Justice

Loving Africa. It's time for justice. Enough!!!! #EndAnglophoneCrisis
please let's #EndAnglophoneCrisis
Umunyarwanda

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

Amazon has been caught buying and destroying rare books in bulk to train its AI models – after investigative journalists planted a tracking device in one of the books.

The retail giant is the latest company to be exposed for the practice after 404 Media convinced a bookseller to hide an AirTag among a large batch of books that Amazon had ordered anonymously.

The delivery was tracked to VGT3, an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas where books have their spines lopped off so the pages can be scanned – and are then thrown away.

The door of the warehouse has a sign with a logo featuring a dinosaur that appears ready to devour a book.

AI firms are buying up older books because they are guaranteed to be authored by humans – there is no risk they contain AI-generated content that might corrupt training models.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring millions of books to feed its demand for human-authored training material, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.

Amazon workers are reportedly required to scan barcodes or ISBNs before scanning books, suggesting they are methodically working their way through all the world’s printed output.

At one stage, staff were concerned that the warehouse might be shuttered if the flow of printed material ran dry, but the facility remains functional, Ars Technica reported.

Amazon said in a statement: “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.”

[Karen Attiah @KarenAttiah]

BREAKING:

The Washington Post fired me last year for speaking the truth after Charlie Kirk's killing. I fought back.

I'm happy to announce: I won my case against the Washington Post.

They have been ordered to reinstate me immediately. ✊🏾

https://t.co/TISoTvFFO9

[SlavicPatriot @infantserbian]

American YouTubers are flooding Cuba right now. Filming the poverty. Shocked by the conditions. No electricity. Empty shelves. Crumbling buildings.

And every single one blames the Cuban government.

Not one mentions the US embargo. 64 years. Since 1962.

Let me explain what that means in simple terms.

Cuba can't trade with the US. Can't buy American goods. Can't sell to American markets. That's expected.

But here's the real damage: any company that does business with Cuba gets sanctioned by the US. Any bank that processes Cuban transactions gets cut off from the American financial system. Any ship that docks in Cuba can't enter a US port for 6 months.

The US didn't just embargo Cuba. They forced the entire world to embargo Cuba.

For 64 years.

No access to international banking. Can't import medical equipment. Can't buy spare parts for machinery. Can't trade freely with 90% of the global economy.

I watched sanctions destroy Serbia in the 90s. We got 8 years of full economic isolation. Cancer patients died waiting for medicine we couldn't import. Inflation hit 300 million percent. Our economy collapsed.

That was 8 years. Cuba has endured 64.

And now American YouTubers show up, film the poverty their own government created, and blame the victims.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because the media campaign is starting. Marco Rubio just said "all options are on the table" for Cuba. American influencers are suddenly very interested in Cuban suffering.

This is the setup. Film the crisis. Blame the government. Build public support. Then invade.

I've seen this playbook before. Serbia. Iraq. Libya. Venezuela last week.

Watch. Cuba is next.

Cuba is poor because America strangled them for 64 years and won't let anyone else help. That's the answer. Everything else is propaganda.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

One of the most radical -- and reprehensible -- Obama policies was John Brennan's CIA drone assassination program based on the claimed right to eradicate anyone remotely suspected of terrorist ties: all with no process or evidentiary burden of any kind. Most of the time, they had no idea who they were killing, and we know they murdered large numbers of innocent people in multiple countries (including ones at wedding parties and funerals).

At least the Obama officials had the excuse -- frivolous though it was -- of acting under the authority of the "War on Terror." There is not even an arguable legal basis for blowing up small boats in international waters, which Trump and Hegseth have been doing for a year by invoking some vague "War on Drugs" theory. If you suspect these boats carry drugs, they're so easy to interdict with the Coast Guard (as @RandPaul notes, the Coast Guard often finds no drugs on boats they strongly suspect of carrying them).

I'm sure it's exciting for many to watch these grainy images of the mighty US military blowing up small boats and killing people, even when it turns out they're just ordinary fisherman. It provides some vicarious sense of power for those who feel powerless. But it's precisely this king of ongoing arrogant assertion of unilateral, unlimited global police power that alienates so much of the world (and has had literally no effect on drug demand or availability inside the US).

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Ask yourself a specific question.

Not abstract. Specific.

If a foreign country:

Funded opposition movements in your country.

Ran a covert program to assassinate your political leaders.

Imposed sanctions that targeted your civilian economy.

Backed a coup against your elected government.

Trained a replacement government to serve its interests.

Stationed its military in countries surrounding yours.

Conducted surveillance operations inside your borders.

Vetoed international agreements that would have benefited you.

If a foreign country did all of that to the United States:

What would Americans call that country?

They would call it an enemy.

They would call it an aggressor.

They would say it threatened their way of life, their freedom, their very existence.

They would say resistance to it was not just justified but sacred.

Now look at the list of countries America has done exactly those things to.

And then look at the list of countries America calls its enemies.

Notice anything?

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

"Nos enfrentamos en el Congo a una persona que es Fidel Castro o incluso algo peor. Lumumba debe ser un objetivo urgente con una alta prioridad de toda nuestra acción encubierta".

El 25 de agosto de 1960, Allen Dulles, director de la CIA, ordenaba la eliminación de Lumumba, el líder anticolonial que llevó la independencia en el Congo, por no someterse a los intereses del imperialismo.

Lumumba se negó a ser un dictador títere del imperialismo como tantos otros líderes corruptos en África y defendió la libertad de su pueblo... por lo que CIA/EEUU y Bélgica, lo torturaron, lo descuartizaron y lo disolvieron en ácido... robándole un diente de oro y conservándolo como un trofeo durante décadas.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

This image of a football match in Gaza was removed from a sports photography festival in France, following Israeli pressure.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

BREAKING: Israel just bombed a water desalination plant in northern Gaza.

Not a military base.
An essential infrastructure built to provide water to civilians suffering through an extreme water crisis.

Gaza is running out of water.

This is an act of genocide.

[Vijay Prashad @vijayprashad]

In the scandal of the Open Letter, the @guardian should do an investigation - given the following facts that have now emerged.

1. Mumia Abu-Jamal did not give consent for his signature on this letter.
2. Several initial signatories, such as Robin DG Kelley, have now retracted their signatures saying that the letter that was published was not what was shown to them.

a. Why did the Guardian's editorial team not check to make sure that the signatures were accurate? They could have asked to see emails or - in the case of Mumia - letters to verify the signatures on such a consequential statement.

b. Why did the Guardian not verify with the signatories that what they were publishing was indeed what the signatories had read?

The @guardian is responsible for ensuring accuracy. It turns out that they let slip a poorly executed intelligence operation.

[Kim Iversen 🇺🇸 @KimIversenShow]

My account has been permanently banned from @tiktok for criticizing Israel. I appealed, they denied.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Mientras los niños palestinos en Gaza andan bebiendo agua de los charcos para no morirse de sed, hoy "Israel" ha bombardeado una planta de purificación de agua para que haya más escasez.

Estos genocidas sionistas son alimañas malvadas salidas de las alcantarillas del infierno.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I'm typically not one to toot my own horn but I think I may have written the single best article on Xinjiang this past decade.

Never has writing an article taken me so much time: almost two months.

It involved, as amply documented on this platform, a six-week RV roadtrip through Xinjiang during which I posted so relentlessly that I suspect several of you muted me somewhere around day six, and are only reading this now because someone told you the ordeal was finally over 😅

More seriously, I did what unfortunately all too few writers do these days when writing about a topic: I genuinely went deep.

Not only did I travel almost everywhere in Xinjiang and spoke with hundreds of people in the process, but I also spent a further 10 days afterwards in Urumqi - the province's capital - to engage with the local intelligentsia (journalists, university professors, public servants both junior and senior, XPCC/Bingtuan executives, businessmen, etc.) to get as accurate a read on the place as I could.

Meanwhile, when back in Urumqi after our roadtrip, I placed my 2 daughters in a holiday camp with local Uyghur kids - learning as a result something no discussion with an adult could ever tell me: what life is actually like for Uyghur kids in today's China.

On top of all this, I read widely and voraciously. The academic historians - Brophy, Gladney, Rudelson. The UN reports. But also books like Li Juan's wonderful Winter Pasture, a Chinese writer's account of living through a winter with Kazakh nomads in the Altay region.

The end result is an 8,000-word article that, I hope you'll agree, does something no article on Xinjiang has done in a very long time: treats the place and its people with the depth they deserve.

Maybe uncharacteristic for me, I don't shy away from the uncomfortable parts - on either side. I write about the omnipresent police checkpoints and the institutional paranoia as candidly as I write about the breathtaking shallowness and lies of the Western discourse on the topic.

If you're looking for propaganda - whether pro or anti-China - you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for honesty and nuance, however, I think you'll like it.

Enjoy the read here: https://t.co/K39WByvjvG

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

En Tossa de Mar (Girona, Catalunya), una camarera llamada Sheima, se negó a traducir y servir a una pareja de colonos de "Israel" como protesta ante el genocidio en Palestina... los dueños del restaurante Sotavent donde trabajaba la despidieron.

El sionismo quiere implantar una dictadura global donde a todo el que se niegue a reirles las gracias del genocidio que perpetra en Palestina, sea despedido y perseguido hasta arruinarle la vida.

[Ethan Levins ✝️ @EthanLevins2]

I was told by the DHS to never speak on Ben Gvir again.

They didn’t ask me about a single American politician.

It was ONLY about Ben Gvir, and they TOLD ME to stop.

Why is the DHS protecting him? I’m an American (born and raised!).

Does my free speech stop with Gvir?

[Ajamu Baraka @ajamubaraka]

Western modernity? The Western nations that supported this are not going to be able to explain this away. And it will be incomprehensible to future generations that authorities actually prosecuted individuals & organizations that opposed the genocide.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Will Jewish communities be asked to condemn these extreme statements from the Chief Rabbi of the self-proclaimed Jewish state, in the same way that Muslim communities for 25 years have been asked to condemn extreme statements from every random imam anywhere in the world?

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

There's one interesting dimension of the US's sanctions on the ICC 👇 that, as far as I saw, no media caught.

The US has sanctioned many ICC officials over the past few years but Abdoulaye Seye - one of 2 persons sanctioned this time (the other being ICC President Tomoko Akane) - was the first non-elected one.

So there is something quite unique about his case.

Seye's role at the ICC? Senior Trial Lawyer and Head of the Team handling the Situation in the State of Palestine (I know, quite a mouthful): in other words, the guy is the ICC's lead lawyer on the Palestine case.

Already, that alone should make it absolutely obvious that these sanctions have nothing to do, as Marco Rubio wrote, with "protecting Americans" but everything to do with protecting Israel.

But that's not the only thing special about Abdoulaye Seye.

See, ICC judges are elected officials: they serve non-renewable nine-year terms, and these terms are staggered so that one-third of the bench (6 judges out of 18) comes up for replacement every three years. All 124 member countries vote by secret ballot.

And that's where things get interesting: the next election is coming up in December this year and Seye is actually candidate to becoming a judge, proposed by his country of Senegal (https://t.co/z8fNaXMqME).

There are 14 candidates running for the 6 judge seats (https://t.co/6D2AXA7tCF) and Seye is the only one sanctioned by the U.S., which actually puts him at enormous practical disadvantages versus the other candidates.

For one thing, very concretely, the election takes place at the UN in New York, and being on the US sanctions list means being physically barred from entering the United States.

And it's not just about the vote itself. The whole campaign plays out in New York over months: in particular during the UN General Assembly in September, the High-level meetings, the candidate public roundtable interviews on November 4–5, and the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) session in December. That's where candidates meet delegations and lobby for votes.

The other 13 candidates will be freely doing this. Seye cannot do any of it.

So there is actually a huge election meddling angle to this: with these sanctions, the US is effectively rigging the race by banning one candidate from the entire campaign trail.

Perhaps more importantly, it also re-raises the question of whether the US is a fit place to host international institutions at all.

It's painfully obvious that a host country that weaponizes its territory to influence elections at international institutions (which, in the case of the ICC, it doesn't even belong to) is not an appropriate ground: for their own survival, these institutions should be as far away and as insulated from the US as possible.

It also raises the crucial question of how the rest of the world should respond.

The insanity here is that almost no other country globally - be in the West or the Global South - stands with the US on this, save for a handful of exceptions (like Israel). Yet they all behave like deer in the headlights (or, as we say in French, like "ostriches burying their head in sand") and do absolutely nothing concrete about it besides meaningless "we're preoccupied" statements.

The EU's behavior is particularly egregious in this regard. They too host a number of international institutions, such as... the ICC! ICC bench elections may be occurring in NYC but it's in The Hague, Netherlands, that the institution is physically located (I visited the place last year with my daughters: https://t.co/WyUgXUylj8).

So, given that they oppose these sanctions and literally host the court, you'd expect the EU to take some measures to protect the institution and the officials targeted by the sanctions.

All the more because they have a tool designed EXACTLY for this purpose: the so-called "blocking statute", a regulation that prohibits EU entities from complying with extraterritorial US sanctions.

On its own website the EU describes it as "an important achievement of unified EU action to protect EU operators, whether individuals or companies, from the extra-territorial application of third country laws" (https://t.co/W3IbD6Ummg)

It's perfect: activate the blocking statutes, and European banks can no longer close ICC officials' accounts, cancel their credit cards, or freeze their transactions just because Washington says so.

It's exactly what China did (they have their own "blocking statute") when the US started sanctioning Chinese refineries to prevent them from buying Iranian oil (see ): they activated their blocking statutes, making it illegal for Chinese companies to comply with these US sanctions and there is jack shit the US can do about it. It's a very powerful legal tool.

Yet, incomprehensively, the EU refuses to activate it. The blocking statute sits there, purpose-built but completely unused, while European companies have no choice but to enforce America's sanctions.

It's insane: the EU literally standing by while Washington destroys the lives of people on European soil - they oppose it, have the perfect tool to fight it, but they stand by. Again: incomprehensible.

All the more incomprehensible because it's actually a golden geopolitical opportunity for Europe: if Europe wants to be taken seriously as an independent actor on the world stage - as it keeps saying it does - there is literally no easier win than this. Activate a tool you already have, protect an institution you already host, defend a principle you already claim to believe in.

The fact that even this is too much unfortunately tells the rest of the world everything it needs to know about what European "sovereignty" actually means in practice.

[Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur]

Isn't it amazing that you almost never see the Palestinian point of view on American television? You see thousands of appearances by anchors, politicians and pundits supporting Israel. And endless stream of only the Israeli perspective. And they absurdly claim they're objective!

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

The Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, Rabbi David Yosef said today that the Palestinian people do not exist, do not have rights, that it is good that Gaza was destroyed and that with the help of God, all of Gaza and the West Bank will be Jewish soon. The Jewish religion is being used as a tool of genocide. This is not a fringe rabbi. This is the most important rabbi in Israel.

[💧Mary Kostakidis @MaryKostakidis]

Juries now have refused to send Palestine Action astivists to jail as well as Tony Greenstein. His speech to the Jury that refused to send him to jail for ‘terrorism’ worth reading in whole, but here is an excerpt:
‘In the second world war, the Nazis walled the Jews of Warsaw, half a million of them into a ghetto — a sealed district, starved and diseased, from which the trains left for the Treblinka death camp. And in 1943 the young Jews who remained did something nobody expected. With a handful of smuggled pistols, against tanks and the SS, they rose. They knew they could not win. They rose because it was better to die resisting than to be led away quietly. It is one of the proudest moments in Jewish history.
The last surviving commander of that uprising was a man named Marek Edelman. And in his old age, Edelman wrote to the Palestinian resistance and addressed them as fellow fighters — much to Israel’s annoyance. When he died, Poland gave him a state funeral, a fifteen-gun salute, the President gave the oration. Israel did not send the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy. Edelman wasn’t a Zionist.
Edelman, who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, described Gaza as a ghetto. I have used his comparison for years before October 2023. Two million people, most of them refugees or the children of refugees, sealed into a strip of land under blockade for 16 years, where the majority are children who have never once been allowed out. When I wrote “ghetto,” I meant a ghetto. My blog supported the Uprising just as I would have supported the slave uprisings of the 19th century. That is a political opinion. It was a political opinion on 7 October 2023, and it is a political opinion now.
And here is the crazy thing. Read section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and ask what it would have made of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. If this Act had existed in 1944, they could have been classified as terrorists. So could the French Resistance.’

https://t.co/vgjThBrQfv