cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41381866

Donald Trump has said it would be “an honor” take Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize if she offered it to him, as he prepares to meet the exiled politician next week.

Machado has been in hiding due to persistent threats on her life, emerging only briefly in Oslo after a three-day mission in which she was smuggled out of the country with the help of the U.S. military for the Nobel ceremony.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/48752727

Yayang church, in the Wenzhou area of Zhejiang province, is one of China's unregistered churches that emerged as an alternative to places of worship regulated and approved by Beijing.

China's ruling Communist Party has historically regarded organised religion with suspicion, and under President Xi Jinping, has tightened scrutiny of unofficial groups.

The events in Wenzhou come the same week an underground church in the southwestern city of Chengdu said several of its key leaders had been detained.

"As Beijing tightens its ideological control, unofficial churches are seen as 'disobedient' to the Communist Party ideology and, therefore, pay a heavy price," Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said.

Overseas religious rights groups said the crackdown on the Protestant church in the town of Yayang began in mid-December, with reportedly around 100 members initially detained, and two dozen still in custody.

[...]

When reporters asked one of the dozen or so guards blocking access to the building what was happening, they declined to comment and told the journalists to move on.

Despite otherwise light security, at one point 12 SWAT officers marched briefly up and down a street near the church.

Two locals told AFP separately they had been told filming the scaffolding was forbidden, and that a woman had been "taken away" for doing so.

[...]

Churches and rights groups say the campaign against underground churches stepped up last year.

[...]

WASHINGTON DC, USA – In what diplomats and historians of yore dubbed the “shining city on a hill,” the United States of America now appears to be anything but. The nation is a powder keg.

Regime ruler Donald Trump is mired in yet another scandal, as shocking footage captured his agents executing an unarmed 37-year-old civilian and mother of three in broad daylight. The erratic behavior of the land’s embattled sovereign has ratcheted up as he continues to further withdraw himself from public life, and his nation from the global stage.

While footage clearly shows the victim attempting to avoid the agent, the state has nonetheless dubbed the victim a “domestic terrorist.” The regime has quickly disseminated state propaganda insisting the victim deserved to be killed.

[THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED ON REDDIT IN R/TankieTheDeprogram ON THE 10TH OF JANUARY 2026]

Hey guys,

I wanted to open up a Marxist (and actually leftist) discussion on the topics of decoloniality, decolonial authors, and decolonial academia more generally. Specifically, I am interested in whether decolonial theory and decolonial academics are politically useful for Marxists, or whether they function as an ideological dead end.

I avoided posting this in the critical theory sub because that space is very libbed up.

As you may already be aware of not all forms of decoloniality are Marxist.

Anyways I hope the questions I provided can open up a discussion on it, you can also add separate discussion points below. This Post should help Marxist and non-Marxist foster a better understanding of an actual leftist perspective of decoloniality.

Discussion questions:

• Are decolonial academics genuinely contributing to anti-imperialist struggle, or are they using “decoloniality” as an academic smokescreen/vanity?

• Do academics monopolize discourse while detaching colonialism from capitalism?

• In some cases, does decolonial academia end up silencing the proletariat, and silence Marxist voices?

• What are your thoughts on decoloniality?

• What would an actual Marxist approach to decoloniality look like (both academic and in the IRL liberation movements)?

I would also love to hear people’s thoughts on the following decolonial authors (and feel free to add others):

• Frantz Fanon

• Walter Rodney

• Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

• Walter Mignolo (I am aware he is not a Marxist. This might be a good case study for how decoloniality can become politically harmful)

I made an earlier post touching on this topic and postcolonialism, which you can find on both Reddit and Lemmygrad:

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TankieTheDeprogram/comments/1p51r8t/discussion_decoloniality_and_postcolonialism_in/

Lemmygrad: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9854938

The demonstrations, which were sparked by anger over the rising cost of living, have been met with a crackdown by Iran's Islamic regime. Donald Trump has said the US will hit Iran "very hard" if protesters are killed.

...

US and EU policymakers have launched government initiatives ..., including diversifying their supply chains, establishing stockpiles, investing in private companies and expanding domestic processing and recycling capacities. These efforts seek to mitigate the risk of supply chain disruptions and price fluctuations as Beijing restricts critical minerals supplies for geopolitical leverage.

Government involvement is expected to accelerate in 2026 as recent restrictions on Chinese rare earths exports highlight vulnerabilities and drive the US and EU to reshape the global supply landscape, experts told Platts, a part of S&P Global Energy.

"What we're seeing globally is that the composition of mining companies is getting much more complex where you have a combination of government stakeholders, private equity, private investors and even capital from export and import banks," said Julie Klinger, a University of Delaware professor in the geography and spatial sciences program.

...

In the US, federal agencies launched $134 million in investment opportunities for rare earths and obtained several equity stakes in private companies, including the formation of a public-private partnership between the US defense department and rare earths company MP Materials, which aims to build a secure, end-to-end domestic rare earths supply chain. The deal involved a $400 million equity investment, a $150 million loan and a 10-year offtake agreement.

...

In Europe, the EU ratified the Critical Raw Materials Act in 2024, which aims to enhance the EU's domestic capacities. The law stipulates that no more than 65% of the EU's annual consumption of any strategic raw material should come from a single third country.

The bloc in March 2025 also published a list of 47 strategic and critical minerals projects, accounting for an expected overall capital investment of Eur22.5 billion ($24.35 billion). Other actions include plans to mobilize up to Eur3 billion in funding over the next 12 months to fast-track strategic extraction and processing projects that could reduce EU import dependencies by up to 50% by 2029.

To date, the EU has established 15 critical minerals partnerships with resource-rich countries, such as South Africa, Namibia, Argentina, Chile and Canada, to bolster resilient supply chains. The bloc has also launched negotiations with Brazil, while deepening cooperation with Ukraine and the Western Balkans through the Global Gateway investment initiative.

...

Archive link

The Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News, released Saturday, found that 54 per cent expressed support for closer trade ties and economic agreements with China.

It made the news a while ago, it's interesting to see the creators come out and talk about it.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/56640906

Three quarters of Germans consider the United States to be an unreliable partner, according to a survey published on Thursday.

78% of those queried currently consider France to be a trustworthy partner and 74% consider the UK to be a trustworthy partner.

According to the survey, 40% consider Ukraine to be a trustworthy partner, while 48% of respondents believe that Germany cannot trust Ukraine.

They get ourgraines

Exclusive: SIK leader Jess Berthelsen rejects Trump claim that the US needs Greenland for ‘national security’

Greenland “will not be annexed”, the longtime leader of its largest labor union has declared, refuting Donald Trump’s claims that the Arctic territory’s current status poses a national security threat to the US.

In an interview with the Guardian, Jess Berthelsen, chair of SIK, Greenland’s national trade union confederation, said people in the territory do not recognize the US president’s allegations that Russian and Chinese ships are scattered throughout its waters. “We can’t see it, we can’t recognize it and we can’t understand it,” he said.

The Trump administration has renewed its threats to seize Greenland in recent days, and claimed that officials are even considering using military force as an option, following a raid in Venezuela that culminated in the arrest and ouster of the nation’s president Nicolás Maduro, and his wife Cilia Flores.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/48665498

Archived

A Chinese pro-democracy activist imprisoned in the early 1990s for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement,” after which he fled to the United States, claims that X, the Elon Musk-owned social network, unilaterally shuttered his account based on disinformation circulated by Beijing.

Former student leader Wilson Lei Chen, also known as Chen Pokong, says higher-ups at X took the Chinese Communist Party’s false accusations at face value, subsequently cutting him off from his 150,000 followers with “zero explanation,” according to a $2 million-plus lawsuit.

[...]

The 62-year-old Chen, a longtime critic of the CCP who helped the 1989 Tiananmen Square protestors spread their message to the south of the country, says in his complaint that his X account – which he established in 2010 – was suddenly taken offline nearly three years ago and never reinstated. Chen, who now lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, has “submitted several appeals,” which were “all denied immediately through identical automated responses,” his complaint states.

[...]

It says Chen, who is acting as his own lawyer, “is informed and believes that his wrongful suspension may have been influenced by: coordinated inauthentic reporting, foreign disinformation campaigns, [and] political pressure to silence dissenting voices,” all allegedly propagated by the CCP and its proxies.

Chen was targeted for harassment online by the CCP and Chinese government security agents in what the Department of State called a multi-billion-dollar influence operation meant to shut down dissent and criticism of Beijing, according to a 2023 CNN investigation.

[...]

The years-long effort, known by various names including “Spamouflage,” “Dragonbridge,” has sought to undermine dissidents abroad, damage American companies considered hostile to China and subvert internet commentary that might be disparaging of the CCP.

X Corp. CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has deep ties to China and the CCP, raising concerns among American officials that his relationship with Beijing could constitute a threat to national security.

While X is blocked in China, it emerged last fall that Musk’s SpaceX, one of the largest and most important U.S. military contractors, has taken direct investment from Chinese nationals, according to ProPublica. And some 10 months after the U.S., the U.K. and Canada issued a joint statement in March 2021 expressing grave concern over “forced labour, mass detention in internment camps, forced sterilizations, and the concerted destruction of Uyghur heritage” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwestern China, Musk – seemingly unfazed – opened a Tesla showroom there.

[...]

Dear friends, My family and I are still in urgent need of your support. Any help truly makes a difference for us. Please don’t forget us — you are our only hope. Even sharing this message means a lot. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts 🤍 https://gofund.me/00439328