Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.
What a clusterfuck of an election.
Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.
It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don’t seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan’s supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan’s party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.
This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as “the coalition of losers” by Khan’s supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I was watching some of Genocide Joe’s older interviews (2016 and earlier)… He sounds incredibly coherent, incredibly well-spoken, and incredibly arrogant. A model American statesman.
What the fuck happened?
Global protected area policies sparks conflicts with Mexico Indigenous groups
The creation of the UNESCO-listed Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Mexico’s Campeche region has led to a long-standing conflict with Indigenous residents who argue the government restricted their livelihoods, despite promises of support and land titles by Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT).
Culture and conservation thrive as Great Lakes tribes bring back native wild rice
Wild rice or manoomin is an ecologically important and culturally revered wetland species native to the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada, which once covered thousands of acres and was a staple for Indigenous peoples.
In recent years, native tribes and First Nations, working with federal and state agencies, scientists and funding initiatives, have led wild rice restoration programs that have successfully revived the species in parts of the region and paved the way for education and outreach.
TikTok needs to get ahead of the curve on this US ban by aggressively pushing creators to advertise VPNs.
There’s no reason ByteDance would divest TikTok, it makes no sense from a profit perspective. Far more likely is that TikTok gets banned in the US and US users are forced to go through a VPN.
Same reason Alphabet won’t divest it’s global Google operations to operate in China.
Brazilian Air Force phasing out iconic Hercules
Brazil’s Air Force (FAB) is phasing out the iconic US-built Lockheed C-130 Hercules four-engined turboprop aircraft to replace it with the locally-produced Embraer KC-390 Millennium, of which a total of 19 units are expected to be delivered.
With 29 units in FAB service over the past nearly 60 years and after over 377,000 hours of flights, the historic model reaches its end at the South American country’s military. On Feb. 29, 2024, the unit that went into operation at the FAB in 1964 made its last flight for the 1st Transport Group at the Galeao Air Base. The event was closed with the passage of a C-130 followed by a KC-390.
PBS: Here’s why you poors are wrong to feel like the economy is bad.
I hate this video so much. I wish I hadn’t watched it. A lot of the replies are good though.
Is there any basis behind the claim that Trump would be worse on Palestine than Biden, other than “Trump is evil, therefore, he will be worse than Biden on everything”?
“Political violence has no place in America.”
Because it belongs in Gaza of course.
I was wondering why claims of Uyghur sterilization fit so prominently in US claims… The Role of Sterilization in Controlling Puerto Rican Fertility
I should have known.
haiti does little bit prison abolition
Edit: to be slightly less nebulous, from aj
Gangs led by Jimmy Cherizier, a former police officer known as Barbecue, are trying to force Henry from power.
Pierre Esperance of the National Network for Defense of Human Rights said only about 100 of the National Penitentiary’s estimated 3,800 inmates remained inside after the assault on Saturday night.
One voluntary prison worker on Sunday said that 99 prisoners had opted to remain in their cells in the main jail for fear of being killed in the crossfire. These included several retired Colombian soldiers who were jailed for their alleged involvement in the assassination of former President Jovenel Moise.
The prime minister’s exact whereabouts remained unclear on Sunday. Henry had been due to return from a visit to Kenya where he signed a security deal to tackle gang violence.
Nearly 15,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in recent days, with 10 sites hosting internally displaced people emptied over the weekend, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Henry, who became prime minister in 2021 after Moise’s assassination, was supposed to step down by early February, but told a regional summit in Guyana before travelling to Kenya that he would only hold elections by August 2025 once the situation was more stable.
The last elections took place in 2016.
lmao
Nikki Haley becomes first woman to win a Republican presidential primary
And also the first person to win a Republican primary with a majority Democratic votes.
That primary is DC by the way. I’m sure all five Republicans living there voted Trump.
That primary is DC by the way.
I was trying to find turnout numbers and the DC Republican Party is all in on Haley 😂
The story of Tulare Lake. Tulare Lake in the Central Valley, California was the largest lake West of the Great Lakes in the US. It’s believed to have supported a massive collection of Aboriginal tribes in the area.
The Americans arrive in 1826. They bring disease and begin ethnic cleansing of the Aboriginal tribes there. The rivers which feed Tulare Lake are diverted for agriculture or dammed to prevent flooding of these new farms. Over the years, the lake slowly withers and drains due to a lack of inflows and an abundance of outflows.
Today, the lake no longer exists except for winters with exceptional snowfall.
Is it possible that the increasingly flagrant warcrimes being committed by Israel is a sign that this war’s really not going so well for them? They’re taking their frustrations out on civilians who they know aren’t able to fight back, just so they can feel like they’re “powerful” and “winning.”
