Trump plans to recognize Somaliland in order to bolster the west’s foothold in the Horn of Africa against Yemen and counter Chinese influence, but in doing so, risks alienating key regional allies critical for Israel’s wars in West Asia.
In a move that
surprised many, US President-elect Donald Trump is set to recognize
Somaliland as an independent state. This unprecedented decision,
revealed by former British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson and reported by Semafor, could dramatically reshape geopolitics in the Horn of Africa and the waterways of West Asia.
Positioned
near the Arabian Peninsula, Somaliland’s recognition would give the
west a new strategic foothold in its war against Yemen, which has since
October 2023 blockaded ships heading to Israel. However, this move risks
straining US relations with key regional allies like Egypt and Turkiye,
both of whom maintain strong ties with Somalia.
A current map of the Horn of Africa.
A rising country in the region
Somaliland
declared independence from Somalia in 1991 but remains unrecognized by
any sovereign state. Despite this, the region has carved out a distinct
identity. Home to a third of Somalia’s population, Somaliland is roughly
the size of Florida and has maintained relative stability, unlike its
war-torn neighbor.
While clashes in its eastern regions have intensified
since 2023, the bulk of Somaliland remains peaceful. Strategically
located near the Gulf of Aden, it commands a crucial maritime corridor
for vessels heading to the Suez Canal and Yemen.
Since the onset of the 2014 Yemen War, the UAE has sought partners in the Horn of Africa against the Ansarallah-dominated government in Sanaa. In 2016, the UAE signed a $442 million deal to build a port in the Somaliland city of Berbera, which is only 260 kilometers away from the Yemeni port city of Aden.
A year later, the port was expanded to include a naval and airbase and, since 2018, has been used to strike inside Yemen. The military base continues to expand, with hangars under construction for more planes.
Possible normalization with, and recognition of Israel
The UAE is now reportedly
working on securing a deal between Somaliland and Israel. Interested in
securing a foothold near the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, in 2010
Israel became one of only a few countries to establish diplomatic relations with Somaliland, albeit without formal recognition.
actor/stand-up comedian Nikki Glaser hosted the event:
“So much has already happened in the first half and the acceptance speeches have been on fire. Who got shouted out the most? Let’s look at the numbers, alright: cast and crew are leading the way with 11 mentions; moms are holding strong with 3 shoutouts; God, creator of the Universe, zero mention; and Mario Lopez, host of Access Hollywood 1. Alright, no surprise in this Godless town.”
on Jan 7, 2025, certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles witnessed wildfires
the fire started in Pacific Palisades and spread to other neighborhoods
a mix of reasons are responsible for the fires:
climate change, Santa Ana winds, oversights, lack of preparedness, …
some religious believers jumped on Nikki Glaser’s zero mention of God
those who want to believe will believe, no matter what
they’re not going to check whether 2+3=4 or 2+1=4 or actually it is 2+2=4
strong belief could blur their reasoning power
it could also shut people off from realities
the believer has a strange way to prove God’s existence
they’ll connect a co-incidence to pass their judgement or prove a point
while ignoring dozens of tragedies being telecast live all over
the dots were easy for believers to connect
zero mention of God resulted in wildfires which burned so much of LA
some of the comments from the Youtube video comment section:
1, “God Zero Mention okay. 2 Days Later You Have Zero Mansion.”
2, “A day later, the most devastating fires in LA history scorched their high places.”
3, “God is NOT to be mocked. Two days later & everything is toasted. DO NOT MOCK GOD. Glory be to the MOST HIGH GOD. Praise Jesus.”
5, “Now Hollywood is on fire.”
5, “Hollywood, Firewood.”
6, “Her [sic] girl is the reason of burning of Los angels…”
a friend showed me a video of a Hindu woman saying a similar thing
The Bibi Files examines the corruption charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and how they have changed Israeli politics IMAGE/Jigsaw Productions/Drucker & Goren Media.
Director Alexis Bloom on her shocking documentary that links the war on Gaza to the corruption trial of Israel’s leader
Every year from October to December Oscar contenders try to crack the US film market, hoping to secure a coveted Academy Award nomination.
Millions of dollars are spent on PR campaigns as publicists scurry
about, attempting to generate positive press coverage and court
influential Oscar voters. Meanwhile across Los Angeles and New York,
films big and small flood cinemas before the end of the year to secure
the minimum number of screenings to qualify for awards eligibility.
But of the buzzed-about pics this year, one has been largely absent: The Bibi Files, the hair-raising documentary exposee about the corruption charges brought against Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister and recipient of an ICC arrest warrant. (He and his family have denied the allegations against them.)
Produced by Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentary director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief) and directed by three-time Emmy-nominated film-maker Alexis Bloom (We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks), The Bibi Files enjoyed a thunderous bow at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
Gibney aspired to secure US theatrical distribution deals but they
never materialised: instead the film screened for one week at the
Laemmle Monica Film Center in southern California, where this writer
watched it, and the IFC Center in New York.
After only a few minutes, it becomes apparent why The Bibi Files has caused a stir.
Netanyahu creeps onto the screen, sporting his signature sinister
smirk – but something is distinctly different about his facial
expressions and body language. There is a visible discomfort bogging him
down. His demeanour reeks of restlessness. His familiar guise of
confidence fails to conceal a palpable weakness; his quiet dread at a
looming danger that constantly threatens to blow his cover.
This is Netanyahu like you’ve never seen him before – and it’s a sight to behold.
The crux of the film is the never-seen-before police interrogation
footage of Netanyahu, his wife, Sara and their eldest son, the ultra
right-wing Yair. Other figures who are shown being questioned include
Hollywood billionaire producer Arnon Milchan; Israeli-American
billionaire Miriam Adelson; Israeli telecom mogul Shaul Elovitch; and
Nir Hefetz, a former spokesman for Netanyahu.
Young woman talking with AI voice virtual assistant on smartphone IMAGE/Getty d3sign
Conversational AI agents may develop the ability to covertly influence our intentions, creating a new commercial frontier that researchers call the “intention economy”.
Public awareness of what is coming is the key to ensuring we don’t go down the wrong pathJonnie Penn
The
near future could see AI assistants that forecast and influence our
decision-making at an early stage, and sell these developing
‘intentions’ in real-time to companies that can meet the need – even
before we have made up our minds.
This is according to AI ethicists from the University of Cambridge,
who say we are at the dawn of a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace
for digital signals of intent”, from buying movie tickets to voting for
candidates. They call this the Intention Economy.
Researchers from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of
Intelligence (LCFI) argue that the explosion in generative AI, and our
increasing familiarity with chatbots, opens a new frontier of
‘persuasive technologies’ – one hinted at in recent corporate
announcements by tech giants.
‘Anthropomorphic’ AI agents, from chatbot assistants to digital
tutors and girlfriends, will have access to vast quantities of intimate
psychological and behavioural data, often gleaned via informal,
conversational spoken dialogue.
This AI will combine knowledge of our online habits with an uncanny
ability to attune to us in ways we find comforting – mimicking
personalities and anticipating desired responses – to build levels of
trust and understanding that allow for social manipulation on an
industrial scale, say researchers.
“Tremendous resources are being expended to position AI assistants in
every area of life, which should raise the question of whose interests
and purposes these so-called assistants are designed to serve”, said
LCFI Visiting Scholar Dr Yaqub Chaudhary.
“What people say when conversing, how they say it, and the type of
inferences that can be made in real-time as a result, are far more
intimate than just records of online interactions”
“We caution that AI tools are already being developed to elicit,
infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate
and commodify human plans and purposes.”
Dr Jonnie Penn, an historian of technology from Cambridge’s LCFI,
said: “For decades, attention has been the currency of the internet.
Sharing your attention with social media platforms such as Facebook and
Instagram drove the online economy.”
“Unless regulated, the intention economy will treat your motivations
as the new currency. It will be a gold rush for those who target, steer,
and sell human intentions.”
“We should start to consider the likely impact such a marketplace
would have on human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a
free press, and fair market competition, before we become victims of its
unintended consequences.”
In a new Harvard Data Science Review
paper, Penn and Chaudhary write that the intention economy will be the
attention economy ‘plotted in time’: profiling how user attention and
communicative style connects to patterns of behaviour and the choices we
end up making.
“While some intentions are fleeting, classifying and targeting the
intentions that persist will be extremely profitable for advertisers,”
said Chaudhary.
In an intention economy, Large Language Models or LLMs could be used
to target, at low cost, a user’s cadence, politics, vocabulary, age,
gender, online history, and even preferences for flattery and
ingratiation, write the researchers.
This information-gathering would be linked with brokered bidding
networks to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim, such as
selling a cinema trip (“You mentioned feeling overworked, shall I book
you that movie ticket we’d talked about?”).
This could include steering conversations in the service of
particular platforms, advertisers, businesses, and even political
organisations, argue Penn and Chaudhary.
While researchers say the intention economy is currently an
‘aspiration’ for the tech industry, they track early signs of this trend
through published research and the hints dropped by several major tech
players.
These include an open call for ‘data that expresses human intention…
across any language, topic, and format’ in a 2023 OpenAI blogpost, while
the director of product at Shopify – an OpenAI partner – spoke of
chatbots coming in “to explicitly get the user’s intent” at a conference
the same year.
Nvidia’s CEO has spoken publicly of using LLMs to figure out
intention and desire, while Meta released ‘Intentonomy’ research, a
dataset for human intent understanding, back in 2021.
In 2024, Apple’s new ‘App Intents’ developer framework for connecting apps to Siri (Apple’s voice-controlled personal assistant), includes protocols to “predict actions someone might take in future” and “to suggest the app intent to someone in the future using predictions you provide”.
Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression. The subject of the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power.
In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96)
that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los
Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing,
CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to
borrow Noam Chomsky’s words,
“large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua. At the same time, the
crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central
LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among
Black Americans across the country.
But Webb’s revelations should hardly have been a newsflash. As FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (10/21/14) noted in a 2014 dispatch, the CIA was informed
as early as September 1981 that a major branch of the Contra “leadership had made a decision to engage in drug-smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations,” according to the CIA inspector general’s report.
Not that the CIA was any stranger to drug-running—as indicated by, inter alia, a 1993 op-ed appearing in the New York Times (12/3/93)
under the headline “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency.”
The essay traced CIA ties to narco-trafficking back to the Korean War,
while the Vietnam War reportedly saw heroin from a refining lab in Laos
“ferried out on the planes of the CIA’s front airline, Air America.” The
piece went on to emphasize that “nowhere…was the CIA more closely tied
to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan” during the Afghan/Soviet war of
1979 to 1989.
Decade-long suppression of evidence
And yet, in spite of such established reality, Webb was subjected to a
concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy” (11/16/96),
one of the examples cited by Solomon—which is kind of like saying that
the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he
was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same
month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times (12/19/97) reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.”
As
Solomon argued, “The elite media’s attacks on the series were clearly
driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the Contra-cocaine
story—involving a decade-long suppression of evidence” (Extra!, 7/87; see also 3–4/88). Time and again, the nation’s leading media outlets had buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links; Naureckas (10/21/14) pointed out that the Washington Post
ignored Robert Parry and Brian Barger’s groundbreaking AP article (12/20/85), which first revealed the involvement of Contras in drug-running, and then failed to follow up as smaller papers reported on Contra-related cocaine traffic in their backyards (In These Times, 8/5/87).
As a senior Time
magazine editor acknowledged to Laurence Zuckerman, a staff writer
whose 1987 story on Contra-related cocaine traffic was ultimately
scrapped (Extra!, 11/91) : “Time is
institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the
Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the
magazine.”
Karl Marx und das revolutionäre, weltverändernde Wesen seiner Lehre.” Artists: Rolf Kurth, Klaus Schwabe, and Frank Ruddigkeit. This bronze relief stood above the entrance to the administrative building of the Universität Leipzig on the spot where the SED demolished the Paulinerkirche in 1968. IMAGE/ Flickr.
It’s reached that time again, a time to look forward but also, for an
old geezer like me to look backward. Being 96 for a while yet (until
March), I can permit myself some retrospection (while noting that those
two digits, if only reversed and embodied, might well have been greatly
preferable. Wot-the-hell, while I can still enjoy each new spring and
fall and even a snowy winter (if I ever see one again), why shouldn’t I
review the many happenings I observed or was part of the worst of them,
luckily, from a distance. (But if you’ve read my “Crossing the River” or
“A Socialist Defector” you can skip all that follows.)
I’m old enough to remember, just barely, the Great Depression: lines
of shabby men waiting for free soup, better-dressed men selling apples
on streetcorners, miles of evil-smelling, self-made shacks in a
Hooverville near Newark. A few years later, with my cousin at Times
Square, I recall collecting money to “Save Madrid!”—and admiring the
Soviets for trying to help do just that, alone (with Mexico) for two
years against all the other countries. (And, also largely alone, for
bypassing the Depression, building the giant Dnepropetrovsk dam and the
model Moscow marble subway stations at New York’s World Fair. In
February 1937 I recall the movie newsreel with happy, unshaven sit-down
strikers at GM in Flint, waving from the factory windows in a dramatic
(Communist-led) victory which changed the USA.
And, in a friendly teacher’s room in September 1938, I recall hearing
Hitler boast of seizing much of Czechoslovakia, with British and French
compliance—and the tears of my Czech classmate Natalie. A year later,
as the only lefty in my class at posh Dalton School, I did my
11-year-old best to convince classmates that Stalin had to sign the pact
with Hitler to avoid being hit from all sides; Japan in the East,
Germany in the West, with the acquiescence of Chamberlain and Daladier
as in Spain and Munich, hoping they might wreck each other. “The USSR
needs time to strengthen its defenses.”
I triumphed later when Pete Seeger, in one of his first concerts, had
all the kids singing leftwing, CIO songs. June 1941, when the Wehrmacht
stormed in, I felt sure the great USSR would smash them. It did, but
only after years of sacrifice and slaughter, perhaps 27 million dead,
untold destruction—while we in safe but darkened, rationed New York felt
deep fear—and then enthusiasm as the tide turned.
Saddened and worried by the death of the only president I had ever
known, I rejoiced at the photo of the GI-Red Army handshake on a broken
Elbe bridge, not dreaming that, 25 years later, I would be commemorating
that event at the bridge at Torgau.
Grateful that V-E Day against German y and V-J Day against Japan
saved me , at 17, from the draft and the war—and from a fate like that
of my cousin Jerry, taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge and, being
Jewish, slaved till his death in a Buchenwald outlier camp in
Thuringia. Spurred by Hiroshima-Nagasaki, post-war racist lynching and a
big CIO strike offensive, I helped build a Communist Party branch at
Harvard, covert in name but active against Jim Crow and in “Win the
Peace” actions, like our anti-atomic weapons parade through staid
Harvard Yard. In the summer of 1946 , in a lone hitchhike to California
and back, I got to know more of my country’s many beauties—and many
problems. I had a trip through France and wrecked Germany—and six
wonderful weeks at the first World Youth Festival in Prague (1947), with
anti-fascist partisan veterans from Europe, freedom fighters from
Greece, Vietnam, Burma, Africa, and new friends from Tirana, Bucharest,
Moscow, Capetown, Prague—and shared with thousands my hopes for a
new-born world.
BRICS keeps expanding, adding partner
countries in January 2025, after admitting new members in 2024. It now
makes up roughly half of the global population and more than 41% of
world GDP (PPP). It’s an economic powerhouse, with top producers of key
commodities like oil, gas, grains, meat, and minerals.
Indonesia was admitted as a full member of BRICS on January 6, 2025. This was announced just two weeks after Russia had revealed that Indonesia was one of nine countries that were added as BRICS “partners”.
This means that BRICS now has 10 full members, consisting of the following:
Brazil
Russia
India
China
South Africa
Egypt
Ethiopia
Indonesia
Iran
United Arab Emirates
Joining the 10 BRICS members are eight partner countries that are on the path to full membership. These are:
Belarus
Bolivia
Cuba
Kazakhstan
Malaysia
Thailand
Uganda
Uzbekistan
The following is an updated map showing the members and partners of BRICS, as of January 7, 2025:
On Monday, following Israel’s decision to close its embassy in Ireland,
the newly appointed Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar lashed out at
Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris, accusing him of
anti-Semitism. “There is a difference between criticism,” Saar said,
“and anti-Semitism based on the delegitimisation and dehumanisation of
Israel and double standards towards Israel as opposed to other
countries. This is how Ireland allowed itself to behave towards Israel.”
Responding to the furore, Harris told reporters in Dublin that
Ireland would not be silenced, stressing Ireland had remained consistent
throughout the war in its support for Israel’s “right to defend itself”
within the limits of international law.
However, “You know what I think is reprehensible?,” Harris caveated,
“Killing children, I think that’s reprehensible. You know what I think
is reprehensible? Seeing the scale of civilian deaths that we’ve seen in
Gaza. You know what I think is reprehensible? People being left to
starve and humanitarian aid not flowing.”
Historian Vijay Prashad is one of the most prominent Marxist thinkers in the current era – William Campos
The historian and political analyst analyses some of the world’s main political events
One of the main topics of international news at the beginning of the new year is likely to be Donald Trump’s comeback to the White House.
Even before taking up a new term heading the US, he has been causing
controversy with a variety of threats: from “resolving” the Ukraine war
in 24 hours, to the mass deportation of millions of migrants and seizing
the Panama Canal.
One of his
main threats is to surcharge products from other countries, in theory,
to benefit US production. Punishing countries that stop using the US dollar for commercial transactions with sanctions is another variant of this threat.
“By now,
70% of developing countries around the world have US sanctions. What are
they going to do? Sanction 100% of them? That would isolate the United
States. I think we have to take some of these threats by Trump with a
little less seriousness,” said Prashad.
To Indian historian Vijay Prashad,
one of today’s most important Marxist thinkers, although he points out
that the new US government must be terrible news for most nations, the
billionaire’s threats shouldn’t be taken so seriously.
The Indian thinker was the last guest of BdF Entrevista
in 2024. In the conversation, he reviews some of the main issues that
were highlighted in the last year in the international news, such as the
Venezuelan election and the US, the rise of the far right, the war in
Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, as well as climate change and
artificial intelligence.
Watch the full interview (in English) and read the main topics below:
I’d
like to take you through some of the most important events of 2024 that
have made international news, starting with Venezuela. We had the
election in Venezuela, whose result was contested by the opposition and
by foreign countries, including the US and the European Union. What did
you think?
The first
thing I’d say is that countries that are in a situation of near war or
war, it’s very difficult for them to hold an election. The immense
sanctions campaign on Venezuela is effectively a war.
And I think
it would be appropriate for the government to have held back on the
election, frankly. There are enough experiences around the world to know
that, when there is a situation like this, [it’s] very difficult to
hold an election. The state apparatus was not working at full capacity,
people are suffering and struggling, so many people have migrated out of
the country.
The sheer
fact that a million of people have migrated out of Venezuela calls into
question the ability of the Venezuelans to hold an election. So many of
their embassies are understaffed and so on. Nonetheless, Venezuela went
ahead with the election. Part of the reason for the election was the
Barbados Agreement that the Venezuelan government have made with the
opposition, brokered by the United States.
The US is
desperate to get Venezuelan oil into Europe. Because of the sanctions on
Russia, Europe is struggling to find energy. In fact, during 2022, the
United States committed France and Italy to buy petroleum from
Venezuela. There was a real hope that if the Barbados Agreement held,
then Venezuelan il could enter Europe.
The
election was, again, contested. It is always contested. The opposition
has contested the election from the beginning of the Chávez era. That
was to be expected. But then, the reaction of different countries was a
little surprising. If the Europeans are desperate for Venezuelan oil,
why would they then contest the election?
Particularly because they keep to trying to violate Venezuela’s sovereignty, saying, “Where are the papers? Show as the papers!” and so on. There is
no obligation in Venezuela for anything to be published. In fact, the
opposition candidate has to go to the government agency, the Central
Election Council, and ask for a challenge. They never did because the
opposition candidate [Edmundo González] ran off to Spain very shortly
thereafter.
