"La France reconnaît en Israël un peuple ami (...) mais condamne avec fermeté le gouvernement israélien et la politique qu'il mène chaque fois qu'elle contrevient au droit international", indique @jnbarrot. #QAG#DirectAN
Ian Bassin argues that the defeat of Orban is “further evidence of something that we have now known for some time, which is that the formula for dislodging these autocrats is to form an incredibly broad coalition that is uncomfortable for people within it.” (From today's 'To the Contrary" podcast)
Orbán has backing from both Washington and Moscow - which can be a curse more than cure. Everyday realities hit harder,Russian links are becoming toxic,and Europe is playing hardball. My latest in @guardian on the geopolitics of the Hungarian elections.
https://t.co/mGiFB5xhvp
✈️ Just landed back in #Brussels after seeing situation on ground in #Beirut.
🇮🇱 Israel are now collapsing residential buildings in central #Beirut, a city of over 2m people.
This is the Gaza playbook.
Again, @vonderleyen is silent.
The divine music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky echoing through the streets of Paris 🇫🇷✨
Bravo to the fearless ballerina and everyone who made it magical. May great music unite us — peace, clear skies, and beauty for all in the New Year. 🎶🕊️
The history books quietly bypassed is that Barack Obama, during the most pressure-saturated nights of his presidency, would retreat alone to the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House residence — not to strategize, not to take calls, but to handwrite personal letters to ten ordinary American citizens every single night, a practice he maintained with almost monastic devotion across all eight years, selecting the letters himself from the 40,000 that arrived daily at the White House, and his longtime correspondence director Fiona Reese confirmed that Obama would often weep privately while reading certain letters, folding them carefully before writing responses so personally detailed and emotionally present that recipients frequently described the experience of receiving them as the most significant moment of their lives, with one Ohio steelworker writing back to say that Obama's letter had physically stopped him from making a decision that would have permanently altered his family's future. What makes this practice almost unbearably moving is the detail that surfaced later — Obama never used a computer for these letters, always a black felt-tip pen, always legal yellow paper first as a draft, always rewritten onto White House stationery by hand a second time, because he believed, as he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in a rare private conversation later recounted in her 2018 work, that the physical act of pressing pen to paper forced a quality of attention that typing simply could not replicate, a philosophy rooted in his years as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004 where he developed the conviction that democracy only functions when its leaders remain genuinely, uncomfortably close to the specific gravity of individual human suffering rather than processing it from behind the insulating distance of institutions and screens."
Take a moment to look at the inhumanity captured in this extraordinary photo running on the front page of tonight's Minneapolis @StarTribune. It shows federal immigration agents immobilizing a protester on the ground and spraying chemical irritant directly into his face. The scene reminds me of the brutality used against civil rights protesters in the 1960s. We look back at those old photos and wonder how the authorities could have behaved so savagely; many years from now, young Americans will look at these photos from 2026 and wonder how anyone could have justified shooting a woman in the head as she tried to drive away, arresting 5-year-old schoolchildren on the street, or holding a man down and spaying chemicals into his face. Thanks to the Star Tribune reporters and photographers for documenting this work; they create accountability, they make democracy work, and they make all of us in journalism proud.
Video has emerged of Gen Xu Qinxian of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army at his court martial in 1990, explaining why he refused orders to crush the Tiananmen Square protests. Xu said he didn’t want to become “a sinner in history”. He was given a 5 year sentence.
🐶 FOUND DOG 🐶
Found between Portmarnock and Clongriffin station near the tracks.
Safe and being looked after now at Connolly Station. Very friendly and clearly loved — please share to help find the owner! 💛
DM for details.
#LostDog#FoundDog#MissingDog#DogFound
BREAKING: Nathan Gill is sentenced to 10 & half years in prison after pleading guilty to eight charges of bribery from a Russian agent.
The "ultimate source" of the funds came from "a close friend of Vladimir Putin," said Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb.