Image is from this Reuters article.
This week marks the one year anniversary of Honduras ceasing to recognize Taiwan and instead only recognizing China. Over that time period, China and Honduras have gone through several rounds of negotiating a free trade agreement, with trade expanding. Additionally, they have just signed a $275 million cooperation agreement, providing education infrastructure for Honduras.
The other major news piece relevant to Honduras is the battle against Prospera, a US-based crypto libertarian firm that sought to buy a private island in order to create an ancap paradise, in which Bitcoin would be legal tender. In 2022, Honduras killed the island's special status that made the deal possible, and so Prospera is seeking $11 billion in compensation.
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 Honduras! 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.
There is a new movie from Russia called Zero Cosmonaut (trailer) based on the Italian hoax about how the USSR sent countless test subjects to die in space before Yuri Gagarin finally succeeded.
In this film, the evil Soviet Union sent a WOMAN (based on the original hoax where some Italian radio operators apparently picked up on a woman’s voice in space, or maybe because women are seen as less valuable so they are disposable for space missions if you want to be a lib about it) who became the first human to enter the orbit before her spacecraft came into trouble and needed to be rescued by some amateur ham radio operators on earth.
You cannot make this shit up! Russia as a country is truly a joke! Imagine turning foreigners’ ridicule of your success into a movie lol.
what if we did Gravity but made it anti-communist? - some dipshit Russian chud
Somehow I think it’s made by libs. My impression of Russian chuds is that generally they like the Soviet legacy (though still try to sneak in some Imperial achievements on occasion) and they weirdly love China for reasons I cannot explain. I’ve seen way more Russian libs and leftists being “suspicious” of China than the Russian chuds.
Must not be communists because my comrades contacts tell me the Communists of Russia are quite fond of the PRC.
The ones who like Stalin, yes, but Russia is full of Trots and left coms and they love throwing shade at China.
Check out Konstantin Syomin’s Youtube channel, which is the most popular Russian leftist channel. I think he was also a guest on the Deprogram before. Very Trot/leftcom leaning.
Before the war, he made videos about “hmm… how come there are so many billionaires in socialist China… very suspicious…” After the Xi-Putin meeting in 2023, he made videos that straight up called China a “red fash imperialist state”.
Eh, I'll pass. While im sure theres numerically more ultras in Russia as a result of their Soviet legacy, theyre no more significant than american ultras, themselves being strung-up dogs barking at the wind.
It’s true, they’re mostly confined to what I call the “Russian breadtube” lol
buterbrodtube more like
butertube
I think they like China because it’s got their back. That simple.
To the point of talking about getting your kids to learn Chinese/Mandarin?
That’s more than just “China’s got our back” mentality. It doesn’t even make sense from a “nationalist” perspective.
I mean, that just makes sense from a financial perspective. They know the future is looking up between the two nations, there will be a lot of business opportunities for bilingual Russian-Chinese speakers.
It makes sense economically. Probably still English number one as the economically useful language to learn but it would make sense if Chinese rapidly overtook German for second place.
Funny enough, they are. From first-hand witnesses in my circle, there's quite a significant number of Russians that've learned Mandarin and use it to actively communicate with Chinese folks visiting them.
Of course caveat being this is from a bit more high-brow levels of politics than the average bear, so it's most likely not a super-common thing among working class folks, but knowing that it's standard educational practice for Russians to learn at least one other foreign language, the number of Mandarin speakers will most likely grow in the coming years as a result of continued economic and cultural friendship between the two nations.
I think it also points to Russian leftists and especially Russian liberals being more brainwashed by the West to think they're Westerners as well. Apparently, all that Eurasianism shit has the positive effect of making Russian reactionaries turn away from the West. The main problem is Eurasianism is reactionary and just dressed up Russian chauvinism. But, I do think it's a first step towards eventual de-Westernization.
Things will get really spicy when Russians (hopefully spearheaded by Russian socialists instead of Russian reactionaries) begin to see themselves as Asian instead of European, when they repudiate the vision that Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had for Russia and see Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, Iranian, Palestinian people as fellow Asian peoples. Until the Russian people collectively repudiate the glorified Asian subcontinent called Europe and embrace their collective identity as peoples of the actual continent of Asia, the Western brainworms will always be there to find the next generation of self-hating Westophilic marks and traitors.
Вызов was pretty good tho. Mostly because of all the actual zero gravity scenes. Plot was meh.
Was that the one they tried to beat Tom Cruise to be the first to film in space?
If that’s the case, then it looks like they succeeded.