Thank you to @carpoftruth@hexbear.net for covering my position as Supreme Dictator of the Goddamn News while I was moving and getting set up in my new home in a top secret Kremlin-funded bunker five hundred feet below the ground. Our regularly scheduled programming returns this week.
On October 9th, Daniel Chapo won the Mozambique general election with about 70% of the vote. Chapo is the head of FRELIMO, the Marxist-Leninist party of Mozambique's liberation, which fought an internal anti-communist resistance called RENAMO which was backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa; Frelimo won in 1975. However, as the USSR fell, Frelimo began to allow elections inside Mozambique, and has ruled the country with significant majorities in each election ever since.
The main opposition party inside Mozambique is Podemos, which is led by Venancio Mondlane, a former member of Renamo and trained inside the USA. He alleges that his polling figures predicted a majority win for him, not Frelimo, and has accused Chapo of electoral fraud. There have been the usual slogans about how they yearn for freedom. The EU, of course, "witnessed irregularities." As @WilsonWilson@hexbear.net has pointed out, Mozambique has massive undeveloped gas fields and is outsourcing the development process to France, Norway, the UK, and the USA, while mysterious Islamist groups have popped up to cause chaos in the exact regions which have the gas, slowing the process of actually developing those gas fields. Overall, it appears to be a cookie-cutter colour revolution attempt by the imperial core designed to install a comprador for cheaper resources. Its proximity to BRICS+ member South Africa may also be significant, noting the colour revolution in Bangladesh earlier this year exerting influence near India and China.
Protestors have been battling against the police and government since late October, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries as well as massive disruption, as the government has intermittently blocked access to the internet and social media. As of today, calm appears to be returning, with border crossings beginning to reopen.
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 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.
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.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Testimony of a British surgeon who spent time in Gaza where he talks about quadcopters coming down after airstrikes and shooting civilians: https://old.reddit.com/r/Global_News_Hub/comments/1gps2bv/british_surgeon_nizam_mamode_testifies_to_the_uk/
Do we know what quadcopter this might be? I have never seen footage of a quadcopter with a gun used in combat yet the claim here is that this was happening day after day? The operational way they're using this must either be really sneaky or so fast in and out that they're never around long enough to be filmed.
There are very few videos out there, so it could be for that reason
https://t.me/pal_Online9/44822
https://t.me/pal_Online9/40846
Stuff with drones sickens me in a different way. Something about the mixture of total impunity and fine control.
Second video is interesting! It's very stable while firing, I wonder how that works? Small caliber?
First one sounds more like it dropped a small bomb.
Can't say for certain but modern weapon turrets can have very very good stabilization to keep them on target even when a vehicle is moving on uneven terrain. It's certainly within the limits of existing tech.
Right but that's a very lightweight flying machine that can be knocked out of the air by an errant wind. Recoil from the gun has to go somewhere, so my guess is low caliber bullets because they have less recoil.
Quads can get enormous. Like hundreds of pounds of payload enormous. Lemme look something up.
https://www.griffaviation.com/
This Griff Aviation G300 is the biggest I could find with a 225kg payload, which is like heavy machine gun or anti-tank missile territory.
Idk what the Israelis are doing but there's definitely quads, well, octos, that can carry machine guns and stabilized turrets.
Here's an article from like 6 years ago. Not much in concrete detail and, CW: this is horrifying.
https://zeteo.com/p/israel-gaza-quadcopter-drone-warfare
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-gaza-israeli-quadcopters-hi-tech-weapon-menacing-palestinian-civilians
https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6357/Gaza:-Israeli-army-expands-its-use-of-quadcopters-to-kill-more-Palestinian-civilians
This article has a picture of something that might be one of hte armed drones but I can't figure anything out about what the payload is from the image.
But, either way, there are a lot of very big quad, hex, and octo drones that can carry substantial payloads these days. And by military standards the commercial ones are really cheap. Like 10-20k USD.
Update;
This might be what they're dealing with. Looks like a stripped down M4, some cameras, and a gimble mount. 5.56x45mm NATO has negligible recoil so you're right on there, a small zippy bullet that wouldn't push the machine around much.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-security/armed-drones-israel-hamas-war-gaza-hospitals-gunshots/
Better picture of a similar armed drone
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40901393
A bunch of reasonably competent engineers could probably crank one of these things out in days or at most a month or two if they had all the parts. Kind of surprised we haven't seen a terror attack with one. Afaik there have been a couple of attempted assassinations with bomb drones but no one has tried a rifle drone yet.
I’ll look for more with the guns, but I think they’re also used with bombs, see the recent double-taps
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.