technocrit

Palestinians from Gaza, recently released from Israeli detention, have given harrowing descriptions of sexual torture by their Israeli captors.

Victims described rapes by groups of soldiers, forced stripping, forced filming and sexual assaults and rapes using objects and dogs.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which collected the testimonies in recent weeks, said they reflect a systematic policy as part of Israel’s genocide, rather than isolated incidents.

Thousands of Palestinians are still in detention camps and prisons to which international monitors, including the Red Cross, have no access.

PCHR warns that detainees face the risk of death and coerced confessions extracted through torture – especially as Israel is advancing plans to impose the death penalty on Palestinian detainees.

These detainees were arrested solely for being residents of the Gaza Strip, “as part of a policy of collective punishment designed to humiliate Palestinians and inflict maximum psychological and physical harm on them,” PCHR said.

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On October 28, Rio de Janeiro’s police besieged the Penha favela for 15 hours, killing at least 121 people in the city’s worst massacre. Brazil’s right is hailing it as an anti-crime victory while overlooking their own links to violent gangs.

On both Left and Right, many like to take the Whitlam dismissal— as it became known — as a constitutional struggle between an old British-oriented establishment and a new, progressive Australia. But in retrospect, it’s hard to doubt that the 1975 dismissal was in fact a soft coup d’état, heavily influenced by US power and influence.

These various factors — ranging from economic interests to political maneuvering — help explain the strange paradox of countries scrambling to whitewash al-Sharaa and curry favor with a regime that was considered a terrorist entity just months ago. It is a fitting spectacle for the state of global politics in this Trumpian era.

In the wake of a measles outbreak in Canada that has infected thousands of people over the past year, an international health agency revoked the country’s measles-free status on Nov. 10, 2025.

The “State of Climate Action 2025” report from the World Resources Institute found that the world’s governments are failing on all 45 indicators of progress towards limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees. Of these, 29 indicators are “well off track”, meaning at least a twofold and for most a fourfold acceleration of progress is needed to meet end-of-decade targets.

Five indicators—the carbon intensity of steel production, the share of kilometres travelled by passenger cars, mangrove loss, share of food production lost, and public fossil fuel finance—are heading in the wrong direction.

There is not even enough data to analyse the trend for the remaining five: the rate of retrofitting buildings, the share of new buildings which are zero-carbon, peatland degradation, peatland restoration and food waste.

As US media try to whitewash his legacy in death, the world continues to grapple with the horrors he helped unleash.

Gotta ditch Microsoft like years ago...

The IBM Digital Asset Haven, developed with Dfns, aims to offer banks, governments and enterprises a full-stack platform for token custody, governance and compliance.

On Tuesday, Japan’s parliament installed Sanae Takaichi, the new leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), as prime minister. The elevation to power of this ultra-nationalist, pro-war figure comes with a new ruling coalition that is rapidly pushing establishment politics even further to the right.

US military forces struck two small boats off the Pacific coast of Colombia Wednesday, killing at least five people. The strikes were the eighth and ninth since President Trump issued orders September 2 for a campaign of military violence against alleged drug traffickers that is both illegal and unconstitutional.

While Trump claims that the strikes are justified because the United States is at war with drug cartels based in Latin America, the White House has not sought a declaration of war from Congress, or even a congressional resolution authorizing military operations, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The strikes are in flagrant violation of international law. The US government has offered no evidence against the people it is annihilating, and even their names are unknown. And the military assaults are taking place in international waters, where ships of any nationality supposedly have “freedom of navigation,” a right that Washington claims to be defending in the South China Sea...

But today, the sheer scale of the US military build-up does not align with the idea of a cynical political stunt, nor does Trump’s decision to cut off all diplomatic backchannels with the Venezuelan government and deauthorise special envoy Rick Grenell’s outreach to Maduro. The more we look at the military deployment and the increasingly belligerent rhetoric from Trump officials, the more the pursuit of regime change through military means appears to be the most plausible explanation...

We also shouldn’t be surprised if, when the first attack fails to produce the promised uprising, regime-change advocates demand another strike, then another. Convinced the government is on its last legs and needs just one more push, they would likely pressure Trump to keep bombing, and perhaps even support the formation of some form of armed opposition, currently nonexistent in Venezuela.

Such a Libya-style proxy war would flood an already volatile region with more weapons and money. Criminal organizations and irregular armed groups already operating on Venezuela’s western border — and beyond, in neighboring Colombia — would thrive in the chaos, swelling their ranks and profiting from arms and human trafficking: a nightmare scenario for Latin America.

During the last few years of draconian US sanctions on Venezuela — which have significantly contributed to shortages of food, medicine and fuel — more than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country. This unprecedented wave of migration has had profound repercussions across the region and beyond, including in the US, where it has influenced the 2024 elections in Trump’s favor. If US sanctions produced such an exodus, we can only imagine the scale of the refugee crisis that would result from an actual war. It is no surprise that Brazil and Colombia, Venezuela’s most strategic neighbors from the point of view of any potential conflict, have strongly opposed a US military intervention.

The bitter irony is inescapable: an operation justified by anti-narcotics rhetoric would create ideal conditions for drug-trafficking organizations to expand their power. The military build-up off Venezuela’s coast is a slippery slope towards an armed conflagration that could lead to far greater suffering for the Venezuelan people, a potential political quagmire for the United States, US troop casualties and the catastrophic destabilization of much of the region.