23 November 2020 — Open Democracy
Exclusive: Secretive Cabinet Office ‘Clearing House’ for Freedom of Information requests also accused of “blacklisting” journalists; openDemocracy launching a legal bid for transparency
Peter Geoghegan Jenna Corderoy Lucas Amin
25 November 2020 — Institute of Race Relations
Today, we publish a major report, Deadly Crossings and the Militarisation of Britain’s Borders.
19 November 2020 — GMWatch
Comment by Jonathan Matthews
24 November 2020 — Indian Punchline
M.K. Bhadrakumar
The recent Issue Brief by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission entitled The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: A Testbed for Chinese Power Projection takes a close look at the Chinese security footprint in Central Asia and its political dimensions. A perception has grown over the most recent years amongst great game watchers generally, especially the US analysts, that China is gobbling up Central Asia. On the contrary, this report takes a contrarian view.
24 November 2020 — Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (COPS)
The public was largely shut out – only given official access to a live stream in a room in London, online it was limited to a live transcript which was a real eye strain to read for hours on end. Once again, it fell to those abused by spycops to being the truth to the public.
20 November 2020 — Indian Punchline
M.K. Bhadrakumar
The trilateral agreement on November 10 between Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia over Nagorno-Karabakh is leading to a geopolitical struggle in the Caucasus. So long as Armenia and Azerbaijan were ferociously fighting, the great game lurked in the shade.
22 November 2020 — The Consent Factory
C.J. Hopkins
Break out the Wagner, folks … the Germans are back! No, not the warm, fuzzy, pussified, peace-loving, post-war Germans … the Germans! You know the ones I mean. The “I didn’t know where the trains were going” Germans. The “I was just following orders” Germans. The other Germans.
23 November 2020 — World Beyond War
Did you know that the U.S. military has 29 military bases in 15 countries across Africa? The U.S. military established AFRICOM in 2008, despite the majority of African nations rejecting it. Under a false guise of providing security, the U.S. uses its military force to impose control of African land, resources, and labor to serve the needs of U.S. multi-national corporations.
20 November, 2020 — Summit News
By Steve Watson
GCHQ spooks are monitoring the movement of British people minute by minute to check if they are complying with government restrictions, according to reports.
22 November 2020 — Paleo Diabetic
The governments “top men” are working on itPeter Doshi, an associate editor at British Medical Journal, is not favorably impressed with the recent vaccine trial announcements. “90% effective.” “95% effective!”
Coronavirus guru Anthony Fauci assures us that a coronavirus vaccine will only be FDA-approved if it’s “safe and effective.” (more…)
19 November 2020 — Middle East Eye
While the documentary’s release has been blocked by British filmmakers, the truth of its story cannot be suppressed
“Angry TV film-makers stop release of lauded Iranian documentary,” ran the headline of a recent Guardian news story. What documentary exactly is this? We learn: “Coup 53, which charts MI6’s role in the shah’s restoration, has been blocked by makers of a 1985 show, who say it sullies their names.”
21 November, 2020 — RT
A paper that analyzed the results of a massive post-lockdown Covid-19 testing drive that included nearly every eligible resident of Wuhan, China has found no evidence that positive cases without symptoms spread the disease.
19 November 2020 — Open Democracy
Boris Johnson’s government has for the first time confirmed the existence of a prime ministerial task force which is reportedly planning a “radical shake-up of the NHS”.
Freedom of Information disclosures to openDemocracy show the new “No.10 Health and Social Care Taskforce” reports to a Steering Group chaired by Munira Mirza, the influential head of Boris Johnson’s policy unit, and that it “met weekly” from July to September with a further meeting in October.
22 November 2020 — Good Law Project
Kate Bingham heads up Britain’s vaccine task force. She’s a venture capitalist with no public health experience, married to a Conservative minister. Dido Harding leads the Test and Trace system. She has no public health experience and is the wife of a Conservative MP. Mike Coupe, is head of COVID-19 testing, and has – you guessed it – no public health experience. The list goes on.
22 November 2020 — Global Research
By Michael Welch and Michael Parenti
“Those larger institutional forces are directed by conscious human agency, and those agencies use conspiracy or non-conspiracy, they use conspiratorial forces or non-conspiratorial forces, and that the conspiratorial forces are important, they’re not rare exceptions, and that they are systemic in their nature and in their output.” – Michael Parenti (from this week’s lecture.)
20 November 2020 — The Electronic Intifada
The UK’s Labour Party has been purging members using a hit list by a leading Israel lobby group, The Electronic Intifada has learned.
19 November 2020 — GMWatch
There is no global shortage of food, there is a glut, even under any plausible future population scenario, writes Dr Jonathan Latham
The idea that the world might soon be unable to feed its human population is an old and powerful narrative that has recently been extensively exploited by agribusiness. In its modern form the idea rests on the surprisingly narrow foundations of a small number of mathematical food system models. These in turn rest on specific testable assumptions.
Remember what normal life used to be like? Well here’s a beautiful reminder in one, beautiful concert.
19 November 2020 — Tricontinental
Cover of dossier 34: Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In 2011, the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell travelled to India to deliver the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Lecture in New Delhi. Mankell recounted an incident from Mozambique, where he lived for part of each year. In the 1980s, after Mozambique won its independence from Portugal in 1974, the South African apartheid regime and the settler-colonial army of Rhodesia backed an anti-communist faction against the government of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO). The point of the war was to destroy the bases of the South African and Zimbabwean national liberation forces that had been given permission to operate by Mozambique’s FRELIMO government.
19 November 2020 — Sebastion Rushworth MD
A few months back I wrote an article about the state of the evidence on face masks. At that point, there were no good studies looking at the effectiveness of face masks in preventing the spread of covid-19 specifically, but there was a systematic review that looked at all randomized trials that had been done on face masks for the prevention of respiratory infections more generally. That review found that surgical face masks reduced the probability of getting a respiratory infection by around 4% in absolute terms (17% in relative terms).
