Image is of a protest in San Diego against ICE.
On January 7th, 37-year-old Renee Good was murdered by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. While a considerable amount of the discussion online has been about the direction her wheels were turning and things like that, truthfully, I think it's just fundamentally bad to shoot a person to death with a gun if you happen to be a state mercenary enforcing an incredibly racist federal policy, regardless of the circumstances.
The murder has since prompted a wave of vigils and protests, not only in Minneapolis, but also in virtually every major city in the country. The demands are justice for Good in particular, and the abolition of ICE in general, to avenge its many victims. The Trump administration has done all they can to inflame the situation, designating Good a "domestic terrorist" and saying that the agent who shot her will be immune from prosecution.
Protests and resistance to this administration's policies have, encouragingly, had an element of international solidarity - not only are flags from countries throughout Latin America (and also Palestine) present, but speakers in protests have even been actively condemning the recent imperialist actions against Venezuela. For it is, of course, one joint struggle. The imperial boomerang always returns - and in the modern day, it returns rapidly.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA 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.
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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/17/china-blocks-nvidia-h200-ai-chips-that-us-government-cleared-for-export-report
spoiler
Suppliers of parts for Nvidia’s H200 have paused production after Chinese customs officials blocked shipments of the newly approved artificial intelligence processors from entering China, according to a report.Reuters could not immediately verify the report, which appeared in the Financial Times citing two people with knowledge of the matter. Nvidia did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment made outside regular business hours.
Nvidia had expected more than one million orders from Chinese clients, the report said, adding that its suppliers had been operating around the clock to prepare for shipping as early as March.
Chinese customs authorities this week told customs agents that Nvidia’s H200 chips were not permitted to enter the country, Reuters reported.
Sources have also said government officials summoned domestic tech firms to warn them against buying the chips unless it was necessary.
The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said authorities had not provided any reasons for their directives and had not given any indication if this was a formal ban or a temporary measure.
The H200, Nvidia’s second most powerful AI chip, is one of the biggest flashpoints in US-Sino relations. There is strong demand from Chinese firms, but it remains unclear if Beijing wants to ban the chips outright to encourage domestic chip companies to develop their own; whether the Chinese government is still mulling restrictions; or if it is all a bargaining tactic.
If the import ban is confirmed, it adds to a convoluted situation that includes the Trump administration allowing the US-designed, Taiwanese-manufactured H200 chips to be exported to China, with the US government reportedly to take a share of the profits.
The US government then decreed that instead of the completed chips being sent directly to China from Taiwan, they instead first go to a US laboratory for testing, allowing a 25% tariff to be imposed as they pass through the US. The tariff was also applied to chipmaker AMD’s MI325X processor.
Experts and analysts are split on whether selling the H200 to China is strategically a good idea. Those in favour say its availability might slow China’s progress developing similar chips and keep Chinese companies dependent on US technology; those against say the H200 is, for example, powerful enough to be used in weapons systems that China’s military might one day deploy against the US or its allies.
Testing
Everything that involves microprocessors and a network connection (US, European, Chinese, Russian, doesn't matter who makes it) is backdoored and you'd have to be a fool to think otherwise. Sovereignty only exists insofar as your ability to produce your own hardware and software.
Even things without microprocessors should be assumed to be potentially backdoored when from the west and evaluated for risk including in a systemic non-individual way. For example stuff such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) (non-US but they understand the principles very well now and have for decades)
Lots of tricks that can be played with resonance, lighting things up with radio frequencies. That kind of spying is one but also potentially causing failure of devices. Say get your enemy to buy a bunch then when combat comes, blast the right frequency from something you smuggled into a warehouse years ago, their infrastructure crumbles due to tiny failures that are hard to understand at first. Western book of dirty intelligence tricks is pretty sophisticated.
Also I'd like to point out that there is ZERO evidence that China has used hardware backdoors. They do hacking yes. But zero credible evidence they like the US undermine their industry by doing implants. These stories pop up from time to time about supermicro or whoever and cause this big stir in infosec and then without additional evidence beyond "CIA/NSA/FBI claim" they vanish. Why don't they publish the receipt? Where is the proof? Where are the independent experts who can confirm this? These stories then quietly slink away with the feds never mentioning them again. The point being to sew distrust in Chinese products and to keep people within the western ecosystem.
Often in front of Congress or the EU parliament or whatever intelligence ghouls or military will state that "Huawei is a national security threat" or similar. But this is vague and the truth they won't ever say in the spotlight is it's not a threat because of backdoors, it's a threat because it undermines western monopolies on hardware, first disclosures of security vulnerabilities, and so on which together enable the western empire of hackers to do NSA global surveillance, hacking, intelligence gathering and maintain primacy. Their national security threat is not being able to spy on others so they undermine confidence in Chinese tech to keep people on their backdoored tech, their tech that has NSA/FBI officers who know first about privately disclosed vulnerabilities that can be exploited before patching by western intelligence. Their tech that they can do mail interception on to install NSA hardware backdoors in because it comes from western shipping locations. They fear the Chinese do the same but there is zero proof and given the scrutiny China faces I tend to doubt they'd undermine their selling points displacing the west by doing such practices which would get them caught red-handed. Hacking is enough for China because they have no need or interest to spy on everyone all the time like the control-freak west. They do targeted operations.
lol @ anybody who actually thinks China is going to be using Nvidia chips for military technology
The official guideline has been clear: for inference use domestic chips, for training buy Nvidia.
The recent ban is probably lobbying from Huawei/other domestic firms who are worried about competition from Nvidia, but their own aren’t very good for training yet. In other words, classic protectionism.
Is this to encourage local manufacturing, or due to espionage concerns? My understanding is that usually GPUs do not have direct access to the internet, and so putting a backdoor in one of them would be pointless.
I think it’s just protectionist policy. Chinese chips are already good enough for most inference tasks so there is no need to purchase foreign chips.
didn’t the famous zero-day stuff that the US used against Iran to destroy centrifuges also have “no direct access to the internet”?? I am pretty sure that if they can design and modify the hardware they could theoretically bake something into it that would still make it vulnerable- probably even more insidious than a vulnerability in the firmware, no?
Those chips are sabotaged or backdoored.
Aren't these the same chips Nvidia was begging the US government to exempt from the export restrictions? lol