Fatuma Musa Afrah was 16 when she touched a computer for the first time in Kenya. Somalian by birth, she insists that people use the word “newcomer” instead of “refugee” to refer to her.
The Ecuadorian government received international visibility when in 2012 it agreed to grant Wikileaks founder Julian Assange political asylum and host him in Ecuador’s London embassy.
Ecuador has since been widely praised for standing up to the United States to defend the freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
However, reality is not consistent with this projected image.
British student fights extradition to US for allegedly hacking FBI and NASA
US indictments says Anonymous hacker Lauri Love ‘secretly infiltrated’ computer systems and faces years in prison, more than if charged in the UK
THE CASE AGAINST MATT DEHART
Matthew DeHart woke up scared, disoriented and strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance. It was shortly after midnight, August 7, 2010. His heart was beating fast, and he was trembling. What had happened to him? Where was he going? His phone, keys and wallet were no longer in his pockets, and he was surrounded by strangers—the paramedics who’d arrived in the ambulance. And guards from a jail in Maine.
Canada Is Failing Mohamed Fahmy (Canadaland Episode 69)
Aired: FEBRUARY 8, 2015
Lorax B. Horne brings the voice of Dr. Tarek Loubani to inform the question of a Canadian journalist imprisoned in Egypt, on the media commentary podcast Canadaland with Jesse Brown.
Original blurb: “Before he quit his job, Foreign Minister John Baird said journalist Mohamed Fahmy’s release was “imminent”. Now Fahmy is set to be retried in Egypt after over a year in prison. John Baird engineered the release of Dr. Tarek Loubani after 50 days detained in the same jail. L.B. Horne asks Loubani about it, and asks the Fahmy family what comes next.”
(Fahmy was released from prison later that year and now teaches at the University of British Columbia)
Auto biography by Rodolfo Walsh (1965)
(translated from Spanish by Lorax)
They call me Rodolfo Walsh. As a kid, I wasn’t convinced by that name: I thought it would do me no good, for example, to be president of the Republic. Much later I discovered it could be pronounced as two conjoined aliteratives (”Rodól Fowólsh”), and I liked that.
Visit to Malc and Aud
I visited my grandfather’s little brother, Uncle Malcolm, and his wife Audrey. They live across the hall from each other in a quaint care home in their home village west of London.
Chevron’s Achilles Heel
Could a legal case in Ecuador impact future Canadian Liquid Natural Gas plants?
David Harvey lectures in Quito on Capitalism’s decline
These are my notes from the first class of David Harvey’s six-part series at Quito’s IAEN University, about capitalism, Marxism and urbanization. With GIFs.
Email from Taromenane land
Email received today from one of my sources in the jungle who has been following the local fall-out of the Newsweek article, and the government’s attempts to co-opt the conversation:
“NOS SENTIMOS MAREADOS DESPUÉS DE TANTO MATAR”
Una masacre, una niña raptada dos veces y un enorme yacimiento petrolero son todos parte del drama que estremece al Ecuador.
Una activista en Quito durante una protesta por el Yasuní en 2013. AP PHOTO/DOLORES OCHOA
Aterrizan dos helicópteros militares en un poblado remoto de las selvas de Ecuador, y varios enmascarados armados salen e irrumpen en un colegio de un sólo salón. Allí, capturan a su objetivo: una niña de seis años que no habla el idioma de los hombres y ni siquiera sospecha por qué la están secuestrando. Conta, la aterrorizada niña, es introducida en uno de los helicópteros que despega inmediatamente. En el vientre de lo que ella siempre ha visto como un demonio rugiente que atraviesa el cielo, vuela hasta una ciudad cercana. Una vez allí, los hombres armados la llevan a un hospital, que para la niña es un caldo de cultivo de gérmenes contra los que no posee defensas, ya que nunca ha estado antes en una ciudad.
‘AFTER ALL THE PEOPLE WE KILLED, WE FELT DIZZY'
A massacre, a twice-kidnapped girl and Big Oil star in a messy drama rattling Ecuador.
An activist in Quito during a 2013 protest.. AP PHOTO/DOLORES OCHOA
As two military-style helicopters touch down in a remote village in the jungles of Ecuador, masked men with guns hop out and scurry into a one-room schoolhouse. Inside they capture their target: a 6-year-old girl who doesn’t speak their language and can’t even guess why they are kidnapping her. They carry the terrified child, Conta, into the belly of one of the helicopters and it quickly rises up and away. Inside a thing she has only ever known as a screaming demon that roars across the sky, she is flown to a nearby city. There, she is taken by these armed strangers to a hospital that is a teeming petri dish of germs for which she has no immunity, since she has never been in a city before.
Yasuni Bibliography
Why is drilling for oil in the Yasuni-ITT block of Ecuador’s Amazon such a betrayal to the Ecuadorian people, the global anti-capitalist left, and to basic human rights? Today Newsweek publishes a piece I’ve been working on for a few months that attempts to answer this question: "’After all the people we killed, we felt dizzy’: A massacre, a twice-kidnapped girl and Big Oil star in a messy drama rattling Ecuador“
Nueva ley en Ecuador limitaría acceso al internet
Una nueva ley en Ecuador limitará el acceso al Internet en ese país, dice un colectivo conformado por personas involucradas en desarrollo de software y activistas de la red.
Ayer 5 de noviembre, usando el hashtag #InternetLibre, más de 40 personas reunidas en Quito hablaron de las posibles consecuencias de un artículo incluido en la propuesta para el nuevo Código Integral Penal, aprobado hace poco por la Asamblea Nacional que va pronto a consideración final por el Presidente de la República, Rafael Correa.
Hacking Ecuador’s economy
When I arrived in this new city after an eight hour bus ride and showed up on the Spaniard’s doorstep, he’d been asleep.