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
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.
Telegram is also used by Ukraine lol. Are they going to punish them too?
Telegram is litterally the source given in most of Danish State Broadcaster's articles about Ukraine. It even got me into trouble with our IT-department because I clicked one of the links in the article, since apparently Telegram is mega-blacklisted on my work-computer.
deleted by creator
They arrested my boy Tricky Dick Medhurst
There seems to be a coordinated campaign in my country to brand Telegram as "the shady app where dangerous violent criminals are plotting". The criminals are even cast as being both non-white and Swedish. Top regime officials have aired the idea of censoring Telegram completely.
They have not publicly connected this campaign to Telegram's role in spreading non-western news and providing a counter-narrative to NATO propaganda but it is certainly peculiar that the idea of a ban comes now.
Telegram chats aren’t even encrypted by default so the governments and ISPs can easily read them. This is entirely because it’s a channel for information they don’t want shared.
It's worth making the distinction that there is still encryption in transit, I'm sure they're still using HTTPS. but not end to end encryption (which is the gold standard for a reason). So the governments would have to actually get into their servers or MITM traffic or something to read chats. They may well be doing that but its non trivial
Not at all true, unfortunately.
It doesn’t even take high tech CIA shit to read your messages when sent over HTTPS. Even basic law enforcement has been getting court orders for SSL keys for over a decade at least and there are private companies that sell spoofed or stolen root CA certificates to law enforcement.
SSL is a small hurdle they can simply step over. In many countries they wouldn’t even need a court order for law enforcement purposes and for national security espionage purposes they would all be doing it routinely. Why do you think VPNs are still legal?
I'm not saying law enforcement can't get at it, but it takes some effort. Even if you have a root CA you still need to MITM to get the traffic. a court order for their specific SSL key could allow decryption with passive tapping/sniffing, but that's still nontrivial. If there's documented evidence of some turnkey/widely used decryption tool that I don't know about I'd love to see it, but I don't think breaking/decrypting TLS is the easiest way for law enforcement or three letter agencies to get at most of this kind of data.
Just having HTTPS encryption in transit is nowhere near good enough for what people use telegram for, and they have their servers in every spy-happy jurisdiction you can think of, so I'm not defending telegram here, just clarifying the difference with e2ee vs HTTPS vs actually zero encryption for those that don't know
oh another note re: VPNs, they generally have their own internal PKI and don't waste money using properly signed certs from a trusted root for everything, which removes some of the easier ways to break HTTPS. The reason VPNs are legal isn't because their crypto is shitty, it's because its just a tunnel to someone else's ISP, it has to come out somewhere and that's a nice chokepoint to monitor at, in addition to all the normal monitoring via the actual services and devices being used. It does aggregate your traffic with other users and hide your home IP to a casual observer, but its not a silver bullet, its more of a BB pellet IMO
In my country is usually the trumpoid evil ruskie-brainwashed mantra that is being pulled.
By the way, there has been moral panics about organised criminals organising crime on apps before but nobody talked about a ban when the app was Facebook.
Same in Finland, but it has been floated in the natohawk discourse for some time, enough that my natohawk lib dad got his knickers in a twist about it being a putler troll app months ago the first time.
This is why US politicians fought tooth and nail to get TikTok banned. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit et al do whatever the government wants to do to ensure the “wrong” information doesn’t get out there. The fact that TikTok is Chinese is irrelevant, it’s that TikTok doesn’t censor the views that the government wants censored.
Columbia university SJP accounts were banned by meta just before the fall semester