If nothing sad happens in the next weeks, India's restive Northeastern region will complete another year without any incident of journo-murder, maintaining the trend for the last four years. The region, comprising eight states with a population of over 60 million, witnessed the slaying of journalists for the last time in 2017. However, the country as a whole continues to lose scribes to targeted killings. To date, the nation in 2021 has witnessed the murder of five journalists, while acclaimed Indian photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was killed in Afghanistan. India lost 15 scribes to assailants in 2020, one of the worst records on Earth.

France has dispatched hundreds of army troops to the overseas territory of French Guiana, to hunt down outlaw gold miners who have destroyed thousands of hectares of rainforest along the Maroni River over the past months. But apprehending the garimpeiros is nearly impossible; they abandon their camps and dredges and melt into the jungle as the troops approach. Some 9,000 illegal miners are believed to be operating at around 150 sites across the territory—up from little more than 100 a decade ago. The garimpeiros, however, are the smallest links in a chain, paid a pittance—while the dealers they sell the gold to race up and down the river in speedboats. "We're only catching the little guys," admitted French Guiana's public prosecutor Samuel Finielz. (AFP)

In Episode 99 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews an old friend and colleague—legendary journalist, naturalist and adventurer Peter Gorman, who reflects on his long years collecting (and personally sampling) psychoactive and shamanic plants, from the Peruvian Amazon, to the Rif Mountains of Morocco, to the Palani Hills of southern India. Now approaching 71, Peter is about to head back down to the Amazon to revisit the remote Matsés indigenous people, who he first contacted in 1985. His latest collection of first-hand accounts is Magic Mushrooms in India & Other Fantastic Tales.

In Episode 98 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses the book Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience by Melanie Kirkpatrick. A work of Thanksgiving boosterism, it nonetheless recognizes the dissidents who reject the holiday as a celebration and sanitization of genocide, and even call for replacing it with a day of atonement. The idealized portrayal the first Thanksgiving in 1621 belies the bloody realities of the Pequot War and King Philip's War that shortly followed. Perversely, the Wampanoag indigenous people, who shared in that first Thanksgiving and were later defeated in King Philip's War, were the target of a new attempt at "termination" by the Trump administration, which sought to disestablish their reservation at Mashpee, on Cape Cod just 30 miles south of Plymouth Rock. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

Supporters of imprisoned Cuban rap artist Maykel Castillo Pérez, better known by his stage name "El Osorbo," warn that his life is in danger one week into a hunger strike, and that he has been removed to a "punishment cell" where he is being held incommunicado. Academic and fellow dissident Anamely Ramos said that when she last heard from him, he was being taken to a prison doctor with swollen lymph nodes. Castillo is a leader of the San Isidro Movement, a collective of Cuban dissident artists and intellectuals, and co-author of the viral song "Patria y Vida," which became an anthem of the mass protests across the island in late July. He has been repeatedly arrested since 2015, including for protesting the controversial Decree 349, which places restrictions on artistic expression. He has been held at the maximum-security Pinar del Río prison since his May 31 arrest for the vague crimes of "resistance" and "contempt." He launched his total hunger and thirst strike on Nov. 11, in protest both of his own detention and the general crackdown on freedom of expression in Cuba. (CiberCuba, Periódico Cubano, PEN America)

Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a ground-based missile Nov. 15, in a test of its PL-19 Nudol DA-ASAT (direct-ascent anti-satellite) system. The blast created thousands of pieces of debris that quickly spread out into Earth orbit. The US says it has identified more than 1,500 trackable pieces of debris from the strike, and many thousands of smaller ones that cannot be traced. That same day, the Russian space agency, RosCosmos, reported that the astronauts on board the International Space Station had to shelter in place due to a cloud of debris passing by the station every 90 minutes, the time it takes for the ISS to orbit the Earth. It was unclear if the debris threatening the ISS came from Russia's ASAT test.

Plainclothes State Security agents began to gather in downtown Havana early on Nov. 15, the day a "Civic March" had been called by opposition networks. In addition to heavy deployment in the parks and squares, armed agents were stationed on the rooftops around the iconic Capitolio building. What the opposition website 14ymedio called pro-regime "vigilante groups" also gathered on street corners. According to the Havana-based independent human rights organization CubaLex, police arrested 11 people, while some 50 identified as key organizers were effectively "besieged" inside their homes to forestall any public gathering. Those arrested had apparently attempted to gather in defiance of the pre-emptive security measures. Some went out into the streets dressed in white, the color that organizers of the call had promoted. A small group of young people were detained on the Paseo del Prado while shouting "Patria y Libertad", slogan of the protest wave that shook Cuba in July.

In Episode 97 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg dissects the geopolitics of the new James Bond movie, No Time to Die, and how the Daniel Craig reboot of the series has finessed the cultural icon's role in the New Cold War. Famously, the film was produced pre-pandemic, with its release postponed a year due to the lockdown—and its key plot device is a mass biological warfare attack, anticipating the conspiranoid theories about COVID-19. Yet it could also be prescient in warning of a superpower confrontation over the Kuril Islands—disputed by Russia and Japan, and an all too likely flashpoint for global conflict.