In 2015, ISIS captured Palmyra and demanded its head of antiquities reveal where the treasures were hidden.
He was 81 years old. He refused.
Khaled al-Asaad had spent over 50 years excavating and protecting Palmyra, the caravan city that once rivalled Rome in the Syrian desert.
He learned Aramaic to read its inscriptions. He raised his children among its ruins and named his daughter Zenobia, after its rebel queen.
Before the city fell, he helped evacuate hundreds of artefacts to safety. ISIS interrogated him for weeks to find them. But he gave them nothing.
They executed him in the square and left his body among the columns he had spent his life defending.
Archaeology is not a soft profession. Sometimes the people who guard the past die for it.
@wallstreet_au@AustralianArmy Actually women who report abuse and sexual assault and suffer DV are still being betrayed by current Government. U have no idea about reality do ya mate?
🇪🇺 The EU just passed Chat Control 1.0 in Brussels.
Platforms can now scan your private messages again, officially "voluntary," in practice blanket surveillance.
Here's the democratic scandal: 314 MEPs voted against it. Only 276 voted for it.
It passed anyway... because an absolute majority of all MEPs was required to reject it, not just a majority of those present.
More people voted no than yes. It still passed.
Pushed through on an urgent procedure just before summer recess, when absences are highest and attention is lowest.
This is how rights disappear folks. Not in one dramatic moment, but in procedural fine print, on a slow news day, while everyone's looking at Tehran.
Source: @Fidias0 / Writer: Oliver
@covetweet@ChrisFieldAUS Empowering innovation in Army?
Hmm, yes ok in some areas, but in others, senior folk are cannibalising less powerful but smarter people… to enhance their own promotional opportunities
That is not an innovation culture that lasts or works
@wallstreet_au@AustralianArmy They don’t make the decision on war - government does.
Since when has any government gone to a war over feminism? Wars are about oil much of the time or defeating “communism” etc
Even in major war, Chiefs don’t typically go into battle, they employ divisional commanders etc
Australia was accused of bugging Timor-Leste’s cabinet during oil and gas treaty negotiations.
Bernard Collaery represented Witness K, then faced prosecution under national security laws. The case ran in secret for years before being discontinued in 2022. He was never convicted.
Now he tells the story in his own words.
Bernard Collaery in conversation with The Information Rights Project.
In 1916, a pack of dogs attacked a private zoo in Hawaii. Two terrified wallabies broke out of their cage and escaped into the mountains.
What happened next is one of the wildest accidents in wildlife history.
After the wallabies vanished into the forested cliffs of Kalihi Valley, the zoo's owner called for a massive public hunt. Nobody caught them.
A local newspaper joked that they might eventually "produce a breed of Hawaiian wallabies."They were exactly right.
Despite being 5,000 miles from Australia, the steep volcanic rock faces in Hawaii turned out to be the perfect habitat.
By 1984, researchers counted roughly 250 wallabies thriving in the valley. They had even started developing their own unique evolutionary characteristics.
The craziest part?
They aren't considered invasive.They only eat non-native plants.
They don't compete with native species (Hawaii has no native land mammals).
Because they peacefully coexist with the ecosystem, the state of Hawaii officially protects them. It is strictly illegal to hunt or harm a Hawaiian wallaby.
Back in their native Australia, the brush-tailed rock wallaby is fighting for its life. Predators, habitat clearing, and the devastating 2019-2020 bushfires wiped out an estimated 70% of their remaining habitat.
But that accidental Honolulu colony?
They have no foxes. No feral cats in the cliffs. No bushfires.
Two wallabies that broke out of a cage 110 years ago accidentally founded what might be the most secure population of their species anywhere on Earth.
🚨Satellites have detected a massive oil spill spreading across a vast area of the Persian Gulf around Iran's Kharg Island.
Synthetic aperture radar imagery shows a large surface slick emanating from the waters around Kharg Island, Iran's primary crude oil export terminal responsible for roughly 90% of the country's oil exports.
At the time of detection, multiple tankers were simultaneously loading at the Kharg Island terminal.
It is not yet clear whether the spill originated from a loading operation, a vessel, subsea infrastructure, or the terminal itself.
✨🇨🇳Xi Jinping:We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will.
By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.
Trump taking Venezuela’s Maduro and attacking Iran to gain leverage over China by taking away two of its largest oil import sources but China anticipating the move years ahead by building up 1.3 billion barrels in strategic reserves when oil was low and then ceasing most of its oil imports during the Iran war that ruined Trump’s plan and forced him to deplete US strategic reserves in order to drive oil back down to stop high gasoline from ruining chances in the midterms and China now happily buying back oil below 70/bbl is a wild theory that never made it to anyone’s 2026 bingo card.😅
On September 11, 2001, 24-year-old Welles Remy Crowther was working on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower when Flight 175 hit the building.
He was trapped 27 floors above the impact zone a place almost nobody survived.
But instead of only trying to save himself, Welles stayed behind to help others escape.
Before heading into the smoke, he left his mom a voicemail:
“Mom, this is Welles. I want you to know I’m OK.”
Welles was also a volunteer firefighter back home in New York, and he always carried a red bandana his father gave him as a kid.
Survivors later remembered seeing a man with a red bandana covering his face, leading people to safety, carrying injured victims down stairs, and going back up again and again to help more people.
He reportedly saved at least 18 lives before the South Tower collapsed.
For months, nobody knew who “the man in the red bandana” was.
Then in 2002, his mother read survivor stories in a newspaper and realized they were talking about her son.
Welles Remy Crowther will always be remembered as a real hero.
They killed him because he had prepared areas that were full of garbage, cleaned them up, and set up a large screen and chairs, making the area suitable so that the people of Gaza could watch the Egypt-Argentina match, to have some joy, to be like the people of the rest of the world. However, the occupation refused this and assassinated him.