US gun companies are making a killing in Mexico

 Al Jazeera English

In December, I flew from the Mexican state of Oaxaca – where I have been residing since the onset of the pandemic – to the US state of Kentucky, where my parents recently moved. On the ride from the Louisville airport to my parents’ apartment, I passed a billboard advertising an upcoming gun show on January 1 and 2.

A website promoting the event offered enticing details: “If you are a gun collector or are a hunting enthusiast, the gun show at the Kentucky Fair & Expo Center in Louisville… is a great place to spend some time”. In addition to guns, military surplus items would also be available for purchase, and children aged six to 12 received a discounted ticket price of $4 – or $6.50 for the “VIP” children’s ticket, which exempted its holder from waiting in lines.

I fled the country again on January 1 and was, therefore, unable to attend the show, but the billboard and the ubiquitous gun shops in Louisville – from Skull Firearms to Everything Concealed Carry to Gunz Inc – had constituted a marked change from the landscape south of the border. As the Louisville Courier-Journal itself notes, the entire country of Mexico “has just one gun store and issues fewer than 50 gun permits a year”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Elon Musk is a security risk

 Al Jazeera English

Once upon a time, the world’s richest person – Elon Musk, the megalomaniacal CEO of rocket company SpaceX and the officially self-branded “Technoking” of Tesla – endeavoured to bribe 19-year-old Florida college freshman Jack Sweeney with $5,000 to cease operation of the Twitter account @ElonJet, which tracks Musk’s private jet using publicly available data.

The offer was no doubt generous coming from an individual with a private aeroplane and a net worth of some $276bn. The Twitter account provides such updates as “Took off from Kahului, Hawaii, US” and “Landed in Austin, Texas, US. Apx. flt. time 2 Hours : 19 Mins”. Sweeney also tracks the private aircraft of other members of the earth’s ruling class, including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

It does not inspire enormous confidence, of course, that the man who has determined to colonise Mars has to resort to bribing teenagers to sort things out on Twitter. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

From Havana with love

 All Jazeera English

As I was preparing to travel from Mexico to Cuba in early February for a one-month stay, a Cuban friend in Havana messaged me with some tips. If you are going to need things like milk and coffee, he said, be sure to bring them with you.

Indeed, as Cuba now marks six decades of existence under United States embargo, basic commodities are hard to come by – and that is just one aspect of the ongoing US policy of making life hell for Cubans. While the right-wing Cuban exile crowd and allied zealots like the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady prefer to insist that there is “no blockade”, reality indicates very much otherwise.

Sixty years ago, on February 7, 1962, an “Embargo on All Trade with Cuba” entered into effect under the supervision of then-President John F Kennedy, who had taken care beforehand to procure for himself no fewer than 1,200 Cuban cigars. It continues to be the most exhaustive embargo ever imposed on any country by the US, and at the time included a ban on all sales of medicine and food. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Biometric surveillance: Face-first plunge into dystopia

 Al Jazeera English

Flying into Dallas Fort Worth International Airport from Mexico in December, I queued in the immigration line for US citizens and was taken aback when – rather than request my passport – the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent simply instructed me to look at the camera and then pronounced my first name: “Maria?”

Feeling an abrupt violation of my entire bodily autonomy, I nodded – and reckoned that it was perhaps easy to lose track of the rapid dystopian devolution of the world when one had spent the past two years hanging out on a beach in Oaxaca.

A CBP poster promoting the transparent infringement on privacy was affixed to the airport wall, and featured a grey-haired man smiling suavely into the camera along with the text: “Our policies on privacy couldn’t be more transparent. Biometric Facial Comparison. Faster meets more secure.” . . .

[But] face surveillance technology has been exposed as wildly inaccurate, . . . [with] is a much higher rate of misidentification of people of colour and women, which only stands to further exacerbate systemic inequality and discrimination." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.