Surveillance Watch has reached a milestone: we have catalogued over 1,000 surveillance entities and 1,180 funders, across 182 countries and 15 categories of surveillance technology.

World Bank is driving my friend Sam Gikandi to the verge of a mental breakdown. All so that they can take control of the Board and acquire the company at a depressed price. Employees are praying and fasting daily wondering when the siege will end."

My lecture will centre the lives lost at Lampedusa and across other migration routes, resisting the reduction of people to statistics and restoring attention to their stories, dignity and humanity. Register to attend.

The programme will move between film, reflection, testimony and conversation. A short screening of the film ‘Europe’s Immigration Disaster’ will open with a keynote lecture by me.

More than a decade later, these two days will reflect on the lives lost on migration routes, the experiences carried by those who survive, and a critical engagement of the ongoing violences created and perpetuated by imperialism and its legacies.

This event is intentionally taking place in the month marking the 2013 Lampedusa tragedy, when at least 368 people lost their lives on the shores of Italy, attempting to reach Europe.

Hosted by the Racial Justice Network (RJN) in collaboration with the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS), Leeds Migration Research Network (LMRN) and the MIGMOBS research project, this event will centre and explore Ngũgĩ’s concept of “Psychic Tombs” using art, lectures and films.

Join us for two days of talks, film, art and community conversation inspired by the work of the late Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

You can still register to join our event ⬇️

A reminder, there are virtually no local media outlets in the country allowed to report on anything. The few journos who are, are working for foreign outlets anonymously or with no bylines. This does not include government media, or those like Sputnik who traditionally ignore human rights abuses.

Updates: the Ethiopian army is in control of the city of Alamata, after 3 days of fierce fighting on the city's outskirts. At least 50 people in the city died, many from artillery strikes, per medical sources reached by the BBC. A strike that targeted the city's marketplace killed a dozen people.

So well deserved!

Explainer-Why New War in Ethiopia’s Tigray Threatens to Trigger Wider Conflict

Sorry it's 6 PM CET