Crimean Tatar Activists

Russian FSB Detains Crimean Tatar Activists After Searching Their Homes

https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-fsb-detains-crimean-tatar-activists-after-searching-their-homes/29991403.html/

Russian security forces have detained eight Crimean Tatar activists

Rights groups and Western governments have denounced what they describe as a campaign of repression by the Russian-imposed authorities in Crimea who are targeting members of the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatar community and others who have spoken out against Moscow’s takeover of the peninsula.

neoliberalism

Utopia of endless exploitation

The essence of neoliberalism

What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.

by Pierre Bourdieu December 1998

The neoliberal programme draws its social power from the political and economic power of those whose interests it expresses: stockholders, financial operators, industrialists, conservative or social-democratic politicians who have been converted to the reassuring layoffs of laisser-faire, high-level financial officials eager to impose policies advocating their own extinction because, unlike the managers of firms, they run no risk of having eventually to pay the consequences.

Thus the absolute reign of flexibility is established, with employees being hiring on fixed-term contracts or on a temporary basis and repeated corporate restructurings and, within the firm itself, competition among autonomous divisions as well as among teams forced to perform multiple functions.

In this way, a Darwinian world emerges – it is the struggle of all against all at all levels of the hierarchy, which finds support through everyone clinging to their job and organisation under conditions of insecurity, suffering, and stress.

Like the Marxism of an earlier time (my note: socialism for rich people), with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful belief – the free trade faith – not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it.

the destruction of all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine… imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and the state as at the heart of corporations, of that sort of moral Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behaviour.

 

Cyprus serial killings

‘It’s hard to take in’: how Cyprus serial killings left country reeling

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/12/its-hard-to-take-in-how-cyprus-serial-killings-left-country-reeling

a Greek Cypriot army captain, who – authorities maintain – has admitted to preying on women in low-paid household jobs in a 10-page handwritten confession.

The scale of the crimes and alleged cynicism of the suspect has increasingly left people reeling, and, say campaigners, confronting uncomfortable truths about the way foreign workers are treated on a tourism-dependent island where domestic household workers are invariably from the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia.

Refugees Lybia

Refugees Suffer as Libya’s Civil War Rages On

As Libya descends into a bloody civil war, thousands of refugees are trapped in the crossfire. Some are forced to fight as mercenaries, while others are systematically raped, tortured or sold as slaves. One Italian is helping them tell their stories.

By  and 

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/libya-refugees-suffer-as-civil-war-rages-on-a-1266032.html

Thousands of people from African countries were thrown into Libyan prisons while trying to flee to Europe. Many have been tortured and sold as slaves. Now they are trapped between two warring sides: the unity government of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj and the warlord Khalifa Haftar, whose Libyan National Army (LNA) controls the east of the country.