Hezbollah has drones — According to the analysts at Britain’s IHS Jane’s, a respected private firm that collects data and information on armaments, new satellite photos of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley—a zone controlled by the shi’a militias of Hezbollah (the Party of Allah)—clearly show that the group possesses modern military drones, UAVs, small pilotless aircraft able to strike targets and run surveillance far from their bases.
Hezbollah, according to varying points of view, is either an outright terrorist group (the American take) or substantially a benign social movement which, in its spare time, sometimes lends regrettably heavy-handed support in favor of Palestinian independence (the opinion of a large part of the European Left).
However that may be, the photos in question show the recent construction of a tiny airstrip in a sterile and impenetrable wasteland in the Valley. The indication that it is meant for the use of drones is born out by its miniature dimensions—just sixty feet wide—as well as by its very isolated location. According to the analysts, the drone most likely to be flown from the site is the Ababil-3, of Iranian manufacture.
The version of the weapons system supplied by Teheran to the Hezbollah, not equipped with a satellite guidance system, has a range limited to roughly 60 miles. That characteristic—together with the location of the drone base, near the Syrian border—suggests that the Ababils are most likely to be used in support of positions under the control of regular army troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is backed in the current civil war by the Party of Allah. The islamic drones are so far unable to reach targets in either Israel or in Europe from the site. That’s just as well.
Too many zeros in Shanghai — The blaze of greed which has taken hold in newly rich China has made the Shanghai Stock Exchange the world’s largest in terms of the value of shares traded, outstripping even the New York Stock Exchange. According to the Reuters agency however, the unexpected explosion in turnover has outrun the capacity of the software that handles the trading to report the record volumes—because the numbers now have too many zeros.
On Monday the 20th of April the Chinese exchange for the first time in its history went past one trillion yuan (US $161.28 billion) in single day trading volume, but the record data couldn’t be sent to operator terminals because the trading software in use—a package called SHOWROOM2003—was not equipped to display values that high. The Exchange has said it will install an upgrade.
Evil milk — According to the activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—the immensely influential hindu nationalist group that gave India its present Prime Minister, Narendra Modi—the consumption of milk from cows who may be sacred, but perhaps not sufficiently “Indian”, is the cause of booming juvenile delinquency in the country.
A key leader of the RSS, Shankar Lal, explains that only “virtuous” cows of pure Indian bovine races are able to give the good hindu milk that increases the productivity of those that drink it without “generating evil thoughts.” In contrast, milk from cows polluted by their descent from the “demonic” Jersey cattle introduced by the British in the time of the Raj to increase dairy productivity pushes the youths who drink it into a life of crime. In fact, according to Lal, the Jerseys are not really cows at all—though they may resemble them—but rather “a kind of beast that causes impure thoughts and and stimulates wrong behavior.”
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