Canada is looking to join major European military buildup

Prime Minister Mark Carney signalled he hopes Canada will be able to sign on to a major European defence rearmament plan by July 1, a step toward reducing the country’s dependency on the United States for weapons and munitions.

Wang Yi attends signing of convention establishing global mediation body in Hong Kong – CGTN

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Friday attended the signing ceremony of the Convention on the Establishment of the International Organization for Mediation in China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Very good article/piece on the Pakistan-India conflict that took place earlier this month.

Highly recommend reading this if you’re wondering what happened during the four to five days of war/conflict. It’s a good overview of the timeline of events, lines up with most previous reporting and observations, well sourced and cited. I just finished reading the entire thing.

The article doesn’t come to this conclusion, but it’s a clear sign that RFK/his staff are using AI to write reports.

The Guardian: RFK Jr’s ‘Maha’ report found to contain citations to nonexistent studies

The 73-page “Make America healthy again” report – which was commissioned by the Trump administration to examine the causes of chronic illness…includes references to seven studies that appear to be entirely invented, and others that the researchers say have been mischaracterized.

One paper was claimed to show that talking therapy was as effective as psychiatric medication, but the statistician Joanne McKenzie said this was impossible, as “we did not include psychotherapy” in the review.

The sleep researcher Mariana G Figueiro also said her study was mischaracterized, with the report incorrectly stating it involved children rather than college students, and citing the wrong journal entirely.

There isn’t a likely cause for a report to contain these types of errors unless an LLM was used to write it.

Does anyone know any good books about geopolitics, recent history, political currents etc. in the middle east?

Sorry if it’s not appropriate to ask here, please remove if necessary

https://tankie.tube/w/tK7HDp2rYdSfrCkJirTusP

Triumphing for the oppressed Palestinian people and their Mujahideen, and in rejection of the crime of genocide perpetrated by the Zionist enemy against our people in the Gaza Strip.

The missile force of the Yemeni Armed Forces carried out a military operation targeting Lod Airport, Israeli named Ben Gurion Airport, in the occupied area of Yaffa, using a hypersonic ballistic missile. The operation successfully achieved its goal, thanks to allah, forcing millions of occupying Zionists to flee to shelters and halting air traffic at the airport.

The Yemeni Armed Forces assure all our faithful and struggling Yemeni people that, with Allah’s help, they will continue to fulfill their religious, moral, and humanitarian duty toward our people in Palestine until the aggression against them stops and the siege is lifted.

They will also, with trust in Allah, confront every Israeli aggression against our country with further supportive operations for the oppressed Palestinian people, including the continued ban on Israeli air traffic to and from Lod Airport.

Sana’a, Dhu al-Hijjah 2, 1446 AH May 29, 2025 AD

Issued by the Yemeni Armed Forces

http://t.me/army21ye

https://masarbadil.org/en/2025/05/5860/

“Rodriguez’s operation not only revealed the limits of liberal discourse; it also restored the value of direct action as a mobilizing and agitational tool, placing everyone before their responsibilities. The broad popular response to this operation, particularly among youth and within Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities, reveals that popular sentiment remains aligned with armed struggle and a revolutionary position on Palestine. The battle being waged by the Palestinian people is not confined to the West Bank and Gaza, but extends and expands globally within the framework of revolutionary struggle against imperialism, Zionism, and reactionary and fascist regimes”

A Collapsing Mountain has Buried the Village of Blatten. The River Lonza is currently making a new Lake to the north of the Landslide until he has found its Course , ruining the few houses that the Landslide didnt touch. No Injuries.

Edit: Update : one person is missing it seems. + Video of the village 5 months ago + Video of the landslide

Update 2 : The Next Mountain slide will come down soon and its will be even larger

seems like new isntreal-adjusted (from permanent to allegedly 60 days) proposal is circulating (screenshot from al jazeera):

doesn’t seem like it’s permanent tho

upd from https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-gaza-ceasefire-proposal-hamas-israel-witkoff

Most concerning to Hamas, according to officials who spoke to Drop Site, is that the proposal contains substantive amendments to an “understanding” Hamas announced it had reached with the U.S. on Monday. On Tuesday, Hamas issued a statement it had reached “an agreement with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff on a general framework that achieves a permanent ceasefire, a complete withdrawal of occupation forces from the Gaza Strip, the flow of aid, and the appointment of a professional committee to manage the Gaza Strip’s affairs immediately after the agreement is announced.”

The new Witkoff proposal, however, includes only vague language on whether the agreement would lead to a complete end to the genocide and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. “The President is serious about the parties’ adherence to the ceasefire agreement and insists that the negotiations during the temporary ceasefire period, if successfully concluded with an agreement between the parties, would lead to a permanent resolution of the conflict,” the document states. “The United States and President Trump are committed to working to ensure that good faith negotiations continue until a final agreement is reached.”

“There are a lot of reservations on this paper as a framework. There are a lot of loopholes. There are a lot of ambiguities,” a Palestinian source close to the negotiating team told Drop Site. “Israel will never agree to end the war under this framework. The number of aid trucks are not mentioned. There are no specifics about where the Israeli forces will withdraw to. All of these are problems which will probably impede this. Witkoff tried to accommodate Israel much more than what was in the earlier paper. It’s going to take some time before a deal gets approved by the movement.”

Soon after the Witkoff draft was circulated, Israeli officials told several Hebrew language news outlets that the vague language in the draft would allow Netanyahu to resume the war after 60 days. A senior Israeli official, according to Ha’aretz, suggested that “U.S. officials deliberately crafted ambiguous language around the issue of ending the war to make the deal acceptable to both sides,” pointing out that the proposal “does not include a demand for Israel to end the war or withdraw from Gaza.”

Naomi Klein is a radlib but I’ve been reading her book The Shock Doctrine, and find that it’s quite prescient regarding current events even though it was written ~15 years ago. It’s not exactly in-depth but Klein is a journalist, it’s supposed to be high-level flyover.

The thesis in a nutshell is that there is a compulsion - driven both by ideology and material interests - to outsource and privatize all aspects of governance, despite the desires of the people impacted who usually strongly oppose these changes. Disasters - natural or man-made - are the perfect opportunities to exploit.

I had never realized the extent to which the US military had been outsourced and privatized, thanks primarily to Cheney and Rumsfield. In a theme consistent throughout the book, while these two and others stood to benefit tremendously from military privatization, there also seems to be a significant ideological component. These people I think truly believe the military is more effective and efficient when exposed to market pressures. And we are now seeing the fruits of this privatization, as the supply and inventory issues in the military have become well known with giving support to Ukraine.

Then you see the ongoing impacts of disasters like the tsunami in Sri Lanka and hurricanes in Central America. Capital used these disasters as opportunities to privatize and dispossess. It really does echo Marx’s thoughts on primitive accumulation in Capital, though that’s my connection not Klein’s. And now as we hear about all the current turmoil in these places, no one bothers to connect the dots to how the US, the IMF, World Bank, and even local capitalists eviscerated social services, sold off government assets, and dispossessed locals to current problems.

You can even take this to the present with GHF. Ostensibly a “private charity” that supplants UNRWA and others, but is only really a tool of enforcing imperialism.

rip the line rip neom

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the U.S. is implementing a ‘vigorous new visa policy’ to prevent foreign nationals with anti-Israel views from traveling to the United States. He adds that they will hold ‘international organizations and nations’ accountable for criticism of Israel.

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Lebanon using Israeli intel to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure: Report

The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has been using Israeli intelligence to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on 28 May. The Lebanese army’s efforts to implement UN Resolution 1701 and enforce the ceasefire agreement are being carried out “in part with the help of Israeli intelligence,” according to several sources cited by the WSJ. Arab officials told the outlet that the intelligence is being “passed along by the US” and has “helped the Lebanese army find and destroy Hezbollah’s remaining weapons stockpiles and military posts in the south.” The army reportedly destroys some of the weapons while keeping others and adding them to its limited stockpiles.

In an interview with the WSJ, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam claimed that the Lebanese army has achieved 80 percent of its disarmament goals in southern Lebanon – referring to the area south of the Litani River, where Hezbollah has cooperated with the state in handing over military positions.

Under heavy pressure from Washington, the Lebanese government has been escalating calls for a full “monopoly” on arms. This includes a plan to disarm Lebanon-based Palestinian resistance groups, which is reportedly set to begin in June.

Hezbollah has firmly rejected disarmament, and instead calls for the formation of a national defensive strategy that incorporates its weapons into the state for use in defending Lebanon against Israel.

It says it is willing to hold dialogue with the state on this issue once Israeli forces withdraw from south Lebanon and stop their violations of the ceasefire. In a speech on Sunday, Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem said that the resistance is giving the state a chance to diplomatically secure an Israeli troop withdrawal and a complete halt to airstrikes, but stressed that “if it fails to perform its duties, other options exist.”

Israel was meant to withdraw its troops as part of the ceasefire, but has maintained an occupation of five locations along the border in violation of the deal. […] The Israeli army unleashed a violent wave of airstrikes across southern and eastern Lebanon on the evening of 22 May, striking what it claimed were Hezbollah weapons sites.

I’m very confused by this article, there’s like at least three contradictions in it.

• Hezbollah is simultaneously “cooperating with the state in handing over military positions” and weapons but seems to be only willing “to hold dialogue with the state on [incorporating its weapons into the state for use in defending Lebanon against Israel] once Israel withdraws from Lebanon (and they have not yet done so)”?
• Hezbollah is simultaneously 80% disarmed by the Lebanon army with the aid of Israeli intelligence, but Israel is also just striking (what they claim to be) Hezbollah weapon sites instead of allowing them to be disarmed?
• Hezbollah simultaneously expects the Lebanese army to engage in combat to defend Lebanon, but that very same army is fully cooperating with Israel to the extent of receiving intelligence reports on how to disarm them, and that government is refusing to insist that Israel must withdraw from its positions south of the Litani?

I’m welcome to other viewpoints, but this doesn’t seem like a tenable position. My prediction of how the Lebanon conflict proceeds is something along the lines of:

1. This disarmament process proceeds and is completed (to an arbitrary extent; the tunnel networks probably won’t or maybe can’t be dismantled and perhaps Hezbollah retains fighting ability in certain regions)
2. Israel continues to refuse to retreat, and indeed insists on taking more territory ala Syria
3. The Lebanese army, both infiltrated and cooperative with Israel, is quickly crushed to the extent that it resists at all
4. Guerrilla tactics to repel Israel (with the support of the population) will resume, basically taking us back 30 years; perhaps Lebanese soldiers desert to join or rejoin Hezbollah
5. As this is unacceptable to a comprador Lebanese government, some sort of internal unrest up to and including a civil war takes place (I have no idea how this would go, but I cannot imagine that the population of Lebanon would rise up in support of a government that is explicitly saying that they must fight the people who are protecting them from Israel, the country that has both been extensively bombing them and has killed hundreds of thousands of people)
6. An increasingly powerful Iran (backed by China and feeling gradually less pressure by the US/Israel as those countries continue imperial decline and neoliberal internal rot) is able to exert more influence and get more weapons shipments through an increasing unstable Syria

It’s been long enough that I can safely conclude that the plan by Israel post-Nasrallah appears to be to try and achieve what they have failed to do militarily by instead doing some good old-fashioned deals. For whatever ideological and material reasons, several people and groups, including Lebanon’s government, Syria’s government (though those guys are just outright compradors put in power by Israel), and perhaps Iraq (at least, I haven’t heard much about the Iraqi resistance groups in a while) seem to be going along with those deals, not understanding that the US and Israel cannot be trusted and will break those deals whenever they want, if it benefits them to do so.

I don’t think this work in the medium-to-long term, Israel’s existence is now fundamentally on a timer because of the declining military and economic power of their backers in the imperial core and without them, the country just does not have the military strength, economic power, or just outright geographical area to exert its whims on the region for decades to come. It might work in the short-term though, perhaps long enough for them to complete their 2.4 million person genocide.

We shall see if Hezbollah, Syria, and Iraq can reassert themselves in time to save the remaining Gazans; but for now, Hamas and Yemen are the lone warriors left. Yemen is still striking Israel with missiles despite Israeli return strikes (I doubt Israel’s strikes will be remotely effective if the US Navy couldn’t do shit to them), and Hamas has recently posted new videos of ambushes on Israel forces, so we can conclude that despite the occasional death of Hamas leaders or commanders, their military structures remain intact and effective. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re gaining more soldiers than they’re losing; many people in there must be making the calculation that it’s better to fight back and very possibly die, rather than just accept certain death by either bombing or starvation.

Results from abroad for Portugal’s election last week have come in, it’s official, the far-right has overtaken the default center-left party by 2MPs, becoming the largest party in the opposition to an already right-wing government, the socialist party didn’t elect any MPs from the 2 Abroad circuits for the first time ever.

In fact the far-right got the most votes in both the Europe and Out-of-Europe circuits, nearly 100k votes, including in big portuguese communities like the one in Luxembourg and France (where there are reports of portuguese immigrants being discriminated against). So yeah, an anti-immigration party is the favorite among…portuguese immigrants abroad, fuck these people, it’s pure “fuck you got mine”

I remember when I was 13 an uncle of mine who lives in france called my house and I was the only one home so we talked for a bit and he ended up making me look up the website of a literally Salazarist party to learn more about them pretending he was the one who didn’t know what it was, I didn’t even know what a political party was at the time. I told my mom years later and she just said “yeah your uncle is crazy”.

Emigration is oddly romanticized in this country, a bunch had to do it during the austerity years (2011-2015), but since then it has calmed down, however the “I want to leave this country it sucks because of woke/taxes/socialism/big state” discourse is hugely popular among the youth, and if you’re young and in a fake job like IT you’ll be probably asked by everyone why you’re not working in Dusseldorf or some shit.