August 17 is #DingJiaxi's birthday. This dedicated lawyer and democracy advocate remains unjustly detained, serving a 12-year sentence simply for organizing peaceful discussions about a freer China. He should not spend another birthday in prison and should be allowed to join his family in the U.S.. @luoshch #XiamenGathering
Learn more🔗https://t.co/PWDjD5ia2P
Where is #GaoZhisheng? Human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has been missing for 9 years. After being tortured, disappeared, and arbitrarily detained, his family deserves to know whether he is alive and when he will be free to join them in the US. @ChineseEmbinUS
Learn more👉https://t.co/shnhLtlX4o
Six years in solitary confinement. In letters from his cell, Jimmy Lai writes of faith, endurance, and a body that is failing him.
"I could not stand up after I sat back down in my cell," he wrote.
He is 78. His family says the 20-year sentence amounts to a death sentence.
Read here: https://t.co/rjnkAhIQ8e
#FreeJimmyLai #BringHimHome @ObserverUK@dannydvincent
my grandfather wrote a memoir that I couldn't read
after he passed, I tried to learn Chinese but progress was slow
this year, I translated it with AI and designed a bilingual edition. it turned out way better than I could have imagined
Netanyahu is lobbying for Section 224 in the national defense bill, a provision that quietly expands U.S.-Israel military cooperation and weapons development with almost zero oversight.
The American people do not want more U.S. military aid to Israel. We must defeat Section 224.
Yesterday, I listened to Elizabeth Rao’s heartbreaking story about losing her mother, Dr. Jane Wu. A dedicated Chinese American scientist, Dr. Wu faced discrimination and racial profiling by her employers, leading her to take her own life. Her death was felt throughout the research community, especially by those of Asian descent who faced unjust scrutiny from Trump's China Initiative.
Elizabeth reminded us that there's a human cost to this targeting and that our greatest minds should never have to face this type of ethnic profiling.
Today marks exactly four years since Putin started his three-day push to take Kyiv. And that says a great deal about our resistance, about how Ukraine has fought all this time. Behind those words stand millions of our people, immense courage, incredibly hard work, endurance, and the long path Ukraine has been pursuing since February 24.
Looking back at the beginning of the invasion and reflecting on today, we have every right to say: we have defended our independence, we have not lost our statehood; Putin has not achieved his goals. He has not broken Ukrainians; he has not won this war. We have preserved Ukraine, and we will do everything to secure peace and justice. Glory to Ukraine!
Claire Lai, daughter of Hong Kong pro-democracy advocate Jimmy Lai, reacts to his 20-year prison sentence Feb. 9, calling it "essentially a death sentence." https://t.co/vZmSzx2LC3 #FreeJimmyLai@SupportJimmyLai#AppleDaily#HongKong#JimmyLai
One of my former research assistants was killed by ICE in Minneapolis today😢
Alex was the kindest, sweetest human and a ICU nurse with a bright future ahead of him
May his soul rest in peace and this senseless carnage stop💔
Minneapolis @MayorFrey: "I just saw a video of more than six masked agents pummeling one of our constituents and shooting him to death. How many more residents, how many more Americans need to die or get badly hurt for this operation to end?"
On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we honor a man who loved this country deeply, believed in its promise, and challenged us to never accept injustice as inevitable. Dr. King’s legacy reminds us that progress takes grit, grace, and determination—and that each of us has a role to play in building a more just and united world.
Claire Lai, daughter of prisoner of conscience #JimmyLai, continues to speak out about the conditions her father endures in prison, including being deliberately isolated and moved between locations with a thick black cloth covering him from head to toe.
Jimmy Lai must be freed. #FreeJimmyLai
GOP Sen. Thom Tillis just torched Stephen Miller:
“You know what makes me cranky? Stupid. You don’t speak on behalf of this U.S. senator or Congress. You can say it may be the position of the president that Greenland should be part of the U.S., but it is NOT the position of this government. We are a co-equal branch.”
That’s a Republican senator drawing a hard constitutional line and calling out the White House for pretending Congress doesn’t exist.
On the eve of execution, the condemned of Revolutionary France were often given paper, ink, and a few hours to say goodbye. No speeches were allowed. No appeals were heard. The blade would fall whether the words were written or not. And so bakers, seamstresses, priests, clerks, soldiers, and widows—people who had never imagined themselves part of history—sat in cold cells and tried to compress a lifetime into a page. Many began the same way: My dear wife, My beloved children, Forgive me. The Revolution that had promised liberty and equality now granted its final mercy only in ink.
I’ve read hundreds of these letters. What makes them so unsettling is how ordinary they are. There is no grand political philosophy, no defiant rhetoric. A father worries about debts and winter coats. A mother apologizes for leaving her children without guidance. A young woman asks that her hair be given to her sister.
One such woman was a Parisian seamstress in her early thirties, arrested after a neighbor denounced her for “lukewarm patriotism.” I don’t know why, but her case struck a chord with me. Her crime appeared to amount to little more than having regularly attended Mass and failing to denounce her brother quickly enough. The night before her execution, she wrote to her sister asking that her scissors be given to their youngest niece and that their mother be told she had died calmly.
Again and again, the writers insist on their innocence—not always of crimes, but of hatred. “I die without bitterness,” one wrote, “and I forgive those who send me to death.” The language is plain, domestic, and heartbreakingly human. The Terror did not slay monsters; but it did produce victims who sounded like us.
Many of the condemned had supported the Revolution at first. Some had cheered the fall of the Bastille. Others had denounced aristocrats, signed petitions, worn the cockade. But revolutions devour loyalty as easily as opposition. A careless remark, a past friendship, a failure to applaud loudly enough could be fatal. In the machinery of suspicion, innocence was not a defense—it was often a liability. As one prisoner wrote, “I do not know what crime I have committed, but I know I am to die for it.”
On execution mornings, carts rolled through Paris streets lined with spectators who had grown accustomed to death as public ritual. The letters were folded, sealed, and handed to jailers or priests, some of whom risked punishment to deliver them. Many never arrived. Others survived by chance, preserved in family trunks or police archives—small scraps of paper that outlived the so-called Republic of Virtue. The guillotine was efficient; memory was not meant to be.
These final letters endure because they expose the lie at the heart of revolutionary extremism: that abstract ideals can replace human bonds without cost. When politics demands total purity, ordinary life becomes treason. In the end, the French Revolution did not silence its victims with the blade alone. It silenced them by convincing enough of the nation that the individual did not matter. History’s task is to read their letters anyway.
#archaeohistories
Bondi Shooting - Geolocation Mapping
This map is for investigators, online viewers and as another a way to ensure accurate reporting.
-Graphic Warning-
He risked his life to expose Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang. The videos he took are among the most important available documentation of human rights abuses in China. Sending him back means he will almost certainly be jailed with no hope of release. Please @SecRubio, we must protect him.
Mr. Guan Heng, a conscious Chinese man, risked his life to document 🇨🇳’s atrocity crimes. The video he captured served as important evidence to the US gov’s ongoing documentation of Uyghur genocide. Now, he’s fighting for his freedom in the 🇺🇸. The US gov must have his back.