Sarah Lebski

Tourism strategist who loves conversations that spark with great ideas!

[Mambo Italiano @mamboitaliano__]

A bunch of ladies at a window during the visit of Catherine, Princess of Wales to Reggio Emilia, Italy

Not even Francis Ford Coppola could have framed them this perfectly ✨

Italians 🇮🇹

[Tim Walker @ThatTimWalker]

But Mandelson wouldn’t allow Starmer to do this.

[موسكو | 🇷🇺 MOSCOW NEWS @M0SC0W0]

حفيد اردوغان عمر طيب أردوغان، يثير تفاعل واسع في تركيا بعد خطابة باللغه الانجليزيه في اجتماع بطولات المناخ لمؤتمر COP31.

وقال عمر اردوغان : لم نأتِ لمناقشة مشكلة بيئية واحدة فقط. نحن هنا للتفكير في مسؤولية جيل بأكمله.

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

The city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.

Here are some of the emails below:

[cmdibley @cmdibley]

I was born in Australia & have lived & worked here all my life. I’ve raised Australian children, participate in Australian politics, read Australian journalism & literature, attend Australian theatre, watch Australian movies & I have no fucking idea what ‘Australian values’ are.

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

I am surprised how my tweet below entered the political spheres of Australians.

It means that many Australians actually care about their country. But if you want to do something about it, the first thing to understand is that the answer is not the other party.

The two parties run the visible layer. The operators underneath is the same regardless of who is in office.

Same mining multinationals. Same four banks. Same supermarket duopoly. Same media owners. Same property speculation engine. Same gas exporters paying almost no resource rent. The faces rotate. The arrangement does not.

So voting harder for Labor when the Liberals disappoint you, or harder for the Liberals when Labor disappoints you,

is not resistance. It is the trap.

It is the pressure-release valve doing exactly what it was built to do.

The way to move the operators in Australia, is how you move any operator in any country.

Stop voting tribally.

Strengthen the cross bench. Vote for community independents and minor parties willing to put structural questions on the table that the majors have agreed never to discuss.

A senate full of crossbenchers extracting concessions is worth more than another majority for either side.

Learn who owns what.

Find out who owns your bank, your supermarket, your toll road, your energy retailer, your superannuation, your media.

Most Australians have no idea how much of the country routes back to a small handful of foreign asset managers and resource multinationals.

Once you see it, the arguments between the parties stop looking like a contest and start looking like theatre.

Build parallel structures. Move your money to a credit union or mutual bank. Buy from local cooperatives where you can. Read independent media. Put solar and battery on your own roof so you stop buying back your own gas at a markup from the people who exported it.

Demand specific reforms, not vague good intentions.

Ask every candidate, federal and state, whether they will support a real Petroleum Resource Rent Tax.

Whether they will support a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund built on actual resource royalties.

Whether they will support ending negative gearing and the capital gains discount.

Whether they will support breaking up the media monopolies.

Whether they will support foreign investment screening with teeth.

Whether they will support rebuilding domestic refining capacity and downstream processing of the minerals that's shipped out raw.

Vote on the answers. Politicians respond to specificity.

They absorb and neutralise vagueness.

Tell the truth in your daily conversations.

The deepest defense of the system is the conditioning that tells Australians their own sovereignty over their own resources, their own currency, their own land and their own future is the unrealistic option.

Norway did it. South Korea did it. Singapore did it. Australia chose, repeatedly, through both parties, not to. That is a choice.

Choices can be made differently. Saying so out loud, in private and in public, in conversations with family and friends and colleagues, slowly breaks the spell.

Australia is managed. That is the bad news and that is also the good news.

Anything that can be managed can be unmanaged.

But not by waiting for the next election to deliver a saviour from inside the same recruiting pipeline that produced the current arrangement.

The change starts when enough citizens stop voting for the marketing departments and start asking who actually owns the building.

[Razane @RazaneRayan1412]

"We write when we can no longer speak, nor remain silent."
~André Comte-Sponville.
🎨 by Ion Serban.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Soviet psychologist walked into a café in 1927 and watched a waiter do something impossible.

He remembered every open order at every table. Perfectly. Without notes. Without effort.

Then a table paid their bill. She asked him to repeat the order.

He couldn't remember a single item.

She spent the next two years figuring out why. What she found is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your attention.

Her name was Bluma Zeigarnik, and she was a graduate student at the time, sitting with her professor Kurt Lewin, watching the waiters work the room. What caught her attention was something so ordinary that it had been happening in restaurants for centuries without anyone asking why.

The waiters could remember every open order with perfect accuracy. Table four wanted the schnitzel with no sauce. Table seven had changed their wine twice. Table twelve owed for three coffees and a dessert. Every detail, held without effort, without notes, without any visible system at all.

But the moment a table paid their bill, the information vanished. Completely. Lewin tested it on the spot. He called a waiter back minutes after a table had settled up and asked him to recite the order. The waiter could not do it. Not partially. Not approximately. The information was simply gone.

Zeigarnik went back to her lab and spent the next two years turning that observation into one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology.

Here is what she proved, and why it changes how you think about attention, memory, and almost every piece of media you have ever consumed.

She gave participants a series of tasks. Some tasks they were allowed to finish. Others were interrupted before completion. Then she tested recall across both groups.

The unfinished tasks were remembered at nearly twice the rate of the completed ones.

Not slightly better. Nearly twice. The brain was holding the incomplete work in a state of active tension, returning to it, keeping it warm, refusing to file it away. The finished tasks were closed, archived, released. The unfinished ones were still running.

She called it the resumption goal. When the brain commits to a task and cannot complete it, it opens a file that stays open until resolution arrives. That open file consumes a portion of your cognitive bandwidth whether you are thinking about it consciously or not. It surfaces in idle moments. It pulls at the edge of your attention during other work. It is the thing you find yourself thinking about in the shower when you were not trying to think about anything at all.

This is not a flaw in human cognition. It is a feature. The brain evolved to finish things. An open loop is a signal that something important is unresolved. Keeping that signal active increases the probability that you will return to it and complete it. In an environment where most tasks had real survival stakes, this was an extraordinarily useful mechanism.

In the modern world, it is the most exploited vulnerability in human attention.

Netflix did not invent the cliffhanger. But it industrialized it in a way no medium before it ever had. When a show ends on an unresolved question, it does not just create curiosity. It opens a file in your brain that stays active until the next episode closes it. The autoplay countdown that begins at 15 seconds is not a convenience feature. It is a precise calculation about how long the average person can tolerate an open loop before the discomfort of not knowing overrides every other intention they had for the evening. One more episode is not a choice. It is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: return to what is unfinished.

The writers who built Lost, Breaking Bad, and Succession understood this intuitively without ever reading a psychology paper. Every episode ended on an open question. Every season finale answered three things and opened five more. The entire architecture of prestige television is a Zeigarnik machine running at industrial scale.

But television is not where this gets dangerous.

Every notification on your phone is an open loop. Every unread email is an open loop. Every task you wrote on a list and have not yet crossed off is an open loop. Each one is consuming a small but real portion of your available attention, pulling fractionally at your focus, degrading your capacity to be fully present in whatever you are actually doing right now. TikTok's algorithm does not just serve you content you like. It serves you content that ends one loop and immediately opens another, keeping the resumption system permanently activated so the cost of stopping always feels higher than the cost of continuing.

The research on this accumulation effect is striking. Psychologists studying cognitive load have found that unfinished tasks do not sit passively in memory. They actively interrupt. They surface at the wrong moments. They are the reason you are reading something and suddenly remember an email you forgot to send. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is running its resumption system exactly as designed. It is just running it across forty open loops simultaneously, in an environment that generates new ones faster than any human nervous system was built to process.

The most important practical implication Zeigarnik's research produced is one that most people use backwards.

David Allen built his entire Getting Things Done system on the insight that the only way to close a cognitive open loop is to either complete the task or make a trusted commitment to complete it later. Writing something down in a system you actually trust has the same effect on the brain as finishing it. The file closes. The bandwidth is released. This is why writing a task down feels like relief even before you have done anything about it. You have not solved the problem. You have simply told your brain that the loop is registered and will be returned to, which is enough for the resumption system to stand down.

The inverse is equally true and far more destructive. Every task that lives only in your head, unwritten and unscheduled, is an open loop burning cognitive resources around the clock. The mental cost is not proportional to the size of the task. A tiny nagging obligation consumes the same active tension as a major project. Your brain does not discriminate by importance. It discriminates by completion.

Zeigarnik published her findings in 1927. The paper sat in academic literature for decades before anyone outside psychology paid attention to it.

Then television got good. Then the smartphone arrived. Then the entire attention economy was engineered, largely by people who understood intuitively what she had proven scientifically: an open loop is the most powerful hook available to anyone who wants to hold human attention.

Netflix knew it. Instagram knew it. Every designer who ever made a notification badge red instead of grey knew it.

The café in Vienna is long gone.

The mechanism she discovered there is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your time.

Every "to be continued."

Every unread notification.

Every thread that ends with "part 2 tomorrow."

All of it is the same waiter, the same unpaid bill, the same brain refusing to let go of what it has not yet finished.

Zeigarnik noticed it over coffee in 1927.

A century later, it is the most valuable insight in the history of media.

And nobody taught it to you in school.

[David Shoebridge @DavidShoebridge]

We are calling for an immediate freeze on Government contracts with Palantir in Australia. Then full transparency on what data is collected, how it is used and by whom, because their conduct is almost certainly in breach of Australia's privacy laws and core democratic value.

[omarbassam @omar88bassam]

#The Billion Solidarity Campaign has just begun to reject the execution of Palestinian prisoners
We call on everyone, from every country, to join and stand in solidarity with the prisoners and support them. 💛
Share your support and be part of the change! 🌍

[Dalai Lama @DalaiLama]

MESSAGE

I wholeheartedly endorse the powerful appeal for peace made by the Holy Father, Pope Leo, during his Palm Sunday Mass. His call for the laying down of arms and the renunciation of violence resonated profoundly with me, as it speaks to the very essence of what all major religions teach.

Indeed, whether we look to Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism or any of the world's great spiritual traditions, the message is fundamentally the same: love, compassion, tolerance, and self-discipline. Violence finds no true home in any of these teachings. History has shown us time and again that violence only begets more violence and is never a lasting foundation for peace.

An enduring resolution to conflict, including the ones we see in the Middle East or between Russia and Ukraine, must be rooted in dialogue, diplomacy and mutual respect — approached with the understanding that, at the deepest level, we are all brothers and sisters.

I urge for and pray that the violence and conflicts may soon come to an end.

DALAI LAMA

31 March 2026

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

You have your mother's cells in your brain right now. If she ever carried you, yours are in hers.

Scientists looked at the brains of 59 women after they died, ages 32 to 101. In 63% of them, they found their sons' DNA scattered across different brain regions. The cells had traveled from the womb, through the blood, past the wall that normally keeps foreign material out of the brain, and settled in. The oldest woman still carrying her son's cells in her brain was 94. In mice, those cells became functional brain cells.

The transfer starts as early as 7 weeks into pregnancy. Your cells slip through the placenta into your mother's body. Hers slips into yours. One study found a mother still had her son's cells in her blood 27 years after giving birth. After delivery, between 50 and 75% of women carry their child's cells. During pregnancy, up to 6% of a woman's blood DNA comes from the baby.

When a mother's heart gets damaged during or after pregnancy, the baby's cells travel to the injury, latch on, and turn into beating heart cells, blood vessel lining, and muscle. Heart failure tied to pregnancy has a 50% spontaneous recovery rate, better than every other kind. The Mount Sinai team behind the research thinks the baby's cells are fixing the mother's heart from the inside.

The cancer data caught me off guard. A study compared healthy women to women with breast cancer. 85% of the healthy group still carried their children's cells. Only 64% of the breast cancer group did. That works out to about 4x lower odds of getting breast cancer if you kept those cells. The working theory is that they patrol the body and catch cancer cells before they grow.

A 2022 study found that in developing mouse brains, a mother's cells controlled the brain's immune cells, preventing them from cutting too many connections between brain cells. Your mom's cells helped wire your brain before you were born.

And it stacks across generations. A woman can carry cells from her kids, from her own mother, and even from pregnancies her mother had before her. Three generations of cells from different people, living inside one body.

[Idris @7signxx]

Never forget...

"Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who kept Kamal Adwan Hospital open as Israeli forces invaded northern Gaza, has now been imprisoned for a full year without charge. “A full year of injustice has passed,” his family says. He remains in Israeli custody under a law allowing indefinite detention without trial, along with at least 95 other Palestinian healthcare workers still detained by Israeli authorities, including 80 from Gaza and 15 from the West Bank."

©dropsitenews

[Tom the whistleblower @blowingtom2]

I really want to know who writes these post. Absolutely nails it every bloody time.

[Jacques Renardiere @JRenardiere]

Richard Gere récite un poème de Mahmoud Darwich Palestinien.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights.

What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Luxembourg is the world’s first nation to offer free public transport for all, tackling traffic and climate change in one bold move.

Luxembourg has pioneered a bold new era in urban mobility by becoming the first nation on Earth to eliminate fares across its entire public transport network. This groundbreaking policy covers every bus, tram, and train route nationwide, offering free rides to residents, cross-border commuters, and visitors alike.

Financed through general taxation rather than ticket sales, the initiative was designed to tackle the country's severe traffic congestion—once among the worst in Europe per capita—and to sharply cut carbon emissions from road transport. By removing the cost and hassle of tickets, Luxembourg effectively turned public transit into a basic public service, as essential and accessible as clean water or electricity.

The impact has been profound and measurable. Ridership surged as people left their cars behind, leading to noticeably less road traffic, shorter commute times, and a meaningful drop in urban air pollution. While first-class rail options remain a paid upgrade for those wanting extra comfort, the standard second-class system is now truly seamless: hop on, hop off, no barriers.

Luxembourg's experiment has demonstrated that removing financial obstacles can drive a genuine shift toward sustainable travel habits. It has also served as an inspiring model for other countries and cities grappling with sprawl, gridlock, and climate goals. In an age when radical solutions are needed to address the mobility-climate crisis, Luxembourg proves that treating public transport as a universal right is not only feasible—it can be genuinely transformative.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

🌿 It turns out plants have been talking to each other for roughly 400 million years, and nobody thought to mention it to us.

Here is what happens. A caterpillar lands on a leaf and starts eating. The plant, which has no brain, no mouth, and no real options, does the only thing available to it: releases a cocktail of chemicals into the air. A signal. An alarm. A tiny molecular cry of distress drifting across the garden.

The plant next door picks it up.
And this is the part that stops you mid-biscuit. That neighboring plant, which has been attacked by nothing, threatened by nothing, bothered by absolutely nothing this Saturday afternoon, quietly begins producing toxins. Just in case. Because the neighbor said so.

No language. No sound. No evolutionary reason to trust anyone.
And yet there it is. A conversation so old it was already ancient when the dinosaurs showed up and ruined everything.

We built cities. We invented Wi-Fi. We wrote symphonies. The begonias have been doing this since before we had thumbs.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[💧Mary Kostakidis @MaryKostakidis]

Moral double vision as Australia heads to the Gulf

'Suddenly we can send aircraft.Suddenly, we can send missiles.Suddenly, we can speak in the language of security and moral clarity. And suddenly the Middle East is not so far away after all. Because for the past year, Australians were told something very different. When Gaza was being destroyed, the message from Canberra was that Australia is merely a “middle power.” The conflict was distant. Complex. Beyond our ability to influence.There was little we could do.'

'The government hid behind diplomatic language. The opposition, particularly the louder voices inside the Liberal and National parties, went further. They condemned protests, dismissed criticism of Israel as extremist and opposed humanitarian pathways for Palestinians fleeing the destruction. In some cases, the rhetoric became openly hostile. Palestinian suffering was treated as a political inconvenience rather than a humanitarian catastrophe.
And much of the media followed suit. Coverage of Gaza was often framed through the language of “complexity” and “balance.” Israeli security concerns were explored in depth, while Palestinian deaths were frequently reduced to statistics buried deep in reports. Calls for sanctions or stronger diplomatic pressure were portrayed as radical or irresponsible. Restraint became the narrative.'

'When Iranian repression or attacks on Gulf states dominate the headlines, the language of moral clarity suddenly returns. Victims are humanised. Outrage is expressed. The responsibility of democratic nations to respond is emphasised. But when Palestinian civilians were buried beneath rubble, when hospitals collapsed and children starved, the dominant tone was caution. One conflict is analysed with restraint. The other with urgency.Together, the political class and large parts of the media construct a quiet hierarchy of suffering. Some lives command outrage. Others barely command attention.'

https://t.co/fuDZfAqA6W