Agis/Άγις 🇬🇷 🇨🇺 🇬🇧 🇺🇦

Terra is my nation, the stars my destination.

[Agis/Άγις 🇬🇷 🇨🇺 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @ALiberakis]

Greek news

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 4. Every single day for the last 35 years, about 118,000 people have climbed out of extreme poverty. Every day. That is a mid-sized city’s worth of people, every 24 hours, no days off, for three and a half decades. Nobody tells you this on the news.

In 1990, 2.3 billion people were living on less than $3 a day. Today that number is 808 million. A billion and a half humans moved from not enough food to eat, to enough food to eat. The bulk of that lift came from China and India just getting richer. China alone pulled 800 million people out of poverty. That is more than the population of the United States, Canada, and Western Europe combined.

And it is not just money. A baby born in 1900 was expected to live 32 years. A baby born today is expected to live 71. We more than doubled human life expectancy in four generations. In 1820, 9 out of 10 adults on the planet could not read. Today 87% can. More than 5 billion people can now read a book, a recipe, a text from their kid. Two hundred years ago, that number was under 100 million.

Child deaths are the one that hits me the hardest. In 1990, 1 in every 11 children died before their fifth birthday. Today it is 1 in 27. In 2022, for the first time in recorded history, the number of children who died under age 5 dropped below 5 million in a single year. That is still too many. But 30 years ago the number was over 12 million. Nobody threw a parade.

Not everything is better. The news is right about that part. Climate is getting worse. Wars are getting worse in some places. Hunger went back up in Africa. Progress has slowed since COVID. But if you zoom out and look at where humans were 35, 100, 200 years ago, it is not even close. Most people alive today have more food, more medicine, more schooling, more years of life, and more freedom than any generation before them.

The reason you never see this on your feed is that “118,000 humans escaped extreme poverty yesterday” does not make you click. A plane crash does. So you see the plane crashes and you miss the quiet miracle that has been running in the background of your whole life.

Every day, while most of us are scrolling through bad news, another city-size crowd of humans is waking up with a little more money, a little more food, and a little more time on Earth than the generation before them. That is the best news story of our century. We just forgot to write it.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 3. The hole in the ozone layer is closing. The one that was supposed to kill millions of people from skin cancer. The one we all heard about as kids and then quietly forgot. It should be completely gone by 2066.

In 1985, three British scientists stared at their data and realized a hole had opened up in the sky above Antarctica. Over the next 20 years, it grew to be larger than all of North America. If we had done nothing, two-thirds of the ozone layer would have been destroyed by 2065. Millions would have died of skin cancer. Global food production would have been cut in half.

So every country on Earth signed a treaty. All 197 UN member states. It is the only treaty in history every single country has signed. It is called the Montreal Protocol, it banned a class of chemicals called CFCs, and it went into effect in 1987. CFCs were in refrigerators, air conditioners, aerosol cans, and hairspray. They were tearing the ozone layer apart.

Two scientists had tried to warn us 11 years earlier. Mario Molina was Mexican. Sherwood Rowland was American. In 1974, they published a paper in Nature saying CFCs were going to destroy the ozone layer. The chemical industry called them cranks. It took a decade and an actual hole in the sky before people believed them. Both scientists later won the Nobel Prize.

The treaty worked. Since 2000, ozone-depleting chemicals in the stratosphere have dropped by about a third. 99% of the world’s ozone-depleting chemicals have been phased out. The 2025 Antarctic ozone hole was the fifth smallest since 1992 and closed earlier in the season than any year since 2019.

Full recovery is projected by 2040 for most of the world, 2045 over the Arctic, and 2066 over Antarctica. A lot of people reading this will live to see it.

US government scientists estimate that 443 million cases of skin cancer and 2.3 million skin cancer deaths in the United States alone will have been avoided because of this treaty. Globally, the number is much higher. A lot of us are walking around right now without the skin cancer we would have had.

When I was a kid, adults talked about the hole in the ozone layer the way people now talk about climate change. That was the villain. Everyone was sure it was going to kill us all.

And then humanity actually fixed it. The hole is closing above Antarctica right now. You can see it on the satellite feeds.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Part 2. A hospital in India can take someone who has been blind for years and give them their sight back in six minutes. It costs less than a pizza. And they have done it 6.8 million times.

The hospital is called Aravind. It was started in 1976 by a man named Govindappa Venkataswamy, known as Dr. V. He was 58, had just been forced to retire, and his hands were crippled by arthritis so bad he could barely hold a pen. He had scalpels custom-made for his twisted fingers and still performed over 100,000 eye surgeries in his life.

Two years before he retired, Dr. V walked into a McDonald’s for the first time. He looked at the menu, looked at the assembly line in the back, and came out with an odd idea. He would sell cataract surgeries the way McDonald’s sold burgers.

So he mortgaged his house. His brothers and sisters pooled their life savings. He opened an 11-bed clinic in Madurai. Then he flew to Chicago and enrolled in Hamburger University, the actual McDonald’s training program, to learn how the assembly line worked.

At Aravind, cataract surgery is broken into small steps. Nurses prep one patient while the surgeon operates on another. Each surgeon switches between two tables. The operation itself takes about six minutes.

So far Aravind has seen 55 million patients and done 6.8 million surgeries. More than half of those patients paid nothing. Not a rupee. The ones who can pay subsidize the ones who cannot.

A surgery at Aravind costs between $40 and $125 depending on the lens. In the US, Medicare pays about $1,766 for the same operation. Aravind also has better results. Their complication rate is 1.5%, and serious eye infections happen in about 2 out of every 10,000 surgeries. Most American hospitals are not that good.

They built their own lens factory too, called Aurolab. Imported lenses were costing hundreds of dollars each, so Aurolab makes them for around ten. Today Aurolab produces roughly 10% of the world’s eye lenses and ships to 160 countries.

Every year, Aravind sends doctors and nurses out to rural villages for 2,500 eye camps. They screen people who have been blind for years, bus them to the hospital, operate on them, and bus them back home seeing.

Dr. V died in 2006. His family still runs Aravind. Harvard Business School has been teaching the story as a case study since 1993. I still do not see it in my feed.

A 58-year-old with crippled hands walked into a McDonald’s. Fifty years later, 6.8 million blind people can see.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

1/6 Look at the absolute disaster unfolding right now, and remember exactly who told you to vote for Trump in 2024.

The people who sold you this catastrophe should be discredited forever, and you should never listen to their political advice again🧵

[Mattia Nelles @mattia_n]

Oleksandr Yakovenko, the founder of TAF Industries, one of Ukraine's largest drone makers wrote a good response to @RheinmetallAG's Papperger's irritating statement. I used AI to translate it for you. It is worth reading in full.

"Dear Mr. Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall,

When you called Ukrainian drone manufacturers “Ukrainian housewives with 3D printers in their kitchens,” you demonstrated how deeply the European defense establishment still fails to understand the nature of modern warfare.

This is not about emоtions. This is about battlefield reality.

Here are the figures your industry refuses to acknowledge:

In 2025 alone, Ukrainian drones carried out 819,737 confirmed strikes. They accounted for 90% of all combat losses of the Russian army—more than all other types of weapons combined.

A single company, TAF Industries, produces up to 100,000 FPV drones per month. Over any given 90-day period, the products of my company alone have more confirmed hits than your entire fleet of equipment over its entire history of combat use across all conflicts. And most importantly—I built this company and achieved these results in two years, not fifty. Think about that.

Our drones achieve greater kinetic effect in three months than your flagship platforms have in half a century.

Why? Because the battlefield has changed, while your business model has not.

Russian electronic warfare has rendered GPS-guided Western munitions (Excalibur, GMLRS, etc.) almost ineffective.
Expensive and complex systems designed for wars with air superiority and conventional “peer-on-peer” conflict have become easy targets for drones costing $500–2,000 that attack them from above.
The cost-effectiveness ratio has been turned upside down: one 120mm Rheinmetall shell or one anti-tank missile costs more than a dozen of our drones—yet our drones still prevail.

This is not a “Lego game.” This is industrial Darwinism in real time. We iterate weekly. We lose factories to missile strikes and rebuild them within weeks. We print parts in basements and deploy 100,000 strike systems per month, while your engineers still require 3–5 years and hundreds of millions of euros to certify even minor upgrades.

The war in Ukraine is not a temporary anomaly. It is the first true drone-industrial war. And it has already proven that outdated European platforms—no matter how expensive or “serious”—are becoming increasingly irrelevant if they do not integrate the very technologies you are mocking.

So when you say “this is not innovation,” I hear something else: “We do not want to admit that the future is being written in Ukrainian workshops, not in Düsseldorf offices.”

The hashtag #MadeByHousewives is trending for a reason. Because these “housewives” destroy more enemy equipment every month than entire European armies do over full campaigns. And they do so while your industry continues to sell 20th-century solutions at 21st-century prices.

The invitation stands, Mr. Papperger. Stop laughing at the kitchen table. Come and learn how the war of tomorrow is actually fought. Because the next time someone asks, “Who needs tanks in the age of drones?”, the answer may be simpler than you think:

Those who still believe in 1979 will lose to those who are building in 2026.

With respect (but with facts),

Oleksandr Yakovenko
Founder of TAF Industries
One of those “Ukrainian housewives”"

https://t.co/oZnXASQAYw

[Saint Javelin @saintjavelin]

“4 years ago Russians, at gunpoint, took me and my family to the basement of a school, where they held 360 people for 27 days. We became a “human shield” for their headquarters.

4 years ago we became hostages in cramped rooms where there was barely any air to breathe. People were starting to lose their minds from suffocation.

4 years ago people were shot right on the streets for having a phone, for wearing military-style pants, or simply for resisting.

4 years ago people in the basement were forced to sleep standing or sitting, because there wasn’t enough space for everyone.

1/6

[Agis/Άγις 🇬🇷 🇨🇺 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @ALiberakis]

@JimmySecUK @grok Please explain what this is about

[Volodymyr Yermolenko @yermolenko_v]

1. It’s not a “Ukraine war”, it’s a Russian war against Ukraine, Europe, and freedom
2. It’s not “4 years”, it’s 12 years, as Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014. In 2022 it increased the intensity of the war, but the war started much earlier
3. It’s not the war for territories, Russia doesn’t care about “Donbas”, it wants to expand for the sake of expansion, to have the capacity to expand, to export violence outside, otherwise it knows it will be turned inside
4. It’s not “Russia vs western imperialism” because Russia wants to re-imperialise the world, to bring empires back. to end the decolonization process of the 20th century, to divide the world between the “great powers”
5. It’s not “let’s make a deal and it will be fine”, Russia will stop only when it is stopped. In order to have peace you need to put Russia into a weak position where the only option for it is to stop. Flattering Russia, suggesting compromises will only persuade Putin that his opponents are weak

I said it back in 2014:
the fear of provoking Russia provokes Russia.

It’s still valid

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

I’d like to remind you what exactly was actually included in the lost paradise of the 2022 Istanbul negotiations that Ukraine “should have accepted back then”:

- reducing the Ukrainian army to symbolic levels (between 50,000 and 85,000 troops, with severely limited weaponry),
- renouncing membership in any defensive alliances (first and foremost NATO) no allied troops on Ukrainian soil, no military assistance from Western countries,
- recognizing itself as a “Nazi state” to satisfy Kremlin propaganda and carrying out “denazification” (in other words, persecuting anyone Moscow decides to label a “Nazi”),
- granting Russia veto power over any military assistance to Ukraine from countries guaranteeing its security in the event of a new Russian invasion (yes, exactly like that),
- Ukraine renouncing Crimea and Donbas,
- and from Russia, nothing: no troop withdrawals prior to Ukraine’s full capitulation, no obligations, no real mechanism to prevent another invasion, nothing.

All of this came at a time when, in March 2022, Russia’s blitzkrieg against Ukraine had already failed, and after more than a month of fighting, the Russian military was defeated near Kyiv and retreated without achieving a single one of its objectives.

Let me remind you further: those so-called “Istanbul peace negotiations” in 2022 were, in reality, nothing more than diplomatic consultations that were not taken particularly seriously either in the media or at the highest levels of government.

Because no one had any illusions that, despite the obvious failure of the invasion, the Kremlin continued to arrogantly demand deliberately unacceptable "peace terms" that were neither serious nor viable.

Moreover, even after their defeat near Kyiv, Russia had no intention of admitting failure or ending the invasion. By late March and early April, the battered Russian forces withdrawn from northern Ukraine were being redeployed to Donbas for a new offensive and the second phase of the war.

Remember how we lived day by day then, expecting the massive battle for Donbas that began in mid-April 2022?

And I would also like to remind you that the Kremlin, along with its armies of bots and useful idiots, did not spend years lamenting this blessed lost paradise of “Istanbul,” where the evil and foolish Zelensky rejected Putin’s noble hand of peace, and the treacherous Boris Johnson forbade Ukraine from "making peace" with Russia.

This “Istanbul” mantra only resurfaced in Russian propaganda after Donald Trump came to power, when it became clear that Ukraine could not be defeated militarily, and that a more promising path would be to try to force Kyiv into capitulation through “peace negotiations” under pressure from a profoundly incompetent and openly anti-Ukrainian U.S. president.

[UNITED24 @U24_gov_ua]

There are over 70,000 women serving in the Ukrainian army — an increase of 40% since 2021.

Many of them choose high-risk, frontline roles as drone operators, combat medics, and engineers.

These are their stories🧵

Support Ukraine's defenders:
https://t.co/lXHFuxPWwT

[Agis/Άγις 🇬🇷 🇨🇺 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @ALiberakis]

@Rainmaker1973 Ozzy, hands-down!

[Agis/Άγις 🇬🇷 🇨🇺 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @ALiberakis]

@karimfranceschi Karim, what is your assessment as to why this is taking place? Has something substantial been negotiated? I did not get the sense that the PKK was on its knees...

[Agis/Άγις 🇬🇷 🇨🇺 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @ALiberakis]

@CartoonsHateHer Ethnicity is a human construct. DNA does not carry info on that. Your DNA is similar to that of others who self-identified as Greek or Turk or whatever. In our region, we had constant changes in populations and cultures over the centuries, so your test tells you nothing. Sorry.

[Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 @NickKnudsenUS]

BREAKING:

Both the White House and RNCC have lashed out at the creators of this ad.

It must have struck a nerve. Maybe they don't like being outed as fascists.

You know what to do: SPREAD THIS EVERYWHERE!

#MAGAKidnappers

[Richard Woodruff 🇺🇦 @frontlinekit]

Ukrainian dark humour has me in fucking tears 🤣🤣🤣

Is everyone in Ukraine a comedian by birth?

[Agis/Άγις 🇬🇷 🇨🇺 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 @ALiberakis]

@typesfast The Histories, by Herodotus. Reads like a modern writer talking about modern societies.

[Oriannalyla 🇺🇦 @Lyla_lilas]

"Hello, friends

I would like this blog to be alive, emotional.

It's been 50 days since the FPV drone almost blew my brains out

Today is such a day for me - super independent.

And today until lunch I did everything myself.

I put on this shirt myself - no one helped me.

These shorts - also myself.

No one helps me record this video, I record it myself.

And in general, it all started with my crusade -for a pie on the first floor

I went to the cafe myself, bought a pie myself.

I want to show it to you.

My first pie - here it is.

Of course, it fell apart

But I got it - in an unequal battle with the cafe and payments by phone

Doing everything yourself is cool.

It gives a completely different feeling of life

I wash myself, I eat myself, I go to the toilet myself.

You can't tell me how cool it is.

You feel complete again.

People who are in a difficult situation now try to do everything yourself

People who are doing well just live to the fullest!

Most likely, now you will see my forehead again, because I control the phone with my nose (for some reason the sensor doesn't respond to stumps)

I want to do everything myself. And even more than before.

Now I will try to upload this video to Instagram myself.

If you see it - then I succeeded!"

Source : piranha_knives on Instagram.

[WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 @WarMonitor3]

Wow!

Crimean bridge has been hit really good initial reports and promising.