Zein966 🇮🇪

Yesterday, Ukrainian forces were at launch positions, fully prepared to strike the Kremlin and Red Square. They were ordered to stand down at the very last moment after Putin begged Trump for a ceasefire to avoid falling into the mud. He got a ceasefire. We agreed to no strategic strikes against Russia FOR 3 DAYS!!! And what did Russians do? They hit a high-rise building in Kharkiv on that very “parade” day. A little child is among the victims. It’s always a bad idea to pity Russians and agree to their conditions. They will always act in the most disgusting and dirty way.

Palestinians from the village of al-Asa’sa coordinated with Israeli military authorities to bury their loved one in a cemetery in the northern West Bank. They did everything “right.” They got the approval. They followed the process. It didn’t matter. Settlers arrived with excavation equipment and began digging up the body, claiming the grave was too close to their illegal settlement. Soldiers showed up, and rather than stop the settlers, forced the Palestinians to remove the corpse themselves. This is what Israeli military rule in the West Bank looks like: settlers set the terms and soldiers enforce them. They couldn’t even let the dead rest in peace.

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?" Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything? Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it! And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else. Francesca Albanese is that someone. She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen." Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name. And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity. Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people. There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased. There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled." There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.” Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks. She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape". Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence. What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik. These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named. Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable. We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know." Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise. So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that. A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything. Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky. Let us stand with her. Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now. [Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

Alan Dershowitz: “If Jeffrey Epstein told me he was a Mossad agent, I would have got him off completely.” Piers Morgan: “Hang on, are you saying that if Epstein said he was Mossad, he could get away with being a pedophile?” Dershowitz: “That’s right.”

Smotrich: 'My son wants me to leave some Lebanon for him to destroy later. I told him don't worry, there will be enough for everyone.' Generational evil

U support genocide

Israeli soldiers beat and tortured flotilla organisers Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila after abducting them in international waters near Greece in the early hours of Thursday morning, lawyers and diplomats have said. After illegally intercepting 22 boats and kidnapping around 200 activists hundreds of miles from Gaza, Israel transferred the majority to Greek authorities, but refused to release Abukeshek and Ávila. Instead, it transported them back to an Israeli desert prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured. Brazilian activist Ávila was dragged face-down across the floor and beaten so badly he passed out twice, lawyers said, after visiting him on Saturday. His wife, Lara Souza, said an embassy official told her he had been temporarily blinded by his injuries, with his left eye still swollen shut, but he was being denied medical treatment. In a brief visit, where he was separated from the consul by a glass screen and not able to speak freely, he reported pain all over his body, especially in his hand and shoulder, and said that soldiers had threatened to throw him overboard and target his wife and two-year-old daughter. Abukeshek, who had been sailing on an observer boat and did not intend to go to Gaza, was “in shock”, his wife Sally Issa said. He was forced to lie face-down on the floor of an Israeli warship for two days, lawyers said, blindfolded and with his hands bound behind his back. Spain has demanded Israel release Abukeshek, who is Palestinian but holds Spanish and Swedish citizenship. On Friday, prime minister Pedro Sánchez said he had been "illegally abducted by the Netanyahu government". On Sunday, the activists appeared before an Israeli court, where a judge extended their detention by two days. Lawyers demanded their immediate and unconditional release, telling the court the entire process was "fundamentally flawed and illegal", and describing Israel's actions as a "retaliatory measure against humanitarian activist leaders". The two men have now been transferred back to solitary confinement in Shikma prison, where they are being held in windowless cells. Both are on hunger strike, with Ávila saying he will not leave without Abukeshek.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that the United States is “suffocating” Iran’s leadership through an “economic blockade” launched alongside the US military offensive. “This began with the order last March from President Trump on max pressure, and three weeks ago the President gave the order to Treasury myself to begin Economic Fury,” Bessent said in a Fox News interview, referring to his department’s initiative to supplement the Pentagon’s “Operation Epic Fury.” “We are suffocating the regime, and they are not able to pay their soldiers. This is a real economic blockade, and it is in all parts of government – all hands on deck,” he said.

It's normal to have an urge to jump off a cliff.