this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
160 points (96.5% liked)

news

23571 readers
701 users here now

Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.

Rules:

-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --

-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --

-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --

-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today/ . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --

-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--

-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--

-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --

-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Image is from this Black Agenda Report article by the Communist Party of Kenya.


In June, large anti-government protests shook Kenya. President Ruto and his parliament were attempting to pass the new Finance Bill 2024, which, among other things, would have hiked taxes on the population, with a 16% sales tax on bread and a 25% duty on cooking oil, as well as new taxes on financial transanctions and vehicle ownership. There would also have been levies on women's sanitary products and digital goods such as phones, among other measures affecting hospitals.

Hundreds of protestors stormed the parliament building and began to tear the place apart. Shortly afterwards, on June 26th, Ruto announced that he was withdrawing the bill, calling the tens of deaths and hundreds of injuries "unfortunate". A couple weeks later, Ruto then fired his entire cabinet (aside from his foreign minister) and communicated his wish to the nation to form a "broad-based government". Funnily enough, in July, it was announced that the majority of positions were to be filled by members of the old cabinet, while other positions were taken by members of the opposition. This has prompted scepticism among the population, including calls to resign, but there haven't (yet) been any major anti-government events to pressure this outcome. The Communist Party of Kenya has been working to get some of their comrades back after they were abducted by the police during the protest period, and have otherwise supported the protests against Ruto.

The measures in the bill were strongly encouraged by the IMF. Kenya's debt is currently around $80 billion, of which about 10% is owed to China for infrastructure projects (such as a railway linking the capital, Nairobi, to the port city of Mombasa, as well as 11,000 kilometers of road throughout the country). The rest is owed to a combination of the US, IMF, World Bank, and Saudi Arabia. More than half of government revenue is going towards repaying the debt - but despite these massive payments, it has only grown. The most recent round of IMF plundering (and the impetus for current events) began in 2021, when they offered a 38-month programme to "help" Kenya, which would involve the usual warfare on the poor and the dismemberment of any useful societal institutions.


The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Country of the Week is Kenya! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful. Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.


you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] GlueBear@hexbear.net 60 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

Apparently the entity struck Lebanon again. They really think escalation is the way forward, like that won't result in more settlers fucking off.

Edit:

Someone with that tech magic please remove the tracking link, idk how to do it.

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-latest-26-august-2024-9b67ccdeefdc81ea149fc3f9b56ba552

[–] WhyEssEff@hexbear.net 41 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

doesn't seem like a tracking link? usually tracking is appended as a parameter (e.g. sld.tld/content?tracker=xyz). this just seems like an MD5 hash for a specific article.

p sure it's {https://apnews.com|website}/{article|directory}/{israel-hamas-war-latest|category}-{26-august-2024|date}-{9b67ccdeefdc81ea149fc3f9b56ba552|article}

[–] GlueBear@hexbear.net 27 points 3 months ago

Oh okay, idk about this stuff (like at all) so I just posted that disclaimer for others (that probably also know as much about this stuff as I do).

Thank you for the clarification though!

[–] ziggurter@hexbear.net 24 points 3 months ago (2 children)

{`https://apnews.com`|website}

Wow. Where did you get this markdown syntax? I hate how badly, sparsely, and inconsistently markdown syntax is documented.

[–] WhyEssEff@hexbear.net 27 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

oral tradition vivian-shrug^[just kinda found it in a comment. lemmy extends markdown syntax but ^(AFAIK)^ doesn’t fully document what the extensions are ~(unfortunately)~]

[–] wheresmysurplusvalue@hexbear.net 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Had to dig a little to find this, it's an extension to markdown which is used by the lemmy-ui frontend. It's for putting latin text above non-Latin symbols (particularly chinese/japanese/korean). Here is a hexbear post about it:

{睾丸 |こ がん}に{豚|ぶた}の{糞|くそ}

{猪蛋蛋上的粪便 | Zhū dàn dàn shàng de fèn biàn}

{фекалии|fekalii} {на|na} {свиных|svinykh} {яйцах | yaytsakh}

The syntax isn't part of a spec I don't think, but provided by the markdown-it-ruby node.js package and added to lemmy-ui in July 2023 / 0.18.1. And since it's not part of a spec, it's not going to be formatted properly or at all on other lemmy frontends like phone apps.

It would be nice though if there was a document defining the markdown syntax with all the extensions included.

[–] ziggurter@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago

Gotcha. Thanks!

[–] Boredom@hexbear.net 28 points 3 months ago

Every Israeli attack from now on is just a preemptive strike stopping Iran and Hezbollah from responding to the last preemptive strike.

[–] REgon@hexbear.net 27 points 3 months ago

You can use this website to clean links https://linkcleaner.app/

[–] grandepequeno@hexbear.net 20 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Some websites have links to content that track who shared it, to who, when, and from where.

Basically, you copy a link, but that link is custom to you. Then, when someone clicks on that link, the website knows that person is connected to the link maker. It helps social media websites map out relations and offsite connections (bad).

[–] grandepequeno@hexbear.net 21 points 3 months ago

Thank you I didn't know about that stuff

[–] GlueBear@hexbear.net 13 points 3 months ago

Dawg idek what I'm talking about

[–] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 19 points 3 months ago

Someone with that tech magic please remove the tracking link, idk how to do it.

You could share an Archive.Today link instead.