28 January 2021 — Institute of Race Relations
What is often overlooked in struggles around race, policing and deaths in custody, is the role of mental ill health as a key thread of vulnerability. Several stark cases have shown how black men suffering a mental health crisis can end up dead following police involvement.
28 January 2021 — Good Law Project
Correspondence with Government has revealed they expect to spend a staggering £1 million defending our judicial review of their decisions to award contracts criticised by the NAO. This is a sum unprecedented in our lawyers’ experience of judicial review proceedings. We can’t but wonder whether they are trying to scare us off – using the bottomless public purse to avoid accountability to the public.
21 January 2021 — Environmental Health Trust
28 January 2021 — Tricontinental
Mahmoud Sabri (Iraq), Death of a Child, 1963.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Someday the world will be free of the coronavirus. Then, we will glance backward at these years of misery inflicted by virions with spike proteins that have struck down millions of people and held social life in its grip. Much will be debated about the origins of the virus and the rapidity of its spread around the world, a transmission that shows how closely interconnected we have become due to modern transportation technology. There is no going backward from the processes that will continue to shrink the globe, bringing us closer and closer together, bringing other viruses and diseases greater and greater host populations. Turning inward is not a solution to the waves of contagion that have already come before us – from the plagues of the early modern period onwards – and those that have yet to appear. There is not yet a method in our arsenal to eradicate the possibility of something like the coronavirus. Our focus must be on how we protect ourselves.
27 January 2021 — Moon of Alabama
Earlier today police in Europe took down the Emotet bot-network:
First discovered as a fairly run-of-the-mill banking trojan back in 2014, Emotet evolved over the years into one of the most professional and resilient cyber crime services in the world, and became a “go-to” solution for cyber criminals.
Its infrastructure acted as a mechanism to gain access to target systems, which was done via an automated spam email process that delivered Emotet malware to its victims via malicious attachments, often shipping notices, invoices and, since last spring, Covid-19 information or offers. If opened, victims would be promoted to enable macros that allowed malicious code to run and instal Emotet.
This done, Emotet’s operators then sold access on to other cyber criminal groups as a means to infiltrate their victims, steal data, and drop malware and ransomware. The operators of TrickBot and Ryuk were among the many users of Emotet.
28 January 2021 — Dr Malcolm Kendrick
This blog was published on RT-com, after much discussion and a few changes. It can be seen here It took a few days. The editors were concerned about the fact-checkers having a go at it and demanding retraction.
We went back and forward. I assured them that all my quoted facts were correct, so the fact-checkers could only attack the ‘opinion’ stated. Which they may well do. If so, fact checkers are no longer checking facts, they are decreeing which scientific opinions are correct, and which are wrong.
28 January 2021
By Don Fitz
During the late 60s, when the US war on Viet Nam was going strong and people were questioning capitalism, I drove from Eugene to Berkeley where my sister was living. I ran into folks who invited me to a discussion about starting a commune. There, everyone talked about dropping out of consumer society and buying land to get away from it all. Asking about how you could confront the horrors around us by separating yourself from society, I got a string of denunciations accusing me of buying into what I claimed to oppose.
27 January 2021 — Black Agenda Report
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Democrats are determined to snuff out freedom of speech and assembly to protect the corporate ruling order – while pretending it’s to safeguard Black people. Continue reading
26 January 2021 — True Publica
The 1,000 richest people on the planet recouped their COVID-19 losses within just nine months, but it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic, reveals a new Oxfam report today. ‘The Inequality Virus’ is being published on the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Davos Agenda’.
25 January 2021 — Sebastian Rushworth
Here’s a graph that doesn’t get shown in the mass media, and that I’m sure all those who want you to stay fearful of covid don’t want you to see. It shows the share of the tested population with antibodies to covid in Sweden week by week, beginning in the 28th week of 2020 (the first week for which the Swedish Public Health Authority provides data on the share of tests coming back positive).
25 January 2021 — Global Justice Now
The UK government has used half a billion pounds of aid money to fund unaffordable private healthcare services in the global south. We need to take a stand and demand that public money is used to support universal public healthcare instead.
24 January 2021 — Internationalist 360°
Syria’s state-run media earlier reported that 200 troops had been flown to US bases in al-Shaddadi on 21 January for future deployment at Omar oil field and Koniko gas field in neighbouring Deir ez-Zor province. It was also reported that the US-led military coalition had dispatched 40 truckloads of weapons and logistical equipment to Hasakah.
25 January 2021 — Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Biden Will Resume “Humanitarian” Wars / Haitians Tell President “Get Out by February 7” / “Expect Push for Censorship Under Biden
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
The Biden Administration will “shift back to the ‘humanitarian’ interventionism model of US imperialism,” said Danny Haiphong, contributing editor of Black Agenda Report and co-host of the influential podcast The Left Lens. “Biden’s rhetoric from the beginning has not been encouraging on easing the Cold War against China” and heightened tensions with Russia, said Haiphong.
Continue reading
25 January 2021 — theplanningmotivedotcom
At first sight, the Pandemic, Grenfell and Brexit, don’t seem to be connected, but they are. They represent the uncivilised outcomes of an unrestrained capitalism obsessed by cutting costs, the state and regulations. The result is that the short-term enrichment of the tiny minority are now being swamped by the longer-term losses that the rest of society will be forced to bear.
25 January 2021 — Michael Roberts Blog
During the year of the COVID, output, investment and employment in nearly all the economies of the world plummeted, as lockdowns, social isolation and collapsing international trade contracted output and spending. And yet the opposite was the case for the stock and bond markets of the major economies. The US stock market indexes (along with others) ended 2020 at all-time highs. After the initial shock of the COVID pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns, when the US stock market indexes plunged by 40%, markets then made a dramatic recovery, eventually surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
23 January 2021 — Global Justice in the 21st Century
Richard Falk
When a society is deeply troubled, and governed in ways that seem under the influenceof dark forces and disinformation becomes part of everyday life, it seems natural that all sorts of explanations will flourish. Few of us can handle uncertainty, and so many affirm falsehoods for thesake of achieving a specious clarity about the unknowable, or at least convert uncertainty into congenial forms of certainty, a dynamic that explains the rise of cultic thinking in our time and the spread of extremist versions of religious teachings. One variant of this phenomenon that has gained salience during the Trump presidency was supposedly pernicious role of the American ‘deep state.’ Trumpists complaining that unelected bureaucrats were subverting the great leader’s agenda while anti-Trumpists were disappointed that this source of influence didn’t find ways to remove such a political imposter given the damage he was doing national self-confidence and to the international rendering of the previously high end American brand. Some asked in exasperated tones ‘why is the deep state asleep?’
21 January 2021 — The Defender
By Mercola
In an “inauguration” of its own while Joe Biden was being sworn into office, the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated new rules regarding the PCR assays used for testing for COVID-19.
21 January 2021 — The Dossier
Wall Street, Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley are swimming in cash and prosperity. 2020 could not have gone better for the country’s elites. The vast majority of Americans, on the other hand, have been forced into financial, physical, and emotional ruin. 2020 served as the year that government dictates — purposed with fighting a disease with a 99.8% recovery rate — manifested unprecedented wealth inequality, and created health issues far more dangerous than COVID-19. The unintended consequences of “fighting a virus” with the power of government are now on display for the world to see.
21 January 2021 — Interpress News Service
A lockdown closer home. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres walking the empty corridors of the UN Secretariat building in New York in 2020. Credit: United Nations
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Jan 7 2021 (IPS) – The currently available Covid-19 vaccines have been authorized for ‘emergency use ‘in Europe and North America. This is due to an apparent spike in Covid-19 flu cases in the northern hemisphere as winter advances. Highly advertised vaccines are being produced and rolled out at ‘warped speed’ by powerful pharmaceutical and bio-technology companies headquartered in Euro-America although their efficacy including how long their immunity lasts is not clear.
21 January 2021 — The Electronic Intifada
Every act of censorship inadvertently achieves its opposite by drawing attention to its subject.
Last week, an Israeli court ordered the 2002 film Jenin, Jenin to be banned in Israel and all copies of it confiscated.
The film – which was directed by Mohammed Bakri, a Palestinian citizen of Israel – has been the subject of censorship attempts since its release around 18 years ago.
The New Dark Age 