Joanne Conklin

🇫🇷 France launches one-euro meals for all university students French university canteens have begun offering one-euro meals to students regardless of income, in a measure designed to address financial hardship. The price, which covers a starter, main course and dessert, was previously only available to those with low incomes or receiving financial aid #geneu_AFP

Baby gorilla takes a tumble and bursts into tears. But mommy’s always there.. 🥺

The CEO of Spirit Airlines Dave Davis is calling Trump out for his lies about why they had to stop operations and he said it happened because of the sudden and sustained price of jet fuel which has doubled since Trump started this War with Iran.

🇺🇸BREAKING: Someone placed a $920 million crude oil short at 3:40 AM. 70 minutes later Axios reported the US and Iran were close to a deal. Oil dropped 12%. The trade made $125 million in profit. Minutes after that Iran launched the “Persian Gulf Strait Authority” and oil surged 8%. $760 million placed before Trump’s last announcement. $920 million placed before this one. Every major announcement in this war has been front-run by someone who knew it was coming. What kind of war is this? This is more like a trading desk with an army. Never stop connecting the dots.

Watch the full report: youtu.be/MVni0xUU-j4

NEWS: The Epstein files are now bound into 3,437 physical volumes in a new exhibition space in Tribeca. Millions of pages. Two stories tall. And yet only two people have ever faced accountability for this international trafficking operation. Katie Phang says walking through the space is enraging. Not because of politics, but due to the lack of accountability.

Kyiv rejects Russia's 'Victory Day' truce after Moscow violates ceasefire; 'Putin only cares about parades' — Russia violated Kyiv-proposed May 6 ceasefire 1,820 times, Ukraine says; Russian attacks on Ukrainian first responders rise, follow 'sustained pattern,' report finds; and more. kyivindependent.com/ukraine-war-la…

The Vaccine Integrity Project’s review of evidence related to HPV vaccines found no credible evidence linking HPV vaccination to serious adverse events, including neurological conditions, adverse pregnancy outcomes, or other long-term health risks. ow.ly/qTtE50YV1sU 🧵 1/3

⚡️ Top bank official suspended over Ukraine's biggest corruption scandal. The decision by Mykola Hladyshchenko, head of state-owned Sense Bank's supervisory board, follows the publication of alleged transcripts of audio tapes implicating the bank in the corruption scandal last week. kyivindependent.com/top-bank-offic…

Türkiye unveiled its first intercontinental ballistic missile, called Yildirimhan, during the SAHA 2026 defense exhibition in Istanbul english.nv.ua/nation/tuerkiy…

If we don’t do something to stop Republicans from reshaping the political landscape, they will take this Supreme Court ruling and ride right back to segregation.

Rep. Ansari says that Howard Lutnick is a “pathological liar” who is enabling a cover-up. Ansari: After what we have seen so far in this transcribed interview, I feel very comfortable saying that Howard Lutnick is a pathological liar who is enabling the most egregious cover-up in American history. In 2012, he took his family and his staff to Jeffrey Epstein’s island. I focused my questions today on how he could have done that if he and his wife were truly so uncomfortable—especially when, in 2008, we know that Jeffrey Epstein was accused and a sweetheart deal took place for soliciting a minor. Howard Lutnick tried to tell us in that room that he essentially didn’t know any of that. I asked him, how did I, as a child at the time, see this all over the media about Jeffrey Epstein, and you—an adult who was this person’s neighbor and had engaged with him before—how could you possibly not have known? I mean, the level of the lies that are taking place inside that room, without video, is unbelievable.

Khanna: Lutnick had originally said that Epstein had engaged in blackmail and recorded videotapes. Now he’s saying he was wrong and that Epstein didn’t engage in blackmail. Did someone tell him to say that? Why is Lutnick changing his story?

Katy to Houston commute ranks among worst in U.S. for burnout, study finds click2houston.com/news/local/202…

Houston surgeon Dr. George P. Noon leaves legacy of innovation, compassion click2houston.com/news/local/202…

Ukraine does not have enough Patriot interceptors to stop Iskanders today. We will have them soon. So for now, crews fire 1 missile instead of 2 to save ammo, and use drones to destroy launchers, depots, and factories behind the strikes, Kyiv Post. 1/

Winston Churchill used to lay 200 bricks per day to keep his mind busy when feeling down. Depression hates a moving target.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

I call this test my New Opportunity Razor… Here are the two questions to assess any new opportunity: 1. Do I like the winning version of this thing? Imagine yourself five years in the future. This new thing you’ve taken on is crushing it. You’re up there with the best at it. Do you like what that looks like as it relates to your life, time, and energy? In other words, if you make it to the top, are you going to like the view from the summit? This is a critical first step, because too often in life we climb a mountain for years, get to the top, and realize that we never really wanted the view in the first place. If you don’t like the life of the person in the corner office, you may want to think about that before you sacrifice 20 years grinding away to get it (or figure out how you’re going to do it differently, at least). If the answer is no, stop here and say no to the opportunity. If the answer is yes, proceed to the second question… 2. Am I willing to do the losing version of this thing for a long time? To earn anything meaningful in life, it’s going to take a long, long time. Probably much longer than even your most optimistic initial assumptions. An American computer scientist named Douglas Hofstadter once coined the self-referential adage, Hofstadter’s Law, which states: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.” So, knowing this, do you have energy to do the losing, bad, ugly version of this thing for a long time in order to earn the winning version that you like? You may dive into something because of the appeal of the summit, but you’ll never make it there if you don’t embrace the mud you have to crawl through on the climb. The people who have reached those summits have one common trait: They loved the mud. They obsessed over the details. They had real energy for it. When asked about how he had sustained his high level play for so long, tennis legend Novak Djokovic had a simple response: "I can carry on playing at this level because I like hitting the tennis ball." The summit is the grand slam championships. Standing on center court, holding the trophy high in the air. Everyone likes that version. But the way you earn it is through thousands upon thousands of hours of hitting the ball. In the cold. In the dark. In the rain. When nobody’s watching. When nobody’s cheering. When nobody cares. The losing version is the cost of entry for the winning version. The New Opportunity Razor has been a major life cheat code. The best opportunities for your life will pass this test. You'll love the summit and the mud you have to navigate to get there. When you find those things, go all in. Say no to everything else.

Amid the joyous festivities ramping up for Moscow's May 9th propaganda show, Russians celebrate the high points of their culture. Here, reminiscing of all those fun times - just before days of torture and execution or decades in the gulag - the NKVD arrest process. Legitimizing the present regime brutality means laundering the past.