Image is from this Reuters article.
This week marks the one year anniversary of Honduras ceasing to recognize Taiwan and instead only recognizing China. Over that time period, China and Honduras have gone through several rounds of negotiating a free trade agreement, with trade expanding. Additionally, they have just signed a $275 million cooperation agreement, providing education infrastructure for Honduras.
The other major news piece relevant to Honduras is the battle against Prospera, a US-based crypto libertarian firm that sought to buy a private island in order to create an ancap paradise, in which Bitcoin would be legal tender. In 2022, Honduras killed the island’s special status that made the deal possible, and so Prospera is seeking $11 billion in compensation.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Honduras! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
Hmm… I’m mostly familiar with front-end and for most of the integrations, I’ve been able to leverage various APIs, where a lot of that backend-stuff is solved already (i.e. asking the server to get X Data and getting X back; like the IMF Data Tab). Downloading the spreadsheet and doing this myself, I’d have to get familiar with writing that type of code and the math first and it would take me a long time to implement. If someone would like to help doing the back-end it would be cool (please reach out). For now I feel like I still have so much left to do on the front-end of things. I’m also thinking about reaching out to the listed researchers at the bottom, once I’m ready to tackle it
That makes sense, unfortunately I don’t have the knowledge to help. Hopefully some people do, this is a cool project
Commenting for future. I’d love to have a crack at this, but my arm’s in a cast for at least another few weeks so
Yeah. Seems relatively straightforward to import the data into an actual, useful database, and then make a backend API to serve it in some fashion. The real question is: what is the useful thing to actually do with it?
The data is basically a cross product of input country/industry by output country/industry, with each entry being a dollar amount.
Is there some desire to add a way to look up a relation between two countries in the UI? Or, even more specifically, an industry in a country with an industry in another?
Would the desire be to sum up a row or column for each industry in a particular country?
Or…?
Yes! Ideally you’d be able to select two or more countries and see capital and commodity flows and show (imperial) relations. Not sure how to achieve that yet, but I view this as a long-term project.
Do you have experience with the math etc. involved?
I’m not sure what “the math involved” is. I suspect that, at the most, we’re just talking about summing up the values in a row and/or column, and that’s about it. But I guess I’d need to see a description of what the chart details actually mean (there’s some paper it refers to, but that seems to be behind a paywall, and I’m not even 100% sure if it would provide the required info).
So I’m fairly certain that the math would not be difficult at all to work with, but also not sure how to confirm that.
EDIT: Actually, one of the papers linked on the main page is downloadable. It does, indeed, have a bunch of convoluted math in it. But I’m not entirely sure if that’s relevant to what you’d want to show, and again it doesn’t really describe that clearly what the WIOD data actually is (like, in relation to the match described). So…IDK, maybe?
EDIT 2: The paywalled paper looks MUCH more useful, and the paywall can apparently be circumvented by a simple web search for its title, as it seems some sites provide it publicly. But I haven’t read more than the intro yet… (Link: Wisconsin University Social Science Computing Cooperative: An Illustrated User Guide to the World Input–Output Database: the Case of Global Automotive Production…archive)
EDIT 3: Okay, I see the data isn’t as homogeneous as I thought and there is actually some non-trivial math that can be done to e.g. compute “value-added exports” for an industry in a country. Seems like relatively straightforward linear algebra. Pretty easy to implement, and seeing as all the data is static, any desired computations could be done once, at the time of import (or feature enhancement).
I added the paper and your comment to the issue on GitHub. Personally I don’t have experience with what I takes to implement a feature like this and will definitely reach out to you when I’m ready to takle this task. Thank you for looking into this.
Awesome! Keep on codin’!