Tom Roche

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In this week’s news roundup: US-Iran negotiations might be making progress (1:02); in Israel-Palestine, a new aid program implemented gets people killed (6:30), the US proposes framework for a new peace deal* (11:01), and Israel creates 22 new West Bank settlements (15:54); cases of cholera are spiking in Sudan (17:35); Libya’s eastern-based government may cut off its oil supply (19:23); Salva Kiir appoints a potential successor in South Sudan (21:51); jihadist activity appears to be on the rise in Mozambique (23:46); Mauritius and the UK sign a Chagos Islands deal (25:52); Russia offers to begin new peace talks (29:48) as Trump lashes out at Putin (35:06); the far right emerges as the main opposition in Portugal (38:29); President Petro in Colombia calls for a general strike (40:23); in the US, the Trump administration freezes student visas and revokes those for Chinese students (42:11), a court rules that the “Liberation Day” tariffs are unconstitutional*, and Elon Musk’s term as “co-president” has come to an end (48:26).

*Hamas has reportedly rejected this deal as it stands since the time of recording.

**An appeals court has since agreed to a temporary pause in the decision. 

   

Everywhere you look, you can see the decline of Western hegemony, as the world is increasingly multipolar. Ben Norton analyzes the rise of China, development of Global South economies, and increasing unity in Asia. A symbol of this was the historic ASEAN-GCC-China Summit held in Malaysia, which supplements BRICS in pursuit of dedollarization, South-South economic integration, and infrastructure construction. VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRGkCw-Sqk0 Topics 0:00 Weakening US dominance 0:22 Industrial production 0:46 China is world's largest economy 1:22 Decline of Western hegemony 1:53 Rise of Global South 2:45 Global South is Global Majority 3:44 Trump is accelerating US decline 4:28 BRICS expansion 5:46 ASEAN-GCC-China Summit 7:21 ASEAN 7:41 Southeast Asia's population 8:54 Southeast Asia's economy 9:41 GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) 10:50 ASEAN-GCC-China Summit joint statement 11:26 ASEAN's trade with China 11:47 RCEP 12:22 Palestine 12:54 Opposition to Trump's tariffs 13:44 De-dollarization 14:57 Petroyuan challenges petrodollar 16:09 Infrastructure 16:32 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 16:57 New Silk Road 17:32 Railroads linking China to SE Asia 18:59 Energy 19:54 China: world leader in renewable energy 20:08 China's solar power capacity 20:44 China's affordable green energy tech 24:38 Nuclear power 27:16 Other issues discussed 27:55 Multipolarity 28:41 The ASEAN Way 29:35 Cautious optimism 30:31 Global South-led alternatives 31:05 Outro

¡Tómala! On Sunday, June 1st, Mexico went to the polls to elect the entire Supreme Court and half of the federal judiciary (the other half will be elected in 2027). Kurt and José Luis will have the full rundown of this historic step forward in bringing democracy to a branch riddled with corruption, nepotism, obscene privileges, and collusion with oligarchies domestic and international. Sunday also saw local elections in the states of Durango and Veracruz: our hosts will parse through those results and discuss what implications, if any, they have at the national level. And in Losers and Haters, our own cull of the worse takes on the judicial elections - not very hard to find, it must be said.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered an extremely hawkish speech in which he demonized China as a "threat" and said, "We are preparing for war". Ben Norton analyzes the top Trump admin official's aggressive remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue 2025 summit. He explains the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region, and Washington's unsuccessful attempt to pressure countries to join its new cold war on Beijing. VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLOTTVI_LAA US defense secretary declared 'holy war' on China, left & Islam: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/03/07/us-defense-secretary-hegseth-overthrow-china-crusade/ Is war on China coming? The US military is seriously preparing: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/04/28/us-military-war-china-silicon-valley/ Topics 0:00 (CLIPS) US defense secretary speech 0:30 US military prepares for war 1:05 (CLIP) "We are preparing for war" 1:25 Trump admin's war threats 1:55 (CLIP) Trump "will never hesitate to" use force 2:13 (CLIP) "Deterrence" and war 2:24 Shangri-La Dialogue 2025 summit 2:41 Asia-Pacific region 3:59 (CLIP) USA is "here to stay" in "Indo-Pacific" 4:19 US empire seeks hegemony 4:50 (CLIP) Pentagon says China is a "threat" 5:11 Pete Hegseth, extremist US "crusader" 6:31 Myth of Chinese "hegemony" 7:24 (CLIP) Hegseth on China "threat" 8:01 China opposes hegemony 9:34 China doesn't want hegemony 10:33 US pressures Asia to cut ties with China 11:17 (CLIP) USA opposes "economic cooperation" 11:47 Taiwan 13:05 (CLIP) Hegseth on Taiwan 13:32 Hegseth's hawkish rhetoric 13:56 (CLIP) US "warfighters" and "warfighting" 14:31 US military budget of $1 trillion 14:40 (CLIP) Trump boosts US military spending 15:02 Military interventions 15:32 (CLIP) USA tells Asia: Join us against China 15:48 US divide-and-conquer strategy is failing 16:23 China, Japan, South Korea cooperate 16:47 Trump's tariff threats 17:25 RCEP trade deal 17:55 ASEAN-GCC-China summit 18:36 India 18:43 (CLIP) Hegseth on US-India partnership 19:00 India-China relations 20:24 Philippines volunteers to be Ukraine of Asia 21:21 US military bases and missiles in Philippines 21:51 Militarization of first island chain 22:48 Regional non-alignment 23:19 Philippines and Australia 24:40 Colonialist Monroe Doctrine 25:03 (CLIP) Hegseth threatens Panama Canal 25:31 US imperialism is bipartisan 26:03 Biden official praises Trump's China policy 27:02 Republicans vs Democrats 27:39 US empire says war is peace 28:32 (CLIP) USA doesn't seek encirclement? 28:45 US "grand encirclement plan" for China 29:34 Biden admin's China policy 30:02 (CLIP) Antony Blinken on China containment 30:15 Imperial hypocrisy 31:05 Cold War Two 31:54 Silicon Valley profits from war preparations 32:15 Outro

Andy Zaltzman is joined by Armando Iannucci, Ria Lina, Ian Smith and Cindy Yu for more topical comedy quizzing. This week they explore Trump’s tariff turmoil, the King’s Canadian holiday, mixed messages in the Middle East and how the Department of Justice is having trouble finishing its sentences.

Written by Andy Zaltzman.

With additional material by: Mike Shephard, Peter Tellouche, Sascha LO and Eve Delaney. Producer: James Robinson Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Coordinator: Jodie Charman Sound Editor: Marc Willcox

A BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4

For many years, Palestine had one of the strongest left-wing movements in the Arab world, represented by prominent figures such as Emile Habibi, Leila Khaled, and Ghassan Kanafani. At the beginning of the First Intifada in the 1980s, Palestinian left groups were still the main challengers to the hegemony of Fatah, although the Left has lost much of its influence in the period since then.

Red Star Over Palestine: Histories of the Palestinian Left is a six-part series from Long Reads exploring radical movements and progressive organizations of the region. We examine the experience of Palestinian communism and the left-wing currents inside the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. We also look at the outsized impact of the Left on Palestinian cultural life.

Our fifth episode focuses on the period from the First Intifada, arguably the high-point of the Palestinian left-wing movement, to the Oslo Accords.

Red Star Over Palestine is hosted by Daniel Finn and produced by Conor Gillies. Music provided by Fadi Tabbal.

Jon Stewart tracks Elon Musk's White House crash, from the high of being Trump's "first buddy" to the low of his black-eyed DOGE send-off. Now that the 100-day honeymoon is over, Jon also checks in on Trump's other struggling cabinet members, like the FBI's burned-out deputy director, Dan Bongino.

Carole Cadwalladr, the award-winning journalist behind the Substack newsletter “How to Survive the Broligarchy,” talks to Jon about how the U.S. government ignored the huge wake-up call that was the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook data breach scandal – a story Cadwalladr broke and which resulted in no legislative protections for citizens’ private data. She warns about the unregulated dangers that data-mining and AI pose to individual privacy and freedom, and what people and institutions can do to push back on big tech’s authoritarian agenda.

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Michael Kosta dives into the fallout of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill: Elon slamming the “sprawling spending bill" and turning on Trump, Democrats backing Elon’s criticisms, and Marjorie Taylor Greene revealing she never read it in the first place. Plus, the Big Beautiful Bill (Troy Iwata) claps back at all the new haters.

The Trump administration has pushed out legacy media outlets from the White House press room in favor of more conspiratorial right-wing "new media" figures like Tim Pool: a conservative YouTuber and podcaster passionate about stroking Trump's ego and delivering truthful reporting sponsored by Russian interests.

University of Michigan Law professor and “Strict Scrutiny” co-host Leah Litman joins Michael Kosta to discuss her New York Times bestseller, “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.”
By making the inner workings of SCOTUS more accessible and believing in the power of “talking sh*t,” she explains how the nation’s highest court has been operating under conservative guidance with little code of ethics in rolling back LGBTQ+ and minority discrimination protections and targeting reproductive rights after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

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Ryan and Emily discuss Elon rages over Trump budget bill, Piers Morgan grills Israel rep on Gaza children, Schumer badgers Trump on Iran war, Ukraine bombs Crimea bridge, Joy Reid reveals MSNBC firing, Laura Loomer war on neocons over Venezuela.

 

Juan Rojas: https://x.com/rojasrjuand 

 

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In this News Brief, we we break down an object lesson in racist US-Israeli national security state toadyism, double standards, and runaway condescension.

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Danny and Derek welcome to the program author Eva Payne to talk about her book Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution. They discuss American sexual exceptionalism, the legal definition of “prostitution” vs modern conceptions of sex work, the late 19th century new abolition movement and racial hierarchies therein, how Americans interfaced with state-regulated prostitution systems in places like India and the Philippines, the sexual imagery used in justifying US aims in the Spanish-American War, the notion of “white slavery” in sex work, prostitution control in World War I and how it affected things domestically after that conflict, eugenic thinking around prostitution reform, and much more. 

Host of The Adam Friedland Show Adam Friedland joins us to catch up on today’s news and discuss his new season. We look at the return of Matt Miller, Jake Tapper’s take on Israel/Palestine discourse, the kidnapping of a crypto whale in Manhattan, and new reports of Elon Musk’s rampant drug use. Adam also gives us his takes on engaging with the new right-coded online content sphere through TAFS, teases some guests for the coming season, and generally annoys Felix with delays and requests for refreshments. Find The Adam Friedland Show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAdamFriedlandShow New merch for the summer up at https://chapotraphouse.store/

Uma, Nick and Ciarán feel compelled once again to talk about the antics of the German political class as they suddenly realize maybe that Israel is bad. Also Macron got slapped again.

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Following our tributes to David Thomas and Peter Laughner of Pere Ubu, Jims rounds out the trilogy with a song by another of the band's members.

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Historian and founder of Palestine Nexus, an educational resource on Palestine, Zachary Foster joins Bad Faith to break down his viral article on the forgotten history of Jewish anti-zionism. By forensically examining the long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, he disrupts mythology used to justify Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the present. Also, he weighs in on the recent shift in mainstream media coverage of Palestine, a new willingness to acknowledge the ongoing siege and starvation campaign, and what, if anything, it means for the fate of Palestinians.

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Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Andy Zaltzman is joined by Andrew Maxwell, Ian Smith, Alex Kealy and Times columnist, Cindy Yu. They cover a triumph or a surrender (depending on who you ask) as well as reflecting on where you're most likely to spot a billionaire in the wild and the death of the semi-colon.

Written by Andy Zaltzman.

With additional material by: Christina Riggs, Laura Major and Christian Manley. Producer: Gwyn Rhys Davies Executive Producer: Richard Morris Production Coordinator: Jodie Charman Sound Editor: Marc Willcox

A BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4.

Joar Von Arndt has an interesting post on a subject that many Emacs users obsess about: how to bring Web browser functionality into Emacs. As, I’ve said many times, virtually all my tube time is either in Emacs or Safari. I would, of course, like to get that down to just Emacs. To be sure, I do use some other apps but my time with them is basically in the noise. Almost everything I do on the computer involves Emacs or the browser.

Von Arndt looks at eww, w3m, Xwidgets, and EAF. He discusses the pros and cons of each. He appears to think that eww—with some customization—is the best solution.

My solution is to use Xwidgets for rendering Email posts that need it and for my RSS feed via Elfeed. My email client, mu4e, makes it easy to switch between text and HTML rendered displays. It is, in a way, the best of both worlds. I can read most of my emails in plain text, as the elders decreed, but can switch to an HTML rendered display when I need to.

I use elfeed-webkit to display my RSS feed with Elfeed. It brings up each entry in a browser like display and, of course, can be easily be toggled on and off. It’s a bit fragile, as Von Arndt says, but it easier than invoking the brower for each entry.

The sad news is that there still isn’t a good solution but what solutions there are are getting better. Perhaps we will soon have a way of bringing the final major holdout into the Emacs fold.

Jeff Bradberry has an excellent post on adding timestamped notes to the LOGBOOK drawer in Org files. Most of us are used to using this drawer to record state changes in TODO notes. You can arrange to have the times of the state changes added to the LOGBOOK. You can also arrange to pop up a buffer so that you can add a note to the entry. I do this when the state changes to CANCELLED or WAITING. Sometimes you may want to add a note to a state change that doesn’t normally have one.

That turns out to be easy. You simple add the universal argument to the state change call. If you use the normal Ctrl+c Ctrl+t binding, you would simply use Ctrl+u Ctrl+c Ctrl+t instead when you want to add a note.

Many of you probably already know all this but Bradberry thought it would nice to add arbitrary notes to the drawer as well. That turns out to be easy too. As usual, Emacs has us covered. You simply call org-add-note bound to Ctrl+c Ctrl+z by default.

This post is the seventh in a series on building an Org-mode Workflow. The whole series is worthwhile and you should definitely take a look if you’re an Org user. There are links to the entire series in Bradberry’s post.

My journey into using Hledger with Emacs to track my share investments continues. Last Time I looked at a way to track shares using a plain text file. Since then I have made some tweaks to my workflow as I gain more experience:

• naming conventions that support multiple stock brokers
• booking brokerage fees in a better way to support the Australian tax system.

Naming convention

Over the past month I was not overly impressed with my existing stock broker, which led me to explore other stock brokers that may offer a more reliable service at a cheaper rate. It is expensive to transfer stocks over to a new broker, so I decided to cap further investment at my current broker and instead make any new purchases at a different broker. This meant that I would need an account structure that lets me easily identify which share lots were purchased through which broker.

Bad Faith podcast host Briahna Joy Gray chronicles the Democrats' latest acts of self-destruction: from the 2024 primary, to the Biden mental decline cover-up, to the party's quixotic quest to find the next "Joe Rogan of the left." Political commentator and podcast host Katie Halper joins Briahna to unpack the future of the Democrats as they fail to mobilize against Trump's policies.

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If you want to do statistical calculations with your computer, you probably want to use some sort of package to help you. When I was in school, we used Minitab (a "mini" version of OMNITAB— now there's a great name!), but I guess most statisticians used either S or SAS at the time. Later, R came along as an alternative to S. I may want to use extendr to access a Rust library from R, so I thought I would start by installing R on my Debian desktop.

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Writer and researcher Joshua Craze returns to the program to talk about the situation in South Sudan. They cover the collapsed 2018 “peace deal,” the elite forces vying for power, the Nuer White Army, figures like Salva Kiir Mayardit and Riek Machar, how South Sudan’s troubles have been impacted by the war in Sudan, external actors like the United Arab Emirates and Uganda, and the humanitarian crisis in the fragmented country.     

I like GitHub well enough; I link to it often and even have an account but I would never consider using it for anything but public files that I had replicated on my own machine. I’ve been over the reasons for that many times. The most important reason is that you should never commit your only copy of any data you care about to a third party computer. Once you do, a clock starts ticking down to the time that you will lose your data. You never know how much time is left on the clock but you can be sure that it will eventually reach 0.
The second reason is that any site that hosts a lot of data is an attractive target for criminals and your data could be compromised. Here’s the latest GitHub exploit. That’s why I say I would only use GitHub for public data.

All of this is by way of introduction to this post from Simon Willison. In it Willison posits that GitHub is (almost) the perfect notebook. What follows is a list of features that could easily be a description of Org mode. Read it and see if you don’t agree.

The only reason for Willison’s “almost” is the lack of synchronized offline support. I submit that Journelly goes a long ways towards meeting that concern for Org mode. I’ve previously described it as a front end for Org and although it doesn’t expose all your Org files to your remote device it gets you a long way.

Given all that, it’s clear to me that Emacs and Org mode is a much better notebook than GitHub could hope to be. Your data is safer both from criminals and from being disappeared for some reason by a third party provider. My only question is why do I have to keep repeating this.

Enjoy the full version of this special we published last week!

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Danny and Derek invite ⁠Zachary Karabell⁠, historian and founder of ⁠the Progress Network⁠, as well as host of the podcast ⁠What Could Go Right?⁠, to talk about the big things: liberalism, American political capitalism, Trump, "abundance," and more.

The “humanitarian aid” scheme, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has characterized as necessary to maintain U.S. support for his war of annihilation against the Palestinians of Gaza, began on Tuesday. Within hours, Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians at a site near Rafah, while the family of a man who went to get a small box of food aid says he was kidnapped by Israeli forces. The program is managed by a shadowy “non-governmental organization” and is being staffed, in part, by U.S. mercenaries. Some eyewitness reports indicate U.S. contractors also fired at the crowd. No deaths or injuries have been reported as of publication. Photos released earlier in the day showed Palestinians packed into metal enclosures at the site, where, according to local sources, they were held for hours in intense heat with no clear system for distributing food. The aid center is one of two launched Tuesday under a controversial U.S.-Israeli mechanism that bypasses UN agencies and has drawn criticism from Palestinians and humanitarian groups.

Meanwhile, on Monday, Hamas announced it had reached an “understanding” with U.S. officials for a new ceasefire agreement, but almost immediately after the news broke, Israel denounced the plan and insisted it would not enter into any agreement with a clear path to halting the genocide or the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. On this week’s Drop Site News live stream, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim analyze the Trump administration’s approach to the war against Gaza, the specific terms of the agreement Hamas endorsed and the prospects that Trump might force Netanyahu to halt Israel’s genocidal onslaught.

While all international and regional players recognize that Trump is the only person with the power to stop Netanyahu, there are strong voices within his administration that want to see Israel continue on with its occupation and ultimate goal of erasing Palestinians from Gaza and seizing the territory. Pressure is mounting from European nations on Israel to end its war, but the hard reality is that it will all come down to whether Trump—for his own political and personal business interests—decides it must stop.

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Israel and its apologists claim they’re committing slaughter in Gaza to protect Jews and prevent another Holocaust. But that’s a scam.

Historian of Palestine Zachary Foster joins @RaniaKhalek on Dispatches to discuss. He exposes how the pro-Israel establishment in the Jewish American community is helping the Trump administration weaponize antisemitism to justify genocide in Palestine and fascist policies at home, and how empire is using Judaism as a human shield for imperial conquest.

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The European Union isn’t just complicit in the U.S. empire — it’s helping drive it. In this episode of Dispatches, Rania Khalek speaks with Marc Botenga, a Belgian Member of the European Parliament with the Workers’ Party of Belgium, about how Europe became a willing footsoldier for NATO’s wars, U.S. economic domination, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Botenga doesn’t mince words. He calls Europe’s role in Gaza a European genocide. He explains why supporting peace in Ukraine is taboo, how censorship is expanding under the pretext of fighting antisemitism, and why some of the European left is drifting into militarism.

As one of the only anti-imperialist voices in Brussels, Botenga breaks down what it means to resist from within the halls of EU power, how “green colonialism” is dressed up as climate policy, and why hope, and international solidarity, still matter.

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On today's episode, we talk some Eurovision fallout, the EU looking into diplomatic relations with Israel and the return of "It's Going So Well News."

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Drop Site’s Ryan & Jeremy join us for an update on Israel’s war on Gaza. We discuss yesterday’s attack on Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington D.C. and its potential ramifications, Trump’s recent trip to the Gulf and potential shifts in U.S. relations in the region, and the brutal escalations of violence in Gaza over the recent weeks. Ryan and Jeremy also relate some of the stories of the many talented and courageous Palestinian journalists they’ve worked with through the conflict, and how the war has laid bare many of the failings of domestic media. Subscribe to Drop Site here: https://www.dropsitenews.com/