Welcome to Litsy!

"Information is the raw material for society. It is information that turns us from individuals operating in isolation into communities... Authoritarians know this. That's why they spend so much time and energy trying to control the media and our ability to connect with each other. The more we know the less likely we are to tolerate tyranny."
- Editorial, Nanjala Nyabola, #NewInternationalist #552

The concluding article in #NewInternationalist #551 is investigative journalist Matt Kennard's look at the USA's interference in the politics of other countries to further its own agenda. Knowing of the CIA's meddling with the politics of its traditional enemies, I was shocked to read of its propaganda tactics to undermine left-wing UK politicians from at least the end of WWII, most recently JC.
Reading of the UK as a vassal state to the USA is ⬇️

An article in #NewInternationalist #551 on press freedom led me to the website of Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontiers), where there is an index ranking each country. While it could certainly be worse, it's depressing to find the UK at 23/180 given our national pride in freedom of speech. Still, we're better than the USA at 55th, despite the vaunted First Amendment.
Another reason to emigrate to Scandinavia!
https://rsf.org/en/index

"If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly." ☠️

Sir Eric Newton Griffith-Jones, attorney-general of Kenya, 1955-61 in a memo to the British governor of Kenya regarding the suppression of information about and the "plausible deniability" of, the illegal treatment of "Mau Mau rebels", detained in concentration camps built by the UK colonial government within 10 years of the liberation of the WWII nazi death camps.
#NewInternationalist #551

"By December, half of the world's population will have had the opportunity to cast a vote this year."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

#551 of #NewInternationalist Magazine focuses on party politics, which doesn't sound riveting (to me, at least), but it's important as it's how most politics is organised, so I guess I'll have things to learn.

The arrival today of the latest #NewInternationalist magazine (#550, Abortion: Why is Your Body Still a Battleground?) reminded me that I have a year's backlog to read! 😳
I do enjoy NI, it's not a chore, but it can be heavy.
I missed one, and then they just accumulated. We're on holiday next week, so while I definitely won't read them all, I'll try to read a couple, at least. Probably start with the latest, then the oldest and work through. 📚

The latest edition of #NewInternationalist magazine, #540, has global land rights as its Big Story.
One of the general articles is about the Ukrainian government's attacks on unions, which prior to and since the Russian invasion, have led to widespread strikes in protest of Zelensky's legislative attempts to undermine worker's rights. The British government's UK Aid Agency has supported the anti-union crackdown, which perhaps partly explains ⬇️

"At Ivangorod on Russia's border with Estonia, several years ago, I was unceremoniously booted off a train and frogmarched down the tracks."

I thought I'd add another #FirstLineFridays as my other one was a bit boring! This is from #NewInternationalist #539, "Whose Railway is it Anyway?" ????

@ShyBookOwl

The latest issue of #NewInternationalist, #539, focuses on railways, how they can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, their potential to ease cross-border travel, and their role in anti-capitalism, all relevant as a wave of strikes, including rail workers, sweeps the UK as the cost of living crises deepens and our government is ripping itself apart. Other stories include a cartoon history of Thomas Paine, and Palestinian skateboard resistance.

I love it when different reading overlaps and mutually informs. Powys's characters inhabit a living environment in which the English trees, rocks, rivers and even the mud forming the river bed are all inhabited by a living animus with thoughts, feelings and influences. I've just finished a chapter titled The River in which the being of MC John Crow temporarily merges with a riverside willow tree shoot.
The latest edition of #NewInternationalist 👇