The year 2023 is officially the warmest on record—overtaking 2016, the previous warmest year, by an alarming margin. According to the latest data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, released Jan. 9, Earth was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 Fahrenheit) hotter last year compared with pre-industrial levels—dangerously close to the 1.5-degree threshold set by the Paris climate deal. 2023 also marked the first year in which each day was over one degree warmer than the pre-industrial average. Temperatures over 2023 likely exceeded those of any year over the past 100,000 years, the report found. This was partially due to the year's El Niño climate phenomenon, but those impacts only began in June—and every subsequent month last year was the warmest on record for that particular month. September represented the largest climatological departure since record-keeping began over 170 years ago.

The Colombian Ombudsman's Office (Defensoría del Pueblo de Colombia, DPC) reported Jan. 9 that 181 social leaders and human rights defenders were murdered in 2023. The DPC, in its "Annual report on the killings of social leaders and human rights defenders," counted 160 men and 21 women among the victims. The ombudsman, Carlos Camargo Assis, stated: "It is an unacceptable situation that every two days last year, on average, a social leader or human rights defender was murdered in Colombia. Every life lost is a tragedy for their families, for the communities, and for the defense of fundamental rights in the country."

A year after the height of a protest wave that swept Peru, demanding the resignation of President Dina Boluarte, we finally see an initial step toward justice for the some 50 slain by security forces in the repression unleashed by her regime. On Jan. 6, Judicial Power, Peru's justice department, ordered the "preventative detention" of Joe Erik Torres Lovón, an officer of the National Police, as he is investigated in the slaying of a Cuzco youth, Rosalino Florez Valverde, last January. (El País) 

Ecuador's President Daniel Noboa on Jan. 8 declared a 60-day state of emergency in the country after the escape of Adolfo Macías Villamar AKA "Fito," leader of Los Choneros narco-gang, from Littoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil. Macías had been serving a 34-year sentence since 2011 for drug trafficking, murder, and organized crime. As news broke of his disappearance, six other correctional facilities across the country exploded into riots. The situation escalated the following day, when hooded gunmen interrupted a live television broadcast in Guayaquil, taking reporters and staff hostage. Noboa responded by declaring a state of "internal armed conflict" in the country, ordering security forces to "neutralize" designated "terrorist organizations" and "non-state actors," including Los Choneros, Los Lobos and Los Tiguerones narco-gangs. (Jurist, CNN, BBC News, NYT, AFP, InfoBae, La República)

Gold-mining operations in Africa under the control of the paramilitary Wagner Group are funneling money to the Kremlin for the Russian war effort in Ukraine, according to a new report by watchdog organizations. "The Blood Gold Report," prepared by the Consumer Choice Center and Democracy 21, finds that Wagner has laundered some $2.5 billion in proceeds from its African operations since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, helping Moscow to ride out international sanctions.

Burma's ruling junta acknowledged that it withdrew its forces from a key city on the border with China after it was seized by an alliance of ethnic rebel armies. The fall of Laukkai Jan. 4 is the most significant defeat the junta has suffered since the self-declared Three Brotherhood Alliance launched its offensive in northeastern Shan state Oct. 27. (AP, Myanmar Now) Days earlier, on Dec. 30, at least 150 junta soldiers fled across the border into India's Mizoram state, driven from their outposts in Burma's northwestern Chin state by the rebel Arakan Army. The soldiers turned themselves over to a detachment of India's paramilitary Assam Rifles, and had to be flown back to Burmese territory. (Tribune India, The Economic Times, BNI)

Meta has tweaked the Facebook algorithm to sideline links to news articles and boost "memes"—precisely the format most subject to the fabrications and distortions being aggressively peddled by both sides (yes) in the Gaza conflict. Such propaganda has already been implicated in genocide in Burma and Ethiopia. But even apart from such egregious abuses, memes are dumbing down discourse and entrenching groupthink and dogmatism—and are being pushed by Meta as part of its sinister corporate design to enclose the internet. In Episode 207 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg calls for a total moratorium on posting or sharing memes as a means of pressure on Meta to re-emphasize actual news articles, and deep-six the war propaganda.

Countries that approved the first-ever United Nations General Assembly resolution on "killer robots" should promote negotiations on a new international treaty to ban and regulate these weapons, Human Rights Watch said Jan. 3. These so-called "autonomous weapons" systems select and apply force to targets based on sensor processing rather than human inputs.