This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
- Pakistan parliament debates sending troops to Yemen to support Saudi Arabia
- Greece confirms that it will pay the IMF on Thursday and avoid bankruptcy
Pakistan parliament debates sending troops to Yemen to support Saudi Arabia
Pakistan parliament building
Pakistan’s parliament is debating a request from Saudi Arabia to actively join the coalition fighting the Iran-backed Shia Houthis in Yemen and to supply combat planes, warships and soldiers to the effort. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have come to each other’s aid several times in the last decades, so it is thought that Pakistan now has a moral obligation to help with something that Saudi Arabia considers a substantial threat to itself. Pakistanis urging rejection of the request point out that Iran and Pakistan share a long border, and say that Iran may retaliate against Pakistan if Pakistan helps Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
Pakistan has strategic relationships with only three countries: China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia. Leaders from both Turkey and Pakistan are meeting with each other and with leaders of Iran and Saudi Arabia in an attempt to resolve the conflict diplomatically, and to prevent it from exploding into a larger regional war.
However, as I have been saying for years, Generational Dynamics predicts that the Mideast is headed for a war pitting Jews against Arabs, Sunnis against Shias, and different ethnic groups against each other. We have Muslims killing Muslims in large numbers in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Egypt and Lebanon. In the past year, the amount of bloodshed of Muslims killing Muslims seems to have been increasing almost exponentially, and the growing Yemen war continues that trend. The News (Pakistan) and Reuters and McClatchy
Greece confirms that it will pay the IMF on Thursday and avoid bankruptcy
There have been unconfirmed reports that Greece was going into default on Wednesday to then use the four-day bank holiday leading up to Orthodox Easter on Sunday to convert the country’s currency from the euro back to the old drachmas.
But Greece’s finance minister Yanis Varoufakis met with Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on Sunday and confirmed that Greece will make the scheduled 450 million euro ($494 million) bailout loan interest payment to the IMF on Thursday, and would avoid bankruptcy.
Greece is almost out of cash, and will delay paying pensions and public employee wages in order to make the debt repayment. At the same time, Greece is begging the IMF and the eurozone finance ministers to hurry up and provide the next bailout tranche. Kathimerini and Capital (Greece)
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Yemen, International Monetary Fund, IMF, Christine Lagarde, Greece, Yanis Varoufakis
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