Declan Donnelly

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Guaranteed paid annual leave days:

🇺🇸0
🇪🇪20
🇵🇱20
🇦🇺20
🇧🇪20
🇩🇪20
🇬🇷20
🇮🇪20
🇮🇹20
🇳🇱20
🇨🇭20
🇨🇿20
🇳🇴21
🇪🇸22
🇵🇹22
🇫🇮25
🇦🇹25
🇩🇰25
🇫🇷25
🇸🇪25
🇱🇺26
🇬🇧28
🇧🇷30

It is long past time for the United States to join the rest of the world and guarantee paid annual leave and vacation days.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer

[Barbara Oneill @BarbaraOneillAU]

Be careful when buying bananas! 👇

‼️ We're sure you've noticed stickers on bananas at least once in your life. But have you ever wondered what they mean?

👉 If they have a 4-digit code on them that starts with the numbers 3 or 4, it means that the product was grown using the principle of intensive agriculture, which also implies the use of fertilizers and pesticides.

👉 If a product has a 5-digit code that starts with the number 9, it means that the product was grown in a conventional way, as it has been done for thousands of years. This method is now called “organic”, in other words without the use of pesticides and fertilizers.

👉 If a product has a 5-digit code that starts with the number 8, it means that the product is genetically modified or commonly known as GMO.

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

In 1696, the British government decided to tax sunlight. Under the Window Tax, households were charged according to the number of windows in their homes. To avoid paying, many people simply bricked up or boarded over their windows, choosing to live in darkness rather than hand money to the state for daylight.
The tax was presented as a fair way of taxing wealth, since larger houses tended to have more windows. In practice, it proved crude and damaging. Tax inspectors were given the power to enter homes and count the windows, which was widely resented as an invasion of privacy.
The consequences were severe. Poorer families, in particular, bricked up windows to reduce their liability, leaving homes darker, damper and poorly ventilated. This contributed to higher rates of disease, including tuberculosis and rickets. Architects began designing houses with fewer windows to minimise the tax, resulting in buildings that were less healthy and less pleasant to live in.
Far from being an efficient revenue raiser, the Window Tax distorted behaviour, harmed public health and became increasingly unpopular over time. Yet it remained in place for 155 years until it was finally abolished in 1851. The Window Tax required invasive enforcement and created more resentment, hardship and economic distortion than revenue. It is a classic example of the unintended consequences of taxation.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There is a region in southeastern Spain called Almería. If you pull it up on satellite imagery, you will assume the screen has glitched. A vast, blinding white scab where a landscape used to be.

It's not a glitch. It's 64,000 acres of plastic greenhouses. So much plastic sheeting that it is, genuinely, visible from space. The entire region has been wrapped in industrial farming film to grow tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and lettuce for European supermarkets in January.

The plastic has created its own microclimate. The reflective surface is so vast it has measurably lowered local temperatures by bouncing sunlight back into the atmosphere. Scientists have a name for it. The Albedo effect of Almería. The only place on earth where human activity has cooled the local climate, and they did it by accident, while building the world's largest open-air plastic factory.

The plastic itself is single-use agricultural film. It sits in UV light for three to five years, degrades into microplastics, blows into the Mediterranean, and ends up in the ocean and the soil. Every year, 45,000 tonnes of plastic waste is generated just from replacing degraded greenhouse covering. Every year. Just the covering.

Inside, workers from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa labour in 45°C heat for €30 a day. No contracts. No rights. Spraying crops with pesticides at concentrations that would be illegal on outdoor fields. Ventilation: minimal. Chemical exposure: constant. The aubergine looks lovely.

The groundwater underneath Almería is so contaminated with agricultural runoff that it has been declared unusable. The region now imports water from elsewhere in Spain while sitting on top of a poisoned aquifer it created. The land that was meant to feed Europe more efficiently has become a place that needs water flown in to keep the show running.

And this is what supplies your fresh vegetables in January. Grown in plastic factories. By exploited workers. Using groundwater they have already destroyed. Wrapped in more plastic. Shipped across Europe. Refrigerated the whole way. So a person in Manchester can have a tomato in February that tastes of nothing.

But sure. Cattle grazing on Scottish hills are the environmental problem.

Pull the satellite up. Have a look. Then tell me which system is the one that needs explaining.

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

Roundup is evil. And we do not need it nor do we want it

[Nicolas Hulscher, MPH @NicHulscher]

The farmed fish you eat are routinely sedated and mass vaccinated using over 50 different vaccines.

HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of salmon, trout, and sea bass are injected with automated vaccination machines or immersed in vaccine baths every year.

mRNA versions are coming soon...

[мυкєѕн @Being__Mukesh]

Hey @grok is this true 😲??

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The doors of Rome’s Pantheon weigh 17 tons, are 2,000 years old, and yet a single person can still open them.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

The number of Americans seeking Irish citizenship through ancestry jumped 63% last year, per FT

[Mrs B @attackdogX]

Just ONE drain in India empties 150,000,000 Liters of human shit into the Ganges River each day.

Just ONE drain empties the shit of one million Indians into the Ganges River.

This is not including all of the other pollutants, like dead bodies, tons of plastic and trash, etc.

ALL of which makes its way into the Indian Ocean, polluting & killing marine life.

There is no universal outrage, Greta Thunberg is nowhere to be found, the United Nations is silent.

India is destroying the planet and they get away with it.

But make sure you enjoy your soggy paper straws….

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Un trabajador de Walmart en EEUU, graba lo que cada dia el supermercado tira como desechos, todo tipo de alimentos comestibles y productos aprovechables, valorados en 200.000 dólares.

Bajo el capitalismo, los alimentos no se producen para alimentar a la gente, se producen para obtener ganancias y cuando la producción supera a la demanda, los capitalistas desechan productos para no bajar los precios y seguir creando escasez.

[Louise McKenna @_louise__]

Ireland was the first colonoy of the British.

[Pubity @pubity]

One man in Ireland is trying to lower the price of a Guinness across the country.

He used AI to create the "Guinndex", a map that shows the cost of a pint at almost 2000 bars. Now bars are lowering the prices of their pint to try and compete with each other.

[Steady @DeanoGorton]

Let's go on a cruise 🚢 they said ☹️

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Vulture populations in India collapsed. 500,000 people died as a result.

In the 1990s, Indian farmers started using a cheap painkiller called diclofenac on their cattle. When vultures ate the carcasses, the drug destroyed their kidneys.

Without vultures, cattle carcasses rotted in fields instead of being stripped clean in 45 minutes. Feral dog populations exploded by five million. Rabies cases surged. Pathogens spread through water supplies.

University of Chicago economists compared death rates in districts that used to have vultures to districts that never did. Human mortality rose more than 4% after the collapse. Over 100,000 extra deaths a year. Half a million in five years.

India banned the drug in 2006. The vultures still haven't recovered.

This is what a keystone species is to us. This is why we protect the animals nobody finds cute.

[Stew Peters @realstewpeters]

New LEGO video ruthlessly destroys Pete Hegseth.

[BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine @RobLooseCannon]

Think Michael Healy-Rae the wealthiest TD in the Dáil, is a man of the people? Lets have a gander at this cutest-of-hoors staggering finances and property portfolio....

He declared 14 houses for letting in Kerry, three guest houses, one rented commercial unit, a vacant premises, an apartment for letting, an unspecified number of apartments in a separate development, an unspecified number of rooms for letting, and student accommodation in Limerick. That's before you get to the rest.

Based on CSO median property price data for December 2025, his residential and guest house portfolio is estimated to be worth around €5.6 million. Twelve properties in the Killarney, Kilgarvan, Kenmare and Barraduff area, where the median house price sits at €332,500, give a rough valuation of €3.99 million.

Then his six properties in the Tralee and Castleisland area, with a median of €270,000, add another €1.62 million on top. The actual figure could be higher or lower. The register isn't that specific.

On the rental income side, 14 Kerry two-bedroom houses at current market rents would generate €18,340 per month, or €220,080 per year. https://t.co/eVNC8FjlgK figures show listed monthly rents on two-bedroom houses in Kerry rose 7.3 per cent last year to €1,310, with four-bedroom houses up 8.8 per cent to €1,879.

Then there's the land. He owns 100 acres of farmland and forestry in Kilgarvan, another 42 acres of forestry, and a further 4 acres of farmland elsewhere in the area. Based on the most recent Sherry FitzGerald assessment of €14,125 per acre for southwest farmland, the 100-acre holding alone could be worth around €1.46 million. The Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers values Munster forestry at €6,960 per acre, putting the 40-acre forestry plot at approximately €278,000.

His company Roughty Properties received €470,000 from the Department of Children in 2024 for Ukrainian accommodation, paid out month by month, €49,640 in March, €52,080 in April, and so on. He also draws income from Kerry County Council's rental accommodation and housing assistance payment schemes.

He has been a landlord since he was 18. When he first entered the Dáil in 2011 he already owned 14 properties! The register shows 16 properties in 2016, 19 in 2018, 21 in 2020, 24 in 2022, and 28 for 2025, including his family home.

Public records show none of the four companies he directs, Roughty Properties, Black Cap & Co, ML Healy-Rae Properties and Roughty Plant Hire, ever drew down a mortgage. The family plant hire business, now primarily run by his nephew Johnny Healy-Rae, recorded net assets of €4.6 million at the end of 2024.

It received €501,000 for Kerry County Council work in 2025 and €384,000 in 2024. Cork County Council paid a further €334,135 across the same two years. Ah but sure begorrah, he doesn't care about money. He's a lovely wee hat and sure he only cares about de poor folk like you and me...

[Nick Delehanty 🇮🇪 @Nick_Delehanty]

This is extraordinary.

On the SAME week Minister Patrick O'Donovan calls for a review into media coverage of the protests...he signs off on a €20k pay rise for @kevinbakhurst

Anyone have a tractor in South Dublin?
I have an idea where you should park it.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

WARNING!

I frankly do not know what kind of evil and inhumanity this video depicts, but it shakes you to the core.

It appears a dead Palestinian man, probably murdered, is lying on the street, and a group of Israelis essentially torture his body while laughing. They slowly run him over with their, going back and forth over his body.

No words.