The media’s watchdog role is an illusion. The latest scandal reveals just how dependent journalists are on government
Middle East Eye – 21 January 2022
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s head is on the chopping block. Each day, the media digs up more embarrassing details of parties hosted at his No 10 residence or other government buildings, in flagrant violation of strict lockdown rules enforced on the rest of the country.
South African jazz artists tend to immerse themselves in art spaces other than music. It is a visual and musical communing across forms that meet not only in artistry, but also in politics.
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Moscow Doesn’t Want Mediation With Kiev, Just Its Implementation Of The Minsk Accords
https://orientalreview.org/2022/01/21/moscow-doesnt-want-mediation-with-kiev-just-its-implementation-of-the-minsk-accords/
Biden dismisses ‘stupid question’ on Ukraine
https://www.rt.com/news/546752-biden-stupid-question-ukraine/
Priti Patel, the UK Home secretary
FILE PHOTO. The Tabqa Dam in Syria. ©Claude Salhani / Sygma via Getty ImagesIn 2017, the US bombed a piece of strategic infrastructure in Syria, the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River, despite it being on a no-strike list, the New York Times reported.
In the occupied Golan Heights, the population of Settlers and Syrians is approximately equal, but experts fear that a new Israeli project will turn Syrians into a demographic minority on their own land.
by
Jessica Buxbaum
On the Biden Plantation
The idea that Joe Biden would provide harm reduction was created to help the unpopular candidate secure an electoral victory. The reality is a litany of lies and certain defeat for democrats at the polls. There is no harm reduction in a system dedicated to neo-liberalism and austerity.
SPEECH: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., All Labor Has Dignity, March 18, 1968
Martin Luther King was assassinated when he supported Black workers on strike in Memphis, Tennessee. Weeks earlier he spoke of the need for systemic change that would treat all workers with dignity and fairness.
This week, a beleaguered Boris Johnson administration reacted to calls for his resignation by announcing it will defund Britain’s public broadcaster and further militarise the Franco-British border. With many speculating it is a matter of when, not if, Johnson falls, it is important to recognise that such populist policies, launched to placate the right-wing media and others, are consistent with a pattern of entrenched impunity by this government: in the policing of borders, the police, the judiciary, equalities, and human rights. To help understand the sheer proliferation of government measures and proposals put forward over the past year, this week IRR News published a five-part resource, Impunity Entrenched, compiled by IRR vice chair Frances Webber. These measures, informed by an ideology of punishment and exclusion, will destroy the right to asylum, fill prisons, further divide society and exacerbate racial tensions and hatred, while entrenching the powerful by blocking routes to political, legal and public accountability. What they all share is a retreat from values of fairness, equality and basic human decency, in favour of strong-arm policing of minorities and dissent at home, abroad and on the borders, within a punitive, crude, nationalistic political culture.
Think Tank-Social Media AxisThat ASPI is now partially in charge of Twitter’s moderation, influencing what hundreds of millions of people see daily, is a grave threat to the free flow of information, as well as to the chances for a peaceful 21st century.
A U.S. government-funded agency that claims to promote democracy but which helps undermine governments independent of Washington has moved decisively into Britain’s media space since 2016.
By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis
Declassified UK
Carelle Homsy (Egypt), Liberté Egypte, 2009.Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
For over a decade, Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been in and out of Egypt’s prisons, never free of the harassment of the military state apparatus. In 2011, during the high point of the revolution, Alaa emerged as an important voice of his generation and since then has been a steady moral compass despite his country’s attempts to suffocate his voice. On 25 January 2014, to commemorate the third anniversary of the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s government, Alaa and the poet Ahmed Douma wrote a moving epistle from their dungeon in Tora Prison, Cairo. This prison, which houses Alaa and other political prisoners, is not far from the beautiful Nile and – depending on Cairo’s traffic – not too far from the Garden City office of Mada Masr, where the epistle was published. In cities such as Cairo, the prisons where political prisoners are tortured are often located in quite ordinary neighbourhoods.
[Source: chappette.com]Monsanto (now part of Bayer AB) had to pay $78 million in 2018 and $10 billion more in 2020 to settle 100,000 cancer lawsuits. But that won’t stop a company whose 2021 revenues will top $49.991 billion…which is why Roundup is still being profitably sprayed in 160 countries around the world.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warns of imminent Russian assault on Ukraine, scrambling to get allies to rally. (File photo)A special press briefing in unseemly hurry by the US state department to warn an imminent Russian assault on Ukraine; a surprise call by state secretary Blinken to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to be followed by an unscheduled meeting in Geneva Friday; a whirlwind tour of Kiev and Berlin through Thursday — US diplomacy has gone into overdrive as the timeline for giving a formal response to Russia’s demands of security guarantee draws closer.
History’s annals are filled with war profiteers and hustlers for the opportunistic return. They come in the form of hoarders, arms manufacturers and wily business folk making a steal on slaughter and mayhem. But the other conflict – that of battling a pandemic – has also shown that profits exist for those willing to exploit the crisis.
There has been much gnashing of ‘liberal’ teeth and pulling out of ‘centrist’ hair following the Tory government’s announcement that the BBC licence fee will be abolished in 2027.
“The court recognizes the classification of the insurer who, in view of the announced side effects, including death, legally regards participation in the phase three experiment, whose proven harmlessness is not given, as voluntarily taking a fatal risk that is not covered by the contract and legally recognized as suicide.”
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Humanity’s collective awakening will unfold in ways that nobody is anticipating, for the same reasons an individual’s awakening always unfolds in ways they can’t anticipate.
Big Brother Watch Team
Afghans protest the former U.S. embassy building demanding the release of Afghanistan’s frozen assets and resumption of international funding amid worsening economic conditions in Kabul, Afghanistan, on December 21, 2021. [Source: theintercept.com]Over the past few months, U.S. lawmakers, the Afghan government, and the international community have called on Washington to stop strangling the Afghan economy as its people continue to suffer from a U.S.-created humanitarian crisis. On December 22nd, the Biden administration effectively rejected those calls, opting instead for half-measures that will do little to counter the effects of stringent economic sanctions imposed on the Taliban or to improve the material well-being of the Afghan people.
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The New Dark Age 