Nick Tsagaris Mcdonalds - Firefighting planes from Canada iced in and unable to get to Australia

A fleet of water scooping planes, lauded as the champions of Canada's firefighting fleet, are iced in and cannot make it to Australia to help fight fires.

The CL-415 "super scoopers" can land on dams, lakes or the sea and scoop up water to drop on fires.

7.30 has learned that despite early warnings of a dangerous fire season, authorities only requested the planes in December, by which time they were grounded by the frigid Canadian winter.

Stuart Ellis from the National Aerial Firefighting Centre (NAFC), confirmed they would not make it to Australia.

"Canada can't physically deploy those aircraft to Australia currently because of icing conditions," he said.

The NAFC is now scrambling to source other scooping planes from France and Malaysia.

Yesterday it was revealed two US air tankers due to arrive in Australia had been delayed due to natural disasters.

Former fire chief Greg Mullins told 7.30 he thinks homes could have been saved if Australia had more water bombers.

"I do believe that if we'd had more aircraft in the sky, possibly we could have saved more homes," he said.

"Aircraft don't put out fires, but they give you a fighting chance to save life and property.

"They take the intensity out of those fire fronts to allow the ground crews to get in and do their work."

Getting planes to Australia

The NAFC leases planes from around the country and overseas each fire season and is funded by the states, territories and the Federal Government.

States and territories request aircraft as they need them, and the centre tries to source them.

In November last year, the NAFC's Mr Ellis said he was confident Australia had enough water bombers for the impending season. It is now ordering more.

In 2019, former fire chiefs warned the Federal Government it needed to permanently fund the NAFC, but their warnings were ignored until this fire season was underway.

The Federal Government has now committed ongoing funding to the NAFC and kicked in up to $20 million for four large new water bombers, including the two delayed in America.

Australia's fire services rely heavily on aircraft leased from the United States and Europe.

But with fire seasons in America and Australia starting to overlap, aircraft are not making it to Australia in time.

7.30 has learned the well-known water bombing helicopter Elvis is still in the US, believed to be undergoing maintenance, after the fire season there.

The NAFC says it will put a business case to the Federal Government at the end of this season to request funding to buy more planes.

It also flagged it would look to have planes here earlier, starting in September, rather than November, to respond to the changing fire season.

The Prime Minister's office said in a statement it had been taking expert advice.

"Whether it's helping coordinate which offers of international support states and territories want to accept or what further water bombing planes need funding, we've been acting on everything that is asked of us by the country's fire chiefs," the statement said.

"We listen to the expert advice and the business case submitted by the National Aerial Firefighting Centre is why our Government committed an extra $11 million this summer and last summer for water bombing aircraft on top of the annual budget and it's why when we were asked to fund an extra plane at 8:00pm on Friday, 3 January, we responded the next morning with an extra $20 million that would support four planes."

"That ongoing support will be there at that level into the future."

By: abc.net.au

Nick Tsagaris Mcdonalds - Could tension between the US and Iran spark World War 3?

Our age is cursed by hyperbole, hysteria and exaggeration. Blame it on social media and the 24/7 news cycle, where one extreme comment follows another.

So it has been with the America-Iran stand off. It has already generated a Twitter hashtag: #WorldWarThree.

Ludicrous? Well, yes if you consider that by any measure Iran is dwarfed by the United States.

Its population is a quarter the size of America's, its economy is barely 2 per cent as large. Its outdated weapons are no match for the most powerful military force the world has ever known.

Yet Hillary Mann Leverett, a former senior US National Security Council official, told me on Al Jazeera this past week that in Iran the United States faces its greatest adversary since World War II.

She's ignoring the nuclear-armed Soviet Union of the Cold War and the current threat of China. But look more closely and she has a point.

Iran is more daunting than Ho Chi Minh's Viet Cong, or the Taliban, Al Qaeda or Islamic State.

Iran has a large military, a nuclear program, it is geographically crucial to the Middle East, it borders the Strait of Hormuz — one of the world's most crucial choke points — and it is resource rich.

Iran is the world's most dominant Shia Muslim power. Since seizing power in the 1979 revolution, Iran's clerical regime has withstood war, revolt and crippling economic sanctions.

Iran would not capitulate as quickly as Saddam's Iraq or Gaddafi's Libya. Anyway, its leaders are too shrewd to invite an Iraq-style US invasion with American troops rolling down the streets of Tehran.

That's not something that would appeal to America either.

Is America ready for another war?

A glance at history reminds us of the often fraught legacy of post-World War II American military adventurism: beating a retreat from Vietnam; the bodies of American soldiers dragged through Mogadishu's streets; fought to a standstill in Afghanistan (America's longest war); Libya divided with the government teetering at the onslaught of the warlord Khalifa Haftar (backed by Russia, among others).

One by one the dominoes have toppled in the Middle East since the Iraq war: the Arab spring, fallen dictators, the war in Syria, the emergence of Islamic State, millions homeless, countless dead, a flood of refugees.

Amid this upheaval Putin's Russia and Erdogan's Turkey have increased their power and influence. Iran and Saudi Arabia compete for dominance and fight a proxy war in Yemen.

Myriad insurgencies complicate the picture: forming and switching alliances, conquering and losing territory, their reach and ideology spreading far and wide.

In Africa, rebel groups have a foothold in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, the Central African Republic.

The likes of Al Shabab have proven resilient and adaptive. Despite heavy attack from African Union troops and American bombing, they can still strike in cities like Mogadishu and Nairobi. In parts of Somalia they operate as a quasi government.

Bigger than bin Laden

The 21st century was only a year old when Osama bin Laden orchestrated the September 11 attacks on the US. We live still in their shadow.

A new decade has begun with the killing of Qassem Soleimani, a man revered in Iran, yet detested elsewhere.

It is a far more significant moment than the killing of bin Laden or IS leader Abu Bakhar al-Baghdadi.

They didn't belong to national governments. Soleimani was crucial to the Iranian regime.

He seized on the post-9/11 upheaval to entrench Iranian power. He orchestrated the type of asymmetrical warfare that has undone America from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

Soleimani built a network of proxies, notably Hezbollah in Lebanon, which now dominates that country's politics. He successfully emulated the Hezbollah model in Syria and Iraq.

Yet Soleimani also saw the emerging backlash: mass protests across Lebanon and Iraq calling for an end to sectarianism and chanting "Iran out".

He made his fatal trip to Baghdad after Iraq's President rejected the nomination of a pro-Iranian candidate for prime minister.

US President Donald Trump decided to press go on Soleimani's execution, and now Iran threatens "severe revenge".

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatens to unleash martyrs on American targets. The Iraqi parliament votes to expel US forces from its land.

And the twitter hashtag #WorldWarThree goes viral.

War weakens strong nations

War weakens nations, even those victorious.

The two world wars ended Great Britain's dominance and handed global leadership to America.

The US has never stopped fighting since.

Its weakness is revealed in its three most recent presidents.

George W Bush started a war in Iraq that set fire to the region.

Barack Obama led from behind and left the world with Islamic State establishing a caliphate, Syria in flames, Russia annexing Crimea amid war with Ukraine, China claiming and militarising the disputed islands of the South China Sea and North Korea a rogue nuclear-armed state.

Now Donald Trump has assassinated — he argues justifiably — an Iranian military leader and national hero and Iran, threatens revenge that would take the world into uncharted territory.

What will WWIII look like?

This first month has already set the course of 2020, a presidential election year in the United States.

World War III? A look around the world tells us we may already be in it.

And we haven't mentioned the war in cyber space, where countries hack each other's military secrets and meddle in elections.

World War III won't look like World War II, just as that war didn't look like World War I.

Conflict with Iran alone would not end the century of American dominance — the US remains the world's biggest economy and by far its most powerful military.

But we haven't entered the post-American world just yet.

By: abc.net.au