Illegally abducted political prisoner Abdullah Öcalan yesterday was finally allowed to meet with representatives of the only major anti-racist parliamentary party in Turkey, the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) after dictator Erdoğan and Bahçeli closest ally as leader of the Fascist MHP agreed to take this step in a potential resolution to the "Kurdish question" of Turkey in the peaceful manner which PKK has been working for already for decades.

Here's an article on the reportback of those representatives:
https://anfenglish.com/features/abdullah-Ocalan-positive-contributions-are-essential-for-the-process-to-succeed-77153

Been 5 years I haven't had a mains line for electricity. Living off the sun in a location where it is cloudy most of the year is feasible if you can turn off power hungry devices when not needed or when it's been very overcast. This has become a habit now and I have no regrets.

Grateful for this exercise in being always aware of my power demands and what my environment can afford me.

#solarpunk

Fun bit of etymology trivia: the Russian word for 'comrade', 'товарищ', shares its root with the word 'товар', which means 'trade goods'. It may be tempting to guess that this is because товарищ used to mean 'somebody whom one trades goods with', as in, 'business partner', before it got associated with the socialism business in the late 1800s, but consider this etymology dictionary tracing both to a Turkic word meaning 'cattle', a common form of trade goods some further centuries earlier: https://starlingdb.org/cgi-bin/response.cgi?basename=dataievasmer&text_word=%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%89&method_word=beginning

Curiously, Finnish, which is usually highly resistant to borrowing foreign words, has actually adopted 'товарищ' as 'toveri', as well as 'товар' as 'tavarat'. (The -at suffix is just a plural marker, like -s in English 'scissors' or 'trousers'. Or 'goods'.)

The English 'comrade', which clueless people sometimes specifically associate with Soviet Russia, instead comes from Germanic Kamerad, which is derived from the word 'Kammer', for once upon a time, it used to mean 'somebody with whom one would share a chamber with'.

Leila Khaled reflects on her lifetime of resistance, the significance of October 7 for the global solidarity movement, and the way forward for Palestinian liberation.

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/12/october-7-proved-the-importance-of-the-struggle-to-the-world-an-interview-with-palestinian-icon-leila-khaled/

#Palestine #Israel #Gaza
@palestine @israel

If you need to read something utopian once in a while not to go insane:

https://jeninzanghari.substack.com/p/palestine-2031

@palestine

Although Assad has fallen, the tragedies in Syria continue. The Syrian National Army, a Turkish proxy force, has captured the city of Manbij and aims to storm Kobane next.

Turkey intends to conquer all Rojava and carry out ethnic cleansing there.

In 2014, with the tacit support of the Turkish government, the Islamic State took over most of northern Syria, carrying out massacres as they gained ground. In the town of Kobane, locals managed to halt their advance only a few miles from the Turkish border.

Now, Kobane is at risk once again.

In Rojava, multiethnic militias including anarchist volunteers from around the world did most of the fighting and dying in the struggle against the Islamic State. Now the international community is preparing to look away while they are massacred.

We must not let this happen. As in 2019—the last time Turkey mounted a major offensive against Rojava—solidarity actions are urgently needed.

https://crimethinc.com/RojavaSolidarity