 That's a great card. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. 18th of February, give the people what they want. Try your best to do that. Next week, early next week, 21st February, Red Books Day. I hope you have a red book in hand to read, to share with your friends, to be out there celebrating Red Culture one way or the other. Plenty of good books to read. So I hope you'll be there with us, accompanying us in that little adventure. Zoe and Prashant from People's Dispatch, that's peoplesdispatch.org and Vijay from Globe Trotter. Let's go straight to exciting news from Zoe's favorite country, Honduras. What has happened to this gentleman who is known there as who? Juan Orlando Hernandez. Well he was arrested and the US has asked for his extradition to the United States. For some this might come as a surprise. You know, maybe interesting that a former president is going to be extradited on charges of drug trafficking. But for many in Honduras, this is not a surprise. It has been a long-standing demand, not that he be extradited, but that he do face justice for the numerous crimes that he's committed. Drug trafficking and corruption and money laundering being one of them. Juan Orlando Hernandez was president of Honduras from 2014 to this past January when Zio Maracastro took over. And you know, through his eight years as president, not only did he commit mass electoral fraud in 2017, not only did he, you know, for oversee violent repression of mass mobilizations over the past several years, but also he was implicated two years ago in a court in the New York District Court that was trying his brother, Tony Hernandez, over charges of drug trafficking. So for the past several years, the Honduran people have been saying Juan Orlando Hernandez is a dictator, but he's a narco dictator because his money, as proven by courts in the United States, comes from drug traffickers, comes from bribe from drug traffickers, that of course, you know, get political favors when he's in office. And so he was named in this court case as co-conspirator for the Honduran people had been saying, co-conspirator for is Juan Orlando Hernandez. Why is he still in office? They had these mass protests. Fuera Ho out hoe. And this whole time, the United States not only supported Juan Orlando Hernandez in 2017, when he committed this mass electoral fraud, but when the people are on the streets saying, look, he's, he's guilty of drug trafficking. He's guilty of corruption. It's showing this in the courts. You know, they did nothing to confirm this. They did nothing. They really, they just gave more support to Honduras. Honduras is one of the biggest recipients of military aid is one of biggest recipients of military training. There's an entire military police branch that is trained by the United States. And so Juan Orlando Hernandez is going to be extradited to the United States. He's in extradition trials right now. He will face charges of drug trafficking, of money laundering. And, you know, for all those who are surprised, they should really be looking at how Honduran politics has been operating over the past decade, how the United States has been integral in this. And of course, it's, it's good that he's finally paying for his crimes, but it is a little too late because he already was backed by the United States. He already in those four years when he was president from 2017, 2021, Honduras saw the worst decline in quality of life. There's over 70% of the population that's living in poverty. You know, they massively cut health and education budgets. So it's important that this is happening, but it's also important that Honduras get justice that the United States really once and for all stop meddling and that they don't support these politicians who are getting, who are working directly with organized crime to keep them in office. It would be a good idea if Ho was tried in Honduras. I mean, there's probably no reason to extradite him. There's sufficient grounds to try him in Honduras. It tells you about the constant interference in countries that even the question of justice is then subordinated to the United States. You know, people are supposed to then say, yes, extradite him immediately. It's extraordinary. Look at the place you've reached where Honduras cannot actually provide justice for its people by itself. Speaking of provide justice for its people by itself, big news report, you know, news flash. Well, let's start by saying that France is going into a presidential election campaign. The election is on April 10th, Emmanuel Macron walking astride like the Colossus, going to Moscow to talk to Vladimir Putin, although sitting at the other end of a very large table now announces we're going to, that is, France is going to withdraw its 2,400 troops from Mali, close down the bases and so on. We draw its troops from Mali, not really a withdrawal. They're going to move these troops to Niger. And the French have said that they're going to operate the same exact mission from bases in Niger and in Burkina Faso. So they're moving out of Mali, but they're not leaving that mission, which operation Barkhane, the EU's operation Takuba and the G5 Sahel have been in the middle of. So, you know, it's not a question of withdrawing. They're not withdrawing from the mission. They are withdrawing nearly from the territory of Mali. Look, it's important to spend a minute on why Mali has reached this, you know, particular crisis point. In the 1990s, I well remember when Alpha Omar Konare was the president of Mali. He, you know, he's the only Malian president in years who finished his term and then left office, a former Marxist militant, very interesting man, had the pleasure of talking to him once. Alpha Omar Konare was stuck in a position where Mali, country of 20 million, inherited a $3 million debt. They couldn't handle it. It's a small country. It's not a rich country. Couldn't handle the debt that they had. They went to the IMF. The IMF imposed a loan situation on them, which was not going to be good for Mali. Alpha Omar Konare begged the IMF, begged Washington said, look, let us build democratic institutions. We just can't get suffocated by this debt. This debt is going to kill Malian attempts at democracy. It's a very far-sighted statement from Alpha Omar Konare, who left office in 2002. Well, after he left office, the debt escalated. And secondly, NATO decided to go and conduct a war in Libya. Everything is about the IMF and the war in Libya for Mali. One is this IMF loan, which really suffocated democracy. And secondly, the war in Libya released an enormous amount of arms, ammunition and confidence among jihadi groups across North Africa. And it is these groups that then start to make very strong connections with Tuareg rebels in northern Mali. And the Tuareg al-Qaeda type of nexus that developed in northern Mali, that's what then provoked the French intervention in Mali in 2013. But listen, French intervention in Mali doesn't happen in 2013. French intervention happens in this period when France, through NATO, bomb and destroy Libya. It's the destruction of Libya that starts the conflict, not when France intervenes in Mali, per se. That's why even the intervention is not 2013, just as the withdrawal is not 2022. This is a misleading timeline. France had intervened before that in bombing Libya and France is going to continue with its bases in Burkina Faso and in Niger. So that's really important to put in context. The two reasons for so-called French intervention are the insistence of the IMF, pressuring Mali economically, and secondly, the destruction of Libya. It's got to be said that Assimi Goyta, the current head of government, military leader in 2018, by the way, this guy cut his teeth with the US special forces, French special forces and so on. In 2018, he went to Burkina Faso for a special training set up by the United States. In Burkina Faso, he meets Dumbonia, who was a military officer from Guinea, and both of them conduct coups just two and a half years later. There's something here to be looked at. I'm afraid we don't have enough understanding of why there have been these coups basically in the central belt of Africa in the Sahel region. Something needs to be looked at here. I haven't been able to find much. Final point I want to make is that there's been a lot of protests in Mali against the French position. In a sense, that's why one reason why the French are leaving, but there's another reason, which is the Malian military government has decided to set up new relations with Russia of all people in the middle of the Ukraine crisis to which we'll return. They set up so that in the protest, people are saying France out thanks to Russia. The Wagner group has sent apparently 800 mercenaries and here's Emmanuel Macron's comment. Macron said that the Russian entry into Mali is predatory. They've come to secure their economic interests. Hello, Emmanuel. That's exactly what France does when it intervenes. And by the way, the French actually have no problem with the Wagner group because the French have worked with the Wagner group in Libya and they've worked with the Wagner group in Mozambique. So this is actually not about Wagner, which is a very off the wall mercenary outfit from Russia. It's not really about Wagner. It's really about now this tension between Europe and Russia to which we'll return in a minute. Very strange happenings in the world, friends. Hard to explain in five minutes what's going on in Mali, but we're going to stay with Africa. We're going to stay with Europe. There was an African Union, European Union summit. Prashant is going to take us there. There's an interesting health angle, COVID and so on. Prashant, take it away. Right. Actually, the joint communique has just come out from the European Union and the African Union. There's a lot of talk about the usual stuff that you find, some of the Anadine stuff that you find in some meetings. An important aspect, though, to notice is that both the groups, the African Union and the European Union, have said that they're going to work together and constructively engage, et cetera, et cetera, towards an agreement and comprehensive WTO response, which includes the trips waiver related things and patents and stuffs, which means basically that this very important summit, leaders of the African Union coming to Brussels, meeting the leaders of the European Union, the leaders of the African Union very clearly stating that Cyril Ram Hossa of South Africa specifically said that he did, he strongly pushed for what has been called the trips waiver on COVID-19 related medical products, which India and South Africa have been pushing since 2020. And the European Union's response was, no. So it's interesting to note that recent reports just say that the European Union's commission, the European Union president, that is Arsala Wanda-Lein, basically said, what do you call, said the defendant patents as precious, apparently, which is saying something because considering that even the United States has moved in favor of the trips-related waiver on COVID-19 related products, Europe is actually one of the last holdouts, especially France and Germany, for instance, again, we come back to France. France and Germany, for instance, which are among the countries which are preventing this from happening at the WTO, because in the WTO, everything goes by consensus, which means that without a consensus, it's not possible to move things forward. And just to give an idea of what's happening right now, around 12% of Africa's population is completely vaccinated. And if you look at, I think the European Union numbers, it's probably more than 70%. It's over 71%, actually. And this actually shows the difference. And the European Union, the rich countries, many of their alternatives from day one has been to say that, let's not go for patent waivers and things like that. Instead, let's go for something like the COVAX project, which is basically based on donations. And this, of course, has been very haphazard. There's been no real consistency in flow of the vaccine, now supplies are increasing. But this is 2022, it's year three of the pandemic. And we know that vaccinations began in 2021. So it's now the supplies are now increasing. And now the European countries are, of course, saying that the Africa does not have the resources to properly deliver these vaccines. There have been accusations that a lot of the donated vaccines were close to the expiry date, very little. And so there's been a lot of, say, steps, for instance, there's been talk of helping setting up research in Africa, which in decades maybe will have an impact. But there's actually no direct action which addresses the issue right now, which is that we are in the middle of a pandemic. It is causing untold deaths, of course, economic losses, all kinds of losses which are, say, having a massive impact on the people of Africa. And even now, despite all this, there is absolutely no willingness on the part of the leaders of the European Union to just sign up for that patent waiver proposal, which has been pending for over two years. And meanwhile, we've seen the news which shows how Pfizer and Moderna, for instance, have made massive profits over the past year. And if you look at Pfizer's profit numbers, all of those profits come basically from the COVID-19 vaccine. So if you take out the COVID-19 vaccine, its profits are pretty, they're not much actually, or their jump is not too much. But once you add the COVID-19 vaccine numbers, it's a massive jump. And the same, for instance, with Moderna as well, they've made huge amounts of money. And Moderna, for instance, is one of the companies which has been against, say, endorsing this patent waiver. So what the Europeans would like is some kind of long-term credit-based thing where they lend a lot of money on loans. They'll talk about technology transfer. They'll talk about setting up manufacturing hubs, which take their own sweet time. But yeah, there's no real urgency in addressing the crisis right now. And that's, I think, one of the most unfortunate aspects of how we've responded to the pandemic, the term vaccine apartheid, it's, I think, one of those terms, which is, when you see the results of these meetings, when there is a clear demand from countries in the global south that these need to be waived, but still nothing happening. It's amazing. Look at this show. Give the people what they want. Starts in Honduras, goes to Mali, comes back to the fact that the African continent has a vaccination rate of 12%. That's what you're listening to every week on Friday with People's Dispatch, peoplesdispatch.org, Globetrotter, happy to be with you. Zoe's strange news from Italy. Young children, basically, dying at work, being sent there by their schools. Is Italy a civilized country? Great question. In high school in Italy, apparently, a law was passed which says that all high school students, in order to graduate, have to complete what they call alternanza scolar, which basically means a mandatory work internship. This isn't the kind of internship where you go in one day and you make coffee at some magazine. These are industrial internships where students have to work long days, a full working day kind of thing. They have to complete a certain number of hours. It's real work. It's not this sort of fake work that we see in internships, maybe an influence from North American culture and the movies. In this context of these work internships, two students, one in January, who's 18 years old, Lorenzo, and then this past week, another student, Giuseppe, he died in the context of these work internships. These two deaths really sparked anger, sparked rage among students because this is a program that they long have been contesting, not only in the sense that they have to complete this and the whole long trajectory of privatization of education, of pushing students more and more to be career-oriented, to think about how they can enter an industry much less about expanding their minds, developing education, maybe going on to higher education. In addition, Italy also has very, very poor working conditions. In Europe, it is the country where there's almost the largest number of workers who die on the job. So in workplace accidents, in other sorts of conditions, due to the fact that the labor regulations are very slow and are not often fulfilled. And so in this context, it's really, really see that the students have been responding to this precariousness that they face in these jobs, but also kind of the lack of future, the lack of care from Italian politicians to give them a real future, to give them a present. There's a very, very high level of youth unemployment in the country with very sharp regional differences in the South, way worse levels of unemployment, minimum wage, very challenging. And so this moment is seeing the years of the pandemic where youth have been sidelined, have been forced to do online learning, have been really segregated in many ways, lower-class students, as we see across the world, not able to access internet effectively being denied education. And so with these two deaths, students have taken the streets and cities across the country for the past couple of weeks. They've been occupying their high schools. As someone who grew up in the United States is almost unheard of to have a school occupation, they're really committed to not only transforming their schools, their educational system, but also demanding labor reforms, and that two years into the pandemic, we're going on the third, it is not acceptable anymore. It's never acceptable for this to be the reality, for students not to have a future, for students to die in their mandatory internships. Wow, it's a really strong story. And I know people's dispatches covered it. You are covering the protests from Italy, a very important story. The last 10 days or so, after Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and others produced documents talking about apartheid in Israel, the Israeli government said, well, look, they are quoting terrorists. I talked to Philip Luther for people's dispatch about that. Quoting terrorists in that interview, Luther said, well, we talked to Palestinian human rights organizations, which Israel is defined as terrorists. One of the very brave fighters in Palestine has had something happen to her. Her name is Khitam Safin. Khitam Safin is of the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees. Rashaan, take us to Palestine. I know people's dispatch has a story, one of the few stories English language sources out there on the sentencing of Khitam Safin. Right, which I saw the latest news is that she has been sentenced to 16 months in prison. And of course, this important note, of course, that she was first detained in November 2020 and then sentenced to six months of administrative detention. Now, the interesting thing here, of course, is that the charges against her have been really vague. Initially, of course, it was the standard charge which is applied against activists across the board in Palestine, which is membership of the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, which is, you know, which Israelis have conveniently branded terrorists and all kinds of crimes have been associated and attributed to them. So that was, of course, the, what do you call that was the first charge. Then later, what do you call, we saw that the UPWC, the organization you mentioned, that is the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees itself was branded as a terrorist organization last year as well, along with other human rights organizations. And then she also had this charge of being of heading an organization, which, you know, that was apparently her crime as well. And the other group, the spokesperson apparently did said that basically all the accusations are an exaggerated version of what her activism is. So that actually kind of perfectly describes the situation in Palestine today where and we've seen this in multiple instances where human rights work is, you know, spun, is very deliberately turned and branded as terrorist work by the Israelis because any kind of questioning of the Israeli method, any kind of questioning of the Israeli structure is so inconvenient for them, is so unbearable for them that their catch, their response, one single response to any kind of questioning has been to brand Palestinian activists as terrorists. So this yet again is another classic example. Recently, there was an instance, we marked the Adam 7 month, I believe, of the health workers committee again, who has been in continuous detention. She's what you call despite working for decades in the field of health, she contracted COVID-19 in prison cell, you know, we know struggled to recover a person with a lot of complications. So this is really the reality of Palestine today. Someone who spent decades working for the cause of health, someone who spent decades working for the cause of women, all of these activists are in jail and branded as terrorists. Whereas, say, just a few days ago, we also saw in Sheikh Jarrah that an Israeli MP, one of the rabid right-wing MPs, tried to set up what is called a camp office in the locality in what is yet another attempt to actually evict Palestinians from the region. And then there was a clash, Palestinians protested, obviously the Israeli security forces came in, arrested people. This has actually become weekly, if not sometimes even daily occurrence in localities like Sheikh Jarrah. So I think these are the two contrasting pictures, people who dedicate their lives for their fellow human beings, for the welfare, for the rights of their fellow human beings are today in prison as a branded as terrorists and people who are, you know, espousing hate, who are basically trying to evict people from the homes they've lived for decades are members of parliament, are considered respectable people in society. And I think this is the contrast that Amnesty, of course, brought out, but Palestinian activists have been pointing out for decades and generations even, this is actually the reality of Palestine. So that is where we are. You know, it's just an awful shame what's going on. It's very hard to pay attention to this and not be deeply moved. I'm very glad that we've been all covering this together. It's so important. You want good coverage of this, friends, peoplesdispatch.org. It's got a story about what the sentencing of Kitam Safin, I highly recommend you go look at it. Well, it's been a week and during this week, we were expecting to see the military confrontation increase in Ukraine and Russia, NATO pushing hard there, Boris Johnson, Macron, Biden, all of them highly involved in what was going on. Turns out that on the day that the Russian invasion was being predicted by the CIA, there was no invasion. Instead, Vladimir Putin, who seems to be a pretty good chess player, decided to withdraw some troops from the border. Now the question is, were their troops actually withdrawn? Emmanuel Macron, who's been a real hero of this show, was back in the news saying that, look, there's no evidence of withdrawal. One wants to say to him, that's the job of the CIA to say it, not you, but anyway Macron was ahead of everybody. Put that on the table that there may not have been a withdrawal and called for calm and so on. So did Putin. Here's the underreported side of this story. I just want to put it on the table. There are two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk in Ukraine, which are very large Russian populations. What's not being reported much is that the governments of both Luhansk and Donetsk have been working with Russian authorities across the borders in Rostov and so on, for populations to be moved. There are Russian speakers who are moving into Russia. That's part of the withdrawal. That's ethnic cleansing. That should be on the table. There is, in fact, ethnic cleansing taking place now. People of Russian speakers in Ukraine are feeling that they can't stay there anymore, that they want to return or go to Russia. That's a disturbing phenomenon and I'm surprised that there's been no statement by the United Nations or anybody really on that issue. Equally interesting and not reported, but I wrote about it for Globetrotter, is that I went back and looked at the Georgia-Russia conflict in 2008, where again, before the conflict, there was a lot of talk about Russian military intervention. There was a lot of talk about Russian aggression and so on. Well, after the matter died down a little bit, the European Union impaneled a commission led by the very respectable Swiss diplomat, Heidi Tagliavini. Heidi Tagliavini led this commission. They traveled around Georgia. They met Russian officials and so on. In her final report, she said that the idea of Russian escalation and intervention was completely made up, that it wasn't an issue. In fact, in her report, this is a European Union report. I wish European leaders read their own reports. In the EU report, she said that the government in Georgia used the idea of Russian intervention to escalate its own war in Ossetia. Actually, we're seeing the same thing here. In a sense, the government in Kiev and right-wing elements in Ukraine are using the threat of Russian intervention, whether false or real. It doesn't matter, but they're using that threat to bring in weapons into Ukraine, but also to put a lot of pressure on Russian speakers in Ukraine and then escalate this kind of ethnic cleansing. It's a very disturbing feature. I want people to recognize that since the collapse of the USSR and since the breakup of Yugoslavia, questions of ethnicity and borders have risen in Eastern Europe. Whether it's the wars in Yugoslavia after Croatia broke away and then the great struggles in Kosovo, in Serbia itself and so on, where it was about ethnicity beginning to shape nationalism, much the same in the old Soviet republics in Ukraine and so on, where these were non-ethnic republics of the USSR. The moment the USSR collapses, ethnicity asserts itself and is promoted, often with Western backing. This is a form of nationalism that's hideous. You don't need to actually point to the neo-Nazis of Ukraine to be dismayed by this. You can just look at Ukrainian language nationalism against Russian speakers as sufficient grounds, I think, to scratch your heads and say, what kind of world are we living in? Journalists have a responsibility to go back, look at the past, historicize things. That's what needs to be done. That's what we do, and give the people what they want, your favorite weekly movement news show with Zoe and Prashant from People's Dispatch. I'm Vijay from Globetrotter. We expect to see your selfies this week on Twitter and other social media platforms. See you next week.