Helloandy

By the way, you paid a contractor friend of Donald Trump ~$16 million to f*ck up the Reflecting Pool like this. Which means you paid *Trump* ~$8 million, as he has a history of deducting monies he gives to his contractors any benefit he feels he brought to them in other spheres.

Why do Republicans say AOC is “just a bartender” when she has a masters in economics, but they don’t say Markwayne Mullin is just a plumber? HINT: racism and misogyny

The aftermath of last night, all cleaned up as of 8am

SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT IT WAS CONSIDERED ABSOLUTELY HORRIFIC AND A HUGE SCANDAL BECAUSE PRESIDENT ZELENSKYJ DID NOT WEAR A SUIT WHEN HE VISITED THE WHITE HOUSE BUT TRUMP TRANSFORMING THE WHITE HOUSE TO A FUCKING CIRCUS IS TOTALLY ACCEPTABLE 🙄🤡

Israel just middle fingered the ceasefire and is once AGAIN attacking Beirut. What a "peace deal," Mr. @POTUS. You the fucking MAN! 😎

What Trump wanted was for either both names to be there or neither to be there. Effectively, neither name is there now. What Trump wanted was to openly disobey a court. The order obligated him to return the building to its prior state, and effectively he *didn't*. That's a win.

It amazes me how many people fail to see that Trump won here. A tarp now covers the front of the building, effectively erasing Kennedy's name from his own Center. It appears the tarp will be there long-term. Stop saying Trump's name was removed; effectively, *both* names were.

A 17-year-old started volunteering at a nursing home to earn school credit. He hated it. At first. Then he met Eleanor. She was 93. Sharp as a knife. And completely alone. No family ever visited. Every Saturday he sat with her for an hour. Then two. Then three. When she passed away, the nursing home called him. Not because he was family. Because he was the emergency contact she had listed. The teenager cried harder than anyone at the funeral. Sometimes friendships ignore age completely.

JFK gave best speech of his life, this week 1963, at American University: “If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. . . .We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

The first person ever executed for treason in the “United States” was put to death for freeing enslaved people. Let that sink in.

OMG Another Epstein victim has come forward. She claims to have tapes that feature Trump raping minors. The truth will be revealed.

John Turturro says in the early days Spike Lee once partly paid him in Knicks tickets 😂 "Sometimes he would say, listen, you know, I can't pay you the amount of money that you normally get, so I would say 'well then give me five games.'"

Angelina Jolie slams Israel over the genocide in Palestine and says world leaders are all complicit in the Israeli war crimes.......

Vi risparmio il video pubblicato da Al Jazeera. Lui si chiamava Mohammad Abu Giab ed era un pescatore di 15 anni di G@za. Nel video in questione lo si vede tuffarsi nel mare che amava, ridendo e facendo il gesto con le dita della “Vittoria” insieme a un suo coetaneo. Entrambi felici. Durante il bagno è stato ucciso con un’arma da fuoco delle forze isr@eliane al largo di Deir el-Balah. Lo hanno riportato a riva su una specie di canoa: il corpo completamente insanguinato, immobile, privo di vita. Mentre in sottofondo si sente qualcuno urlare. Il Sindacato dei Pescatori di G@za afferma che, da ottobre 2023, almeno 238 uomini e ragazzi sono stati uccisi da Isr@ele mentre stavano lavorando, nuotando, facendo quello che più amavano nel loro mare. Duecentotrentotto: l’ennesima cifra che dimostra dove stia l’inferno in terra. Jacopo Melio

Tom Hardy: -Artık kariyerimi değil, Filistinli çocukları umursuyorum.

Maine veterans brought 168 lunchboxes to Susan Collins' door. One for each schoolgirl killed in the Minab school bombing. She was forced to go on record. That is what organizing looks like. Thank you @VeteransForPeace. No more forever wars.

This is why they want you to forget about the Epstein files. There are dozens of girls just like her who were taken and sold into human trafficking. They’re probably not even alive anymore. What happened to these girls is beyond comprehension, and the people responsible are getting away with it.

I took an elderly friend of mine some donuts this morning for his birthday and sitting there talking to him he said his rent has went up again and he is terrified of social security running out. Our Seniors shouldn't have to live in fear.

On the morning of November 30, 2021, in a courtroom in Frankfurt, a judge read out a verdict that no court anywhere had ever delivered before. The defendant, an Iraqi former ISIS member, was guilty of genocide. The specific crime: the death of a five-year-old Yazidi girl named Reda. He and his wife had purchased Reda and her mother as slaves in 2015. As punishment for wetting the bed, he had chained the child to a window in the open sun in Fallujah, Iraq, in heat that reached fifty-one degrees Celsius, and left her there until she died. The mother survived. She testified. It was the first time any court anywhere in the world had convicted any member of the Islamic State of genocide. It was the first time any court anywhere had ruled in law that what was done to the Yazidi people was a genocide. The institutional path that made it possible to use that word, in that courtroom, six years after Reda died, runs straight back through the United Nations to a twenty-two-year-old Yazidi woman who, in December 2015, decided not to speak in generalities. Her name is Nadia Murad. She was born in Kocho, a Yazidi village of about seventeen hundred people in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. On August 3, 2014, ISIS fighters surrounded Kocho. They separated the men from the women, took the men to the edge of the village, and shot them. They took the older women and shot them too. Among the dead were six of Nadia's brothers and her mother. The younger women — Nadia among them — were loaded onto buses and driven to Mosul. There, they were sold. She was twenty-one years old. She would spend the next three months in captivity, passed between captors under what ISIS called sabaya — sex slavery — until, in early November, she found a door left unlocked and ran. A Muslim family in Mosul, at enormous risk to themselves, sheltered her and helped get her out. She crossed into northern Iraq, then a refugee camp, then Germany, which granted her asylum. She was, by every standard the world recognizes, free. She was also, by every standard the world recognizes, free to be silent. Most survivors of mass sexual violence are silent. Nadia Murad chose differently. On December 16, 2015, she walked into the chamber of the United Nations Security Council, accompanied by the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, and described what had been done to her and her community. She did not speak in generalities. She did not use the diplomatic euphemisms — gender-based violence, crimes, abuses. She used the names of things. She said the women had been sold. She said the children were as young as nine. She said her mother had been executed. She said what had been done to her. Then she made the demand the testimony had been built to make: international recognition that this was a genocide, and prosecution of the people who had committed it. The room was silent. The transcript exists in the UN archives. Here is the part that turns a speech into law. Vague testimony, by design, cannot become evidence. A genocide conviction in a court of law requires testimony specific enough that a judge can rule on intent, on system, on patterns of conduct. Nadia's testimony, and the testimony of other survivors she helped gather in the years that followed, was specific enough to do that work. In 2016, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry formally determined that ISIS's treatment of the Yazidis met the legal definition of genocide. The United States, the European Parliament, and the UK Parliament reached the same determination in the same months. In 2017, by Security Council resolution, the UN established a specialized investigative team — UNITAD — whose job was collecting evidence to courtroom standard, so prosecutions could one day take place. In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege, for their work to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. She used the acceptance speech to remind the room of the women still missing. And in 2021, in Frankfurt, in a case in which Amal Clooney represented Reda's mother, the architecture caught up with the testimony. There have been further German convictions since. There are open prosecutions in other countries. UNITAD's investigative files have been used in courts where the crimes themselves happened in Iraq but the accused was found in Europe, under universal-jurisdiction laws that allow genocide to be tried wherever the perpetrator turns up. Nadia Murad is thirty-two years old now. She continues to travel, to testify, to run Nadia's Initiative, which rebuilds water systems, clinics, and schools in Sinjar — the region she came from. By the most recent figures, more than two thousand eight hundred Yazidi women and children are still missing or held in captivity. Mass graves are still being excavated. The first time a court used the word genocide for what was done to her people, the year was 2021. The first time anyone said it in a chamber where the law could hear it was December 16, 2015. The woman who said it was twenty-two. She did not speak in generalities. If her story moved you, drop one word in the comments — Nadia, witness, evidence, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.

I took my son swimming today at our community pool during the quietest hour, desperate to slip past the invisible threats swirling through this summer heat. Here in the South, the relentless heat leaves us so few safe havens for our children that we chase these pockets of normalcy wherever we can. The only others there were a family with a frail, bald woman in her late 20s or early 30s, chatting softly with the mom. Pale skin, not a single hair left on her head... Cancer, I knew instantly. Then her little blonde girl, about 4 years old in a bright strawberry swimsuit, hobbled over with that familiar cough… The pieces locked together like a key turning in a rusted door. This child, born in approximately 2021, has carried Covid home again and again. Her family probably shrugged it off each round as a “stomach bug,””allergies,” or “just a cold.” Year after year of quiet accumulation, until it left her mother to face the toll of her body stripped bare by cancer. This is the timeline we now inhabit. A slow, unfolding apocalypse of Covid that most refuse to see, yet reveals itself everywhere once you truly look and listen. The damage plays out in plain sight around us while Covid keeps spreading, hidden within the everyday moments. The world glances away, makes excuses and forgets, but this nightmare presses onwards. It is simply just one unnoticed infection at a time.