A South Korean man has been killed at work by a malfunctioning robot which apparently mistook him for a box of capsicums. The article goes on to say:

This is hardly the first incident of an autonomous system harming a human. Last month an empty self-driving Cruise robotaxi hit and then proceeded to drag and trap a woman who had seconds earlier been struck by a human hit-and-run driver and fallen in the way of the autonomous vehicle.

The incident left the woman in critical condition and Cruise’s operations in limbo amid an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. As we reported Wednesday, Cruise issued an update to its self-driving taxis to prevent similar incidents.

Beyond agricultural, industrial, and transportation industries, datacenters are looking to robots to address personnel shortages. Last month, Microsoft listed an opening for a Hardware Automation Team Manager to oversee among other things the use of robotic systems throughout its network of datacenters.

It’s worth noting: there is no actual shortage of human beings to provide their labour. There is a shortage of employers willing to pay enough humans enough money to live in dignity. That’s the reason for automation and artificial intelligence, not “personnel shortages”; let’s not get it twisted.

An article (which I’m sure The Conversation has been saving up for ages) on the horrific impact Kissinger’s policies – namely his secretive, highly illegal carpet-bombing campaign of Cambodia – has had on that country ever since.

Oooh, now this is the problem with not being glued (however temporarily) to my social media. I’m late to great news like this!

“From the river to the sea” is a rejoinder to the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination. Palestinians have been divided in a myriad of ways by Israeli policy. There are Palestinian refugees denied repatriation because of discriminatory Israeli laws. There are Palestinians denied equal rights living within Israel’s internationally recognized territory as second-class citizens. There are Palestinians living with no citizenship rights under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. There are Palestinians in legal limbo in occupied Jerusalem and facing expulsion. There are Palestinians in Gaza living under an Israeli siege. All of them suffer from a range of policies in a singular system of discrimination and apartheid—a system that can only be challenged by their unified opposition. All of them have a right to live freely in the land from the river to the sea.

[…]

Since Zionists struggle to make a persuasive argument against freedom, justice, and equality for all people throughout the land, they seek instead to attack the message and messenger. When Palestinians proclaim “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” many Zionists argue that this is a Palestinian call for genocide. But as historian Maha Nassar has noted, there has never been an “official Palestinian position calling for the forced removal of Jews from Palestine.” The links between this phrase and eliminationism might be the product of “an Israeli media campaign following the 1967 war that claimed Palestinians wished to ‘throw Jews into the sea.’ ” Jewish groups such as the American Jewish Committee also claim that the slogan is antisemitic because it has been taken up by militant groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas. But as Nassar writes, the phrase predates these uses, and has its origins as “part of a larger call to see a secular democratic state established in all of historic Palestine.”

This Palestinian man has been offered USD$100 million for his family home in Hebron’s Old City – a home he is forbidden to even step out of every second day, thanks to the arbitrary restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation – but has refused to sell out.

It starts slowly at first. A food bank crops up inside your local mosque. You notice more sleeping bags on the walk to work. Over time, the signs seem to grow. A donation bin appears in Tesco for families who can’t afford soap or toothpaste. Terms such as “bed poverty” emerge in the news because we now need vocabulary to describe children who are so poor that they have to sleep on the floor.

Then one day you read a statistic that somehow feels both shocking and wearily unsurprising: about 3.8 million people experienced destitution in the UK last year. That’s the equivalent of almost half the population of London being unable to meet their most basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.

The research – released on Tuesday by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) – lays out starkly not simply the scale of destitution in this country, but how potently it has spread. The number of people experiencing destitution in the UK has more than doubled in the last five years – up from 1.55 million in 2017. One million children are now living in destitute homes – a staggering increase of 186% in half a decade. The research, part of a project that has been monitoring the scale of destitution since 2015, found almost two-thirds of adults who are in severe poverty have a disability or long-term health condition; cancer patients going to chemotherapy and coming home to wear a coat in their freezing homes.

Over the last few years, I haven’t been able to help but notice that the way British immigrants talk about their home country is starting to resemble the way South African immigrants¹ talk about theirs. So much despair and horror at the indifference of the government to the widespread suffering of the poor. And that’s among the people who were privileged enough that emigration was an option! The difference with the UK, I guess, is that it once used to strive for better – but the neoliberal era ended that, and as the article shows a tipping point was reached with the Brexit-related economic crisis that means poverty is escalating fast.

Direct action at work 😄

Narendra Modi’s government in India is targeting Arundhati Roy with a politically-motivated prosecution 😢 Shame on them.

One of those great articles that it’s difficult to quote from because I just want to quote almost all of it. But it makes the point that for all we constantly hear the refrain that the Israel/Palestine conflict is “complicated”, it’s really not complicated to understand that 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes in 1949, that Palestinian-controlled territory has shrunk over time until it now consists of a ton of disconnected bantustans that still face constant raids and theft of resources by Israel, or that Palestinians living in Israel/Palestine are living under an apartheid regime, as is recognised by international human rights NGOs like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, as well as Israeli ones like B’Tselem.

While violence against civilians is never “fair”, the article makes two points: Firstly, Israel works tirelessly to smother all non-violent forms of Palestinian resistance, including with violence, ensuring that violence comes to seem like the only option to some. It compares this to the ANC’s use of violence in the struggle against apartheid, which of course was used as an excuse by Western politicians of the day to back the racist apartheid regime, but is now recognised as a necessary evil – South Africa never would’ve been free without it. Secondly, the article points out that this “but they murdered civilians” argument is only ever levelled against those the Western media have deemed the Bad Guys, and never against those the media deems the Good Guys, even when these “Good Guys” are factually the ones murdering more civilians. In Israel/Palestine, the difference is orders of magnitude. Criticise Hamas’ attacks on civilians if you want, but you are a hypocrite if you haven’t also been criticising all of Israel’s violence against Palestinian civilians over the years. Plain and simple.

For my part, I do feel sympathy for Israeli civilians: it must be terrifying to live under threat of bombings, or to be abducted and held hostage while attending a music festival. But I have to put that sympathy in proportion to my sympathy for Palestinian civilians, who’ve been living with the threat of bombings, arbitrary arrests, violent assaults, and more for decades. The way forward cannot be for the Israeli regime to escalate the violence – it is for the abolition of apartheid and a new, pluralistic, truly democratic system to take its place. A number of Israelis do understand this, and I admire them for their tenacity because (unless they emigrate) they exist in a very hostile climate for such common-sense ideas. The majority of Israelis seem to believe they can avoid ever compromising with Palestinians by violently exterminating all resistance whenever it arises… which is clearly not a strategy that’s ever going to end well.