ICE detainee found dead and “hog-tied” in shower at Noem facility

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A Chinese immigrant died under suspicious circumstances at a Pennsylvania ICE detention center, and the autopsy tells a different story than the government’s official report.

Chaofeng Ge, 32, was found dead on August 5, 2025, just four days after being detained at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center run under Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Medical examiners found him in a shower stall in what they called a “hog-tied” position — his hands and feet tied together behind his back with bedsheets, with a noose made from bed linens around his neck.

https://boingboing.net/2025/11/20/ice-detainee-found-dead-and-hog-tied-in-shower-at-noem-facility.html

Normalizing Far-Right Ideologies in the Western Balkans: Croatia’s Role at Home and Abroad

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The Croatian government’s normalization of the neo-Nazi far-right is intrinsically linked to its undermining of democracy in post-war Bosnia, a country facing secession threats by a Bosnian Serb leader in its worst political crisis in peacetime, one that has profound security risks, given the ethnonationalist partitionist violence that sparked the wars of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The far-right ideology expressed in July’s concert in Croatia and the sentiment reflected in subsequent Nazi graffiti there that went un-condemned by the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) political party were the backbone of the Croatian ethnonationalist war of aggression against central and western Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. Today’s leader of the HDZ’s sister party in Bosnia, the HDZ BiH, is alleged to have requested Bosniaks from Croat-run concentration camps to use as forced labor when he was general director of the Soko factory in the southern Bosnian city of Mostar, an allegation he denies.

Croatia’s normalization of this ideology suggests it may be turning to the dark politics of the past to shape the Western Balkans of today. At the same time, the region has become fertile ground for Russian influence, including the Kremlin’s support of the Bosnian Serb separatist leader, Milorad Dodik, who regularly cooperates with HDZ BiH political figures and endorses their political objectives.

https://www.justsecurity.org/125043/croatia-far-right-western-balkans/

Roll-back of digital rights prepared in secrecy

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Today, the Commission published its proposal for ‘simplification’ of digital rules, a package intended to deregulate digital laws to support businesses. The deregulation of the EU’s digital rulebook comes at a time when the tech industry is spending a record-breaking €151 million on EU lobbying. Most prominent is an attack on data privacy rules (GDPR) to support the development of artificial intelligence.

Corporate Europe Observatory published a new piece of research documenting how Big Tech has influenced the digital omnibus.

Key findings include:

Key demands from Big Tech firms and their affiliated lobby associations to water down the AI Act and weaken data protection made it into the Commission’s proposals;

Big Tech weaponised the Trump administration to attack the EU’s digital rulebook;

The Commission has opened the doors to business lobby groups in highly secretive meetings. Crucial steps in the preparation of the digital omnibus were five so-called Reality Checks, meetings heavily dominated by industry. Out of 138 invitees, 114 were business representatives. Only 9 civil society organisation representatives were invited.

Corporate Europe Observatory has retrieved a document which shows that the Commission has decided to exempt ‘Reality Checks’ from transparency measures that apply to other meetings with “interest representatives”.

https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/11/roll-back-digital-rights-prepared-secrecy

The UN Embraces Colonialism: Unpacking the Security Council’s mandate for the U.S. colonial administration of Gaza

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Most disturbingly, it hands control of Gaza and the survivors of the genocide over to the United States, a co-perpetrator of the genocide, and provides for the participation of the Israeli regime in decision making. Under the plan, Palestinians themselves are to be granted no such participation in decisions on their own rights, governance, and lives.

In adopting this resolution, the Council, in effect, has become a mechanism of U.S. oppression, an instrument for the continued unlawful occupation of Palestine, and a complicit actor in Israel’s genocide.

Not since the UN partitioned Palestine in 1947 against the will of the indigenous people, setting the stage for 80 years of Nakba, has the UN acted in such a baldly colonial (and legally ultra vires) way, and trampled so recklessly on the rights of a people.

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/the-un-embraces-colonialism-unpacking-the-security-councils-mandate-for-the-u-s-colonial-administration-of-gaza/

CIA, White House surprised by secret meeting between US ambassador and Jonathan Pollard

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The reasons Huckabee and his senior adviser, David Milstein, agreed to the meeting remain unclear. Both men have sought to cultivate strong ties with Israel’s right wing, with which Pollard is closely aligned. Pollard said he thanked Huckabee for advocating more than a decade ago for his release from prison. He declined to detail the topics discussed, saying only that “a lot of things” came up.

In the Times interview, Pollard said he did not regret spying for Israel, arguing that Washington had withheld critical intelligence. He also sharply criticized President Donald Trump, calling him “a madman who has literally sold us down the drain for Saudi gold,” referring to Trump’s announcement that the United States would sell F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia despite Israeli concerns.

Pollard has since signaled political ambitions, telling The Jerusalem Post he intends to run for the Knesset and advocating annexation of Gaza and its “repopulation” with Israeli settlers.

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hyfpt00nlwg

Operation Gladio: The CIA’s Secret Army In Europe

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Three years after the end of World War II, the 1948 Brussels Treaty created the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union. And after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in 1949, the Western Union was left “devoid of its newly-expanded authority,” according to the University of Luxembourg.

But the Clandestine Committee was transformed into the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) in 1952 and, along with the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), was linked to NATO. According to “The Cold War,” it was through this network that NATO member states organized the stay-behind network across Western Europe that would become known as Operation Gladio.

The CIA, with the help of MI6, was also instrumental towards setting up the stay-behind espionage networks. According to “The Declassified History of American Intelligence Operations in Europe” by Matthew M. Aid, the CIA intended to do “whatever it took” to prevent Western European countries from having any communist influence in their governments. And by the late 1960s, the CIA was “covertly financing dozens of underground stay-behind agent networks in thirteen Western European countries, including supposedly neutral Sweden.”

https://www.grunge.com/717106/operation-gladio-the-cias-secret-army-in-europe/

Sandinista! To Our Friends, 20 Years Later — In Memory of Timur Kacharava, Russian Anti-Fascist

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In the early 2000s, Russia went through various stages of consolidation of state power and strengthening of law enforcement structures after the criminal redistribution of property and mass privatization of the 1990s. The role of nationalist rhetoric in these processes and the connection between the state apparatus and nationalist organizations were emotionally yet accurately described in several analytical articles by the anti-fascist civil rights activist Stanislav Markelov.

In his essay “Patriotism as a Diagnosis,” he describes patriotism backed up by the criminal state as a disease of society, a tool for depoliticizing and maintaining a passive condition of silent majority and a tactic to distract attention from the real problem of growing social inequality.

Markelov is best known as the lawyer of the plaintiff on the high-profile trial of colonel Budanov, who was accused of raping and murdering Elza Kungayeva, a teenage girl from Chechnya. Markelov’s uncompromising stance on nationalism and his consistent support for anti-fascists caused strong irritation not only among representatives of neo-Nazi groups, but also among nationalist-minded military and representatives of law enforcement structures.

On January 19, 2009, several years after the murder of Timur Kacharava, Stanislav Markelov was murdered by a gunshot in the head in the center of Moscow. He was accompanied by a journalist, anti-fascist and environmental activist Anastasia Baburova. She was fatally wounded by shots and died in the hospital later the same day.

During the investigation, it was found that behind the murders of Markelov and Baburova was a neo-Nazi group, the Russian Nationalist Combat Organization. This group was later recognized as responsible for the murders of at least ten other people: anti-fascists, migrants, law enforcement officers, and martial arts athletes of non-Russian origin. Members of the group had access to the addresses and photographs of left-wing activists from the database of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Center for Countering Extremism, and one of the group’s members had been an actual Federal Security Service (FSB) employee.

According to our information, the attack on Timur was also not accidental and his killers were hunting him down specifically.

https://crimethinc.com/2025/11/17/sandinista-to-our-friends-20-years-later-in-memory-of-timur-kacharava-russian-anti-fascist

A new face of ethnic cleansing: From siege to demographic engineering

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The latest events merely reveal another layer of this long continuum: expulsion through paperwork, or more precisely, through the deliberate absence of it. Multiple investigations show that passengers were escorted through the Karam Salem crossing and transferred to Israel’s Ramon Airport without their passports being stamped. Bureaucratically, this erases their legal identity; without proof of exit, their right of return dissolves. Politically, it signals a chilling shift from siege to disappearance — the continuation of ethnic cleansing by administrative means.

The organisation behind these “humanitarian” flights calls itself Al-Majd Europe. On its own website, the group describes itself as a humanitarian organisation “founded in 2010 in Germany” and “specialising in providing aid and rescue efforts to Muslim communities in conflict and war zones.” Its self-presentation is steeped in religious language — “Our roots are rooted in the values and heritage of Islam, and our headquarters are located in Jerusalem” — projecting an image of benevolent rescue and offering “evacuation services” to Gazans. Yet the site also includes a disclaimer warning against “hidden smugglers using our name and asking for money.”

Investigative journalists from AP and Al Jazeera have since uncovered a digital mirage: a domain registered abroad, cryptocurrency payment options, AI-generated staff photos, and no verifiable headquarters. Families in Gaza reportedly paid thousands of dollars to secure passage, only for the organisation to vanish once the flights landed. Is this the latest form of smuggling — not into, but away from the homeland? What masquerades as rescue thus becomes complicity, a humanitarian mask concealing the machinery of erasure.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251116-a-new-face-of-ethnic-cleansing-from-siege-to-demographic-engineering/