Plans by Trump's fascist tech bros as well as Putin and Xi to build AI-run nuclear reactors on the Moon open jurisdictional dilemmas that far outpace the modest UN efforts to put a regulation regime in place for artificial intelligence. These plans are unveiled just as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the symbolic hands

Amnesty International on Feb. 3 condemned both the January attack by the US military on Venezuela and the abuses long committed by the ousted Maduro government.

Hundreds of Danish veterans and supporters staged a silent march on Jan. 31 from the historic Kastellet fortress to the US Embassy in Copenhagen as part of a "No Words" mobilization to protest recent US rhetoric that organizers said demeans Denmark's combat contributions alongside American forces.

The Science & Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Jan. 27 moved the symbolic hands of the Doomsday Clock to an unprecedented 85 seconds to midnight. The decision came a year after the clock was set to an also unprecedented 89 seconds to midnight—and three years after it was moved to 90 seconds to midnight. Each increment since 2017, when it was set at 2.5 minutes of midnight, has brought the Clock closer to doomsday than ever before. This year's statement reads: "A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic. Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers." (BAS, NYT, The Guardian)

A last-minute "permanent ceasefire" may mean that northeast Syria is back from the brink of Arab-Kurdish ethnic war. But ceasefires have repeatedly broken down since fighting resumed earlier this year, with Damascus demanding disbandment of the Rojava autonomous zone, and the integration of its institutions—including its military wing, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—into the central government. While the new pact sets a more "gradual" pace for this integration, the Kurdish aspiration to regional autonomy and the central government's insistence on centralization may prove a long-term obstacle to peace. In Episode 315 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg weighs the odds for avoiding a conflict that holds the potential for escalation to genocide, with the connivance of the Great Powers that so recently backed the SDF to fight ISIS.

The Kurdish-held border town of Kobani in northern Syria is under siege again, as it was by ISIS in 2014—but this time by forces of the Syrian central government, which has cut off water and power to the town in the dead of winter, with snow on the ground. Since the start of the year, the Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria have lost almost all of the territory they controlled to a new offensive by the central government. Kobani with Hasakah and Qamishli are the last besieged strongholds of the reduced Rojava autonomous zone. And both the US and Russia, which have backed the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) against ISIS, now appear to be cutting them loose—effectively green-lighting the government offensive against them. The US special envoy for Syria, Tom Barrack, has already warned that US support for the SDF is coming to an end. And in the midst of the offensive, Russia has withdrawn its forces from Qamishli, its principal military outpost in Rojava.

Trump's Greenland annexation drive is only secondarily about the strategic minerals, but fundamentally driven by a geostrategic design to divide the planet with Putin. Even if his belated and equivocal disavowal of military force at the Davos summit is to be taken as real, the threat has likely achieved its intended effect—dividing and paralyzing NATO, so as to facilitate Putin's military ambitions in Europe, even beyond Ukraine Also at Davos, Trump officially inaugurated his "Board of Peace," seen as parallel body to the United Nations that can eventually displace it—dominated by Trump and Putin, in league with the world's other authoritarians. In the Greenland gambit, the territory itself is a mere pawn in the drive to establish a Fascist World Order. In Episode 314 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg calls for centering indigenous Inuit voices on the future of Greenland, and universal repudiation of annexationist designs.

When US President Donald Trump first proposed establishing a so-called "Board of Peace" to oversee governance of the Gaza Strip for a transitional period back in September, the idea was quickly likened to a form of colonial takeover. The UN nonetheless adopted a Security Council resolution in November giving its blessing to the board's creation—a vote some member states may now regret. The board was officially inaugurated in a Jan. 22 ceremony in Davos, Switzerland, where Trump was attending the World Economic Forum. But Gaza seems almost incidental to its true mission, which appears to be creating a global strongmen's club—led by Trump, potentially for life—to rival, if not replace, the UN itself.