previous waves of strikes on Russian oil infrastructure.

The pattern goes like this: official Ukrainian government statements and heightened, flashy military action coincide with a wave of think pieces in respected publications. The usual suspects are all here: Anne Applebaum, Ben Hodges, Ukrainian publications like the Kyiv Independent, The Economist, and so on.

The pattern has thus far always resulted in the same thing: the Ukrainian effort peters out, the war continues much as it did before—with a glacial Russian advance creeping its way across the Donbass, the Russian government more or less unchanged, and the Russian economy intact but never quite where Russian planners want it to be.

🔗 https://www.amerikanets.com/p/pr-war-ramps-up-in-ukraine

🇮🇷🇮🇱🇺🇸⚡️ — Iran adopted additional security measures during this spring's negotiations with the U.S. to reduce the risk of Israeli strikes against senior Iranian officials, NYT reports.

In April, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf had been scheduled to travel to Islamabad for a meeting with U.S. Vice President JD Vance, but Iranian security officials feared Israel could use the visit to assassinate Ghalibaf or Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in an effort to derail the negotiations.

Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian delegation's aircraft—carrying more than 70 Iranian officials—between the Iranian border and Islamabad.

On the return flight, Iranian security services warned of intelligence that Israel planned to strike the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iranian airspace from the Iraqi border. The aircraft made an emergency landing in Mashhad, and the delegation traveled the remaining eight hours by road to Tehran.