t’s been a busy few weeks at Big Brother Watch, as ever! Here’s a quick run down of what we’ve been doing to fight facial recognition, ‘no jab no job‘ policies, censorship, and citizen scoring in the welfare system.
President Joe Biden continues to play the cluelessly racist and paternalistic Ugly American in the Horn of Africa.Under his leadership, the US has been at war with Ethiopia since last November, when its former puppet, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, attacked a federal Ethiopian army base in Mekelle, the capital of the country’s Tigray Region. Tigrayans are only 6% of Ethiopia’s population, but the TPLF ruled the whole nation with an iron fist from 1991 to 2018, when popular uprisings forced them from power.
There is fear in Russia that the U.S. is egging the Ukraine into a renewed active conflict with its renegade eastern Donbass region and thereby into a war with Russia.
In his latest RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP Patrick Armstrong recollects the most recent developments:
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Allso available as a PDF
Welcome to the latest edition of Statewatch News, with information on two upcoming events and all the material published on our website over the last fortnight. In order to keep you better-informed we are also adding a new section, ‘The Roundup’, made up of material we have shared via our social media accounts in the last two weeks
There may be some duplication due to cross-posting and may be updated throughout the day, so please check back
Indigenous Leaders Call for Landback Reforms and Climate Justice in “Required Reading”
https://countercurrents.org/2021/11/indigenous-leaders-call-for-landback-reforms-and-climate-justice-in-required-reading/
COP26- Real Climate Change Candor or More Dissimulation
https://countercurrents.org/2021/11/cop26-real-climate-change-candor-or-more-dissimulation/
The socialist commune Abahlali baseMjondolo built from the eKhenana land occupation in Durban has won international admiration and solidarity, but it now faces a new wave of repression.
28 October 2021: Abahlali baseMjondolo deputy president Mqapheli Bonono walks past the Thuli Ndlovu community hall in eKhenana, Durban.by Greg Palast • Zach D. Roberts for BuzzFlash
Famed indigenous human rights lawyer Steven Donziger had already been under house arrest for over 800 days when he reported to prison on October 27 to begin a six-month sentence. His crime: winning the largest single pollution judgment in history, $9.5 billion, for the Cofan people of the Amazon rain-forest in Ecuador.
When it comes to the Prime Minister’s allies, there’s a pattern emerging in Downing Street. When Boris Johnson doesn’t like the outcome of an official process, he tries to rip up the rules and start again.
There may be some duplication due to cross-posting and may be updated throughout the day, so please check back
Germany says nuclear energy will set back turning EU green
https://www.rt.com/news/540009-eu-germany-france-nuclear-green/
Bill Gates Should Know Better: How the Israeli Occupation Ravages the Environment in Palestine
https://countercurrents.org/2021/11/bill-gates-should-know-better-how-the-israeli-occupation-ravages-the-environment-in-palestine/
Kang Minjin of the Justice Party of Korea at COP26 in Glasgow, 6 November 2021. Photograph by Hwang Jeongeun.Dear friends,
Greeting from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Nothing useful seemed to emerge from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at COP26 this week. The leaders of developed countries made tired speeches about their commitment to reversing the climate catastrophe. Their words rang with the clichés of spin doctors, their sincerity zero, their actual commitments to lowering carbon emissions nil. Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a Filipino climate activist and spokesperson for Fridays for Future, said that these leaders ‘spew empty, tired promises’, leaving young people like her with a ‘sense of betrayal’. As a child, she said, she felt the danger of being caught up in flash floods in the Philippines, floods that have terrible repercussions for high-risk countries. ‘There’s a climate trauma that young people experience’, said Tan, ‘yet the UNFCCC keeps us out’.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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In a new article promoting the CIA’s new mission center focused on China and the need to pour more resources into countering Beijing, Bloomberg also accidentally makes the case that many of the Chinese government’s controversial domestic policies are entirely justified and completely necessary.
An author for the HuffPost has written a way too long screed on Biden’s perceived lack of action against the Saudi clown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
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A tacit agreement between the government and Facebook appears to have been made: you can keep the profits, but we control the message. As such, a cynic might wonder what functional difference there is between Facebook and the national security state.
Reexamining and recalibrating its foreign policy towards Africa is something that may not appeal to France right now but it’s something that must be done.
BAMAKO, MALI — On the 8th of October, Choguel Maïga, the prime minister of Mali, boldly informed the world that its former colonial power, France, was sponsoring terrorists in the country’s northern region. Standing before dozens of cameras and microphones, he provided details on how the French army had established an enclave in the northern town of Tidal and handed it over to well-known terrorist groups. The revelation was shocking not simply for the serious nature of the accusation but because in past times West African leaders have rarely sparred so openly with the French government. A chain of events simmering in the background for weeks triggered the latest spat.
Pakistan extended a special invitation to Acting Interim Foreign Minister of Afghanistan Amir Khan Muttaqi to attend the “Troika Plus” meeting in Islamabad on November 11, 2021The stunning disclosure late Tuesday in Brussels that the US is working on a “road map” for according recognition to the Taliban Government will take a lot of people by surprise but it could have been expected sooner rather than later.
(Brian Berletic – NEO) – In what at first glance looked like the European Union getting onboard with the US-led confrontation with China, a recent delegation led by Raphael Glucksmann sent to Taiwan supposedly representing the EU tells a story less of supposed mainland “interference” within the island territory, and instead, a story about US interference within the EU.
Iran links ‘economic terrorism’ to global warming
https://www.rt.com/news/539858-iran-uk-cop26-sanctions/
The Most Basic of All Human Rights: Clean Water
https://countercurrents.org/2021/11/the-most-basic-of-all-human-rights-clean-water/
Twilight capitalism: Karl Marx and the decay of the profit system is the best book on Marxist political economy in 2021. Authored by Murray EG Smith, Jonah Butovsky and Josh Watterton, these Canadian-based Marxist economists have delivered a comprehensive and often original analysis of global capitalism in the 21st century.
By Nan McCurdy
Nicaraguans voting in November 7 elections. [Source: photo courtesy of Nan McCurdy]In the lead up to the February 25, 1990 elections, President George H.W. Bush told the Nicaraguan people that the U.S. would keep funding the Contras (counter-revolutionaries recruited, funded and directed by President Reagan, the State Department and the CIA in 1980s illegal war), block loans and maintain the brutal economic blockade where Nicaragua couldn’t even get medicine or parts for an x-ray machine.
The New Dark Age 