McTaffish

MISSING: A young #Galway student has been kidnapped by armed terrorists in international waters. Powerful image of Louise McCormack circulating at the @uniofgalway today. @ipsc48

She was younger than Anne Frank

I thought for my first Remix, we’d try a male vocal. Bloody lucky I found one😎🇳🇬👍

London 👏👏👏

Tonight’s Eurovision late entry😎👍

What a fucking video 💚🍀

Her story needs to be taught just like Anne Franks was

Albert Kidd sent everyone at the ACSOM Fanzone a message before the game 💚

It’s incredible to me that we allow a nation committing Genocide, whose leaders talk openly of Ethnic Cleansing, whose army routinely targets and murders children, aid workers and journalists - are allowed to take part in something like Eurovision. This is culture washing a nation committing crimes against humanity - its leader is wanted as a war criminal…..FFS. Meanwhile Israel’s representative in this show is found to be breaking the rules by lobbying for votes.

I wrote an article in 2024 about how far the Israel lobby owns Wes Streeting Andy Burnham was a member of Labour Friends of Israel for years, too Britain is occupied. The lobby has the whole political class sewn up We need a public inquiry now👇 declassifieduk.org/our-friend-how…

"From the moment this government was elected, it has decided there isn’t any money to feed, house or care for people — but there is always money to bomb, kill and injure them." Jeremy Corbyn.

One of the most terrifying images in history: a transformation from life to death. Gaza in 2023 and 2026!

This roadside verge reveals: A total absence of personal responsibility A rejection of the notion of community pride A failure of legal enforcement against criminals A complete embarrassment for Britain It cannot go on. @benonwine

On this day in 1916 the pitiless and idiotic British state murdered the great James Connolly in Dublin. They executed him in his stretcher. Scots steel tempered with Irish fire. 🔥 May his memory be cherished forever more.

Known as “the woman who avenged Che Guevara,” Monika Ertl was the daughter of Hans Ertl, one of Nazi Germany’s leading propaganda filmmakers. After the Second World War, she fled to Bolivia with her family, like many nazi fugitives. Her father continued to associate there with figures such as Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal known as the “Butcher of Lyon.” However, Monika turned her back on everything that environment represented. In the late 1960s, affected by poverty and injustice in Bolivia, she broke away from the fascist world around her father and became radicalized. After Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia, she joined the National Liberation Army (ELN) that he had founded. Her codename was now “Imilla,” meaning “Little Girl” in an Indigenous language. The event that made Monika Ertl known worldwide took place on April 1, 1971: the killing of Roberto Quintanilla, Bolivia’s consul in Hamburg and a former intelligence official considered one of those chiefly responsible for Che Guevara’s death. Quintanilla was one of the men who posed beside Che Guevara’s lifeless body and gave the order for his hands to be cut off. Monika entered the consulate building in Hamburg disguised as an elegant woman. When she came face to face with Quintanilla, she drew her weapon and shot him three times. In the note she left at the scene were the words: “Hasta la victoria o muerte.” This act echoed worldwide as “Che’s revenge.” After the assassination, Monika returned to Bolivia and continued underground activities. One of her biggest targets was to kidnap Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, an old friend of her father who at that time was advising the Bolivian dictatorship. However, on May 12, 1973, she was ambushed by Bolivian security forces. She was killed in a clash in the streets of La Paz. Her grave was kept secret and her body was never handed over to her family. Monika Ertl became one of the most extreme examples of devotion to a cause by rejecting her origins and privileged life. As both a German and a Bolivian revolutionary, she became one of the symbols of the anti-fascist bridge between Europe and Latin America.

This country might be about to have its 6th Prime Minister in 7 years. Why? Because they’ve all failed to take on a rigged economic system that enriches the few at the expense of us all. People want a society where children don’t go hungry. That is really not too much to ask.

If anyone on the left talked about Jews and Israel the way Melanie Phillips talks about Palestinians and Palestine, they would be investigated by the police for hate speech and would never see the inside of a television or radio studio ever again.

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]

"The Labour Party under Keir Starmer will abandon its core idealism and principles and won't even gain tactical advantage. It will be a party which gives no one a reason to vote for it, and no one will, in fact, vote for it." - David Graeber (from 2020)