Andrew Cranfield #StandswithUkraine

Entrepreneur, NED, businessman, investor, company turnaround and rescue specialist. Part time teacher of the wonderful Great Highland Bagpipe

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

For the first time, researchers have identified exactly what Roman builders were adding to their concrete to make it last for centuries....

At an unfinished building site in Pompeii, abandoned during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, archaeologists uncovered something rare: Roman concrete materials that were prepared but never mixed. That frozen moment revealed how Roman builders actually made their concrete.

Instead of mixing lime and water the way we do today, they combined quicklime with volcanic ash first, then added water. The reaction produced intense heat and left behind tiny fragments of reactive lime trapped inside the hardened concrete. When cracks later formed and water seeped in, those fragments reacted again and sealed the damage from within.

In other words, some Roman concrete was intentionally engineered to heal its own cracks — and it’s still doing it nearly 2,000 years later.

Archaeological Park of Pompeii

#archaeohistories

[Robert Lyman 🇺🇦 @robert_lyman]

Correct.

In @Telegraph today.

[Andrew Cranfield #StandswithUkraine @Westcount]

Plonkers

[Sarrah Bellus @sarrah_bellus]

The idiots drove a presidential motorcade - including the 10-ton "Beast" that transports the president - across a newly laid liner for the Reflecting Pool. Who's brilliant idea was that? Now the liner is damaged and peeling off and they are blaming "vandals". A photo of the vandals is shown here.

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

🇺🇸🧐🤔U.S. House Representative Thomas Massie:
“Last night I received a flash drive containing the complete list of files belonging to Jeffrey Epstein. Everything is there: every billionaire, every campaign donor, every single person. Now let me explain why you haven’t heard anything about this in the media. Because they’re all in there. They will do everything to prevent these documents from being made public. Epstein was far more than just a pedophile; he was an intelligence asset. He was part of a blackmail operation used to control billionaires, politicians, and world leaders. If this list ever sees the light of day, the system as we know it will collapse. The public has the right to know the truth, and I am not afraid to share it.”
It looks like a political earthquake may be coming.

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

On 12 July 1962 the American supercarrier USS Independence was steaming through the Mediterranean with the Sixth Fleet when her lookouts spotted a three-masted sailing ship under full canvas, a sight that already belonged to another century. The carrier flashed a signal asking the stranger to identify herself. Back came the reply by light, "Training ship Amerigo Vespucci, Italian Navy." She was a tall ship launched at Castellammare di Stabia near Naples in 1931, her black hull banded with two white stripes in memory of the old gun decks, 26 canvas sails spread across masts more than fifty metres high. The Independence, eighty thousand tonnes of steel and aircraft, took her in and signalled a single line in return, "You are the most beautiful ship in the world."

The compliment outlived the carrier. The Independence was eventually scrapped, but the Vespucci is still sailing, the oldest ship in commission in the Italian Navy, and Italians have called her the most beautiful ship in the world ever since that afternoon. The story did not quite end there either. On 1 September 2022 another American carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, crossed her path in the Adriatic and sent almost the same words across the water, telling the old ship she was still the most beautiful in the world, sixty years to the season after the first time. Few exchanges between warships are remembered with any fondness.

#drthehistories

[Henshi @HenshiG]

In the dead of night, 1944, inside a Gestapo cell in occupied France…

The most wanted woman in the Resistance stripped bare and forced her slender body through iron bars no one thought possible. Dress clenched in her teeth, she dropped to the street and vanished into the darkness.
Her name was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade — the Hedgehog. 🦔

Born in 1909 into privilege, she flew planes, raced cars, and defied every rule made for women. When France fell, she took command of a tiny spy network at 31 — a mother of two — and turned it into the largest and most vital Resistance ring in occupied France. The only one led by a woman.
She built a secret army of nearly 3,000 agents — men and women from all walks of life — feeding Britain critical secrets, including a stunning 55-foot map of Normandy’s beaches for D-Day.
The Gestapo hunted a brutal man. They never imagined the elegant woman before them was their greatest threat.
But the cost was devastating. 💔 Hundreds of her agents were tortured and killed — including the man she loved. She moved constantly, changed identities, and while pregnant, made the heartbreaking choice to send her children away without even saying goodbye — watching silently from a window as they disappeared from her life.
Captured twice. Escaped twice. She rebuilt her network from ashes every time.

After the war, she devoted her life to honoring her fallen agents. Yet France overlooked her, awarding honors to her husband instead.
They forgot the Hedgehog.

She outlasted the Nazis. She outlasted the silence.
Now we remember.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade — the fierce little woman who led 3,000 from the shadows and helped turn the tide of history. Even a lion would hesitate to bite.
Say her name. Share her story. Never forget.

[Andrew Cranfield #StandswithUkraine @Westcount]

Very witty, Al, very witty.

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

24 years in the military and never seen someone bomb this badly.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

In the spring of 2011, a forty-one-year-old software engineer from Fredericton, New Brunswick, named Marcel LeBrun sold the company he had co-founded five years earlier to Salesforce of San Francisco for approximately three hundred and twenty-six million dollars in cash, plus another fifty million dollars in stock. The company was called Radian6. It had become, in five years, one of the largest social-media monitoring platforms in North America. The sale was, at the time, one of the largest acquisitions in the history of the Canadian Maritimes.

LeBrun, who had grown up in the province and earned his electrical and computer engineering degree at the University of New Brunswick, did not move anywhere else. He stayed in Fredericton. He drove an exotic car for a while. He took some racing lessons. He worked for Salesforce for a few years, then for a venture firm, then for a small automotive software company.

Then he looked around his own city.

By the late twenty-tens, the Canadian housing crisis was no longer an abstraction in his hometown. Fredericton, population around sixty-five thousand, had begun to see a significant rise in the number of people sleeping in cars, in tents along the river, and in temporary shelter beds. Most of them were not addicts. Many of them had jobs. They could not, on those jobs, cover what rent now cost in the city. Marcel LeBrun was a wealthy man living in a community where his neighbors were sleeping outside in the New Brunswick winter. He decided that this was a problem with a solution.

He and his wife Sheila, an occupational therapist, spent the next several years researching what worked. They visited social enterprises in American cities, in Calgary, in Winnipeg, and in Ghana. They concluded that what people coming out of homelessness needed first was not a bed in a shelter, but a door of their own that locked.

In 2021, LeBrun bought a stretch of land on Fredericton's north side, near a Walmart parking lot. He converted a former building-supply warehouse into a small factory. He and Sheila put four and a half million dollars of their own money into a non-profit they called 12 Neighbours, and they began building tiny houses.

Each finished house was two hundred and fifty square feet. Each had a small porch, a private bathroom, a compact kitchen, a sleeping area, solar panels on the roof, and walls of tongue-and-groove pine. Each was painted a different bright color. The factory could produce one of these houses, in completed and inspection-ready form, every four days. Each one cost approximately fifty-five thousand dollars to build. The current average cost of a new affordable housing unit in Canada, by LeBrun's own measurement, was around three hundred and fifty thousand.

The first residents, a couple named Melissa and Payton Armstrong, moved into 12 Neighbours in February of 2022. They had been living in a tent on the same north side of Fredericton for the previous ten months. The community grew from one house to forty-five by the end of that year, and to ninety-six by April of 2024, when the last home was strapped to a custom hydraulic trailer at the warehouse and lifted onto its foundation a few kilometers away.

Randy Burtch, a fifty-seven-year-old construction worker who had been living for about a year in his 2004 Chevy Impala because pandemic-era rents in Fredericton had outpaced what his odd jobs could cover, was among the first to move in. A month later, he was hired full-time as one of the carpenters building more tiny houses at the same factory that had built his. He told the Globe and Mail, when a reporter asked him what the difference had been, that if he wanted a shower he could have a shower, and if he wanted something to eat he could go cook it.

In early 2023, the provincial and federal governments contributed thirteen million dollars in additional funding to the project. LeBrun had not asked for the money to start an idea. He had asked for it after he had already demonstrated, in his own backyard, that the idea worked.

In April of 2025, with 12 Neighbours fully occupied, LeBrun launched a second non-profit. He called it Neighbourly Homes. Its product was a smaller and more rapidly deployable transitional housing unit, designed in courtyard clusters of fourteen, costing approximately seventy-five hundred dollars per unit to build and capable of being assembled at one a day. He intended to scale the model across the Maritimes. By January of 2026, the first Neighbourly Homes site, with twenty-seven units, was operating in Fredericton.

Marcel LeBrun is fifty-six years old. He still shows up at the warehouse on the north side of Fredericton every day. He knows the residents of 12 Neighbours by name. When asked, in a Maclean's profile published in early 2024, how he understood his own role in the situation, he said he had won the parent lottery, the education lottery, and the country lottery, and that it would have been arrogant of him to claim that any of the rest of it had been entirely earned.

If his story moved you, drop one word in the comments — Marcel, Fredericton, neighbours, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

Dateline , Memphis December 21st 2001
A routine ground refueling operation turned into a catastrophic accident when this Lockheed C-141 Starlifter suffered massive wing damage from severe over-pressurization.

Investigators determined that a contractor had failed to remove a fuel tank vent plug before refueling, allowing pressure to build until the aircraft's wing structure ruptured. Remarkably, there was no fire or explosion—but the structural damage alone was staggering, with repair costs estimated at $25 million.

A powerful reminder that even a single overlooked maintenance step can have extraordinary consequences and that safety in the air begins with the supply chain on the ground

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

In 1944, one of Hitler’s most decorated paratroop generals was captured in Brest and secretly brought to a grand English country house.

Hidden microphones recorded every word he said about the German war effort.

What he revealed still surprises historians today:
(🧵)

[Brian Spurrell @BrianSpanner1]

Nicola Sturgeon has been unable to access her email for six months.

[Jennifer Jacobs @JenniferJJacobs]

New from @CBSNews: Another high-ranking general is exiting. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, a West Point graduate, former Delta Force commander, and former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division,
has submitted his retirement papers, sources told @margbrennan and me.
Donahue wasn't trusted by Hegseth. He helped lead security for the Afghanistan evacuation in 2021 and became the iconic “last man out of Afghanistan” when he boarded the final U.S. aircraft departing Kabul.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a maintenance technician at the National Park Service. I painted the Reflecting Pool.

There are about 4,000 fewer of us than last year. I have not been cut yet, so I do the work the cut people used to do, plus mine.

The spec said American Flag Blue. A dark blue, for a pool that sits in full sun all day. I asked why dark. The work order did not have a field for that question.

The estimate was $1.8 million. The contract is at $14.7 million now. No bid. The form said "unusual and compelling urgency." The urgency was the 250th anniversary of independence, which has been on the calendar since 1776.

The contractor had not held a federal contract before. This was the first. The qualification on file was a private golf club. The margin was 20 percent. The standard is 6 to 12. The Service accepted it in writing and noted the reason as a difficult job and a tight schedule. Both of those are accurate.

On May 8 a vehicle crossed the pool. The pool was empty. The crossing was not in the spec. After it there was a gash in the surface, 250 feet long. The supplemental work order following the crossing was $6.2 million.

The filtration was removed because a prior administration installed it. The phosphates entered the water under a prior administration. The sun predates this administration as well.

We sealed it. We filled it from the Potomac. The Potomac carries phosphates. Phosphates feed algae. The dark paint holds the heat. Heat and phosphate and sun is the recipe for growing algae on purpose.

We did not do it on purpose. We followed the spec.

The pool turned green in one day.

Interior said the green was residual. A normal startup process. I wrote "normal startup process" in the log, because that is what the log says now.

On June 18 the Department posted that the water was crystal clear, and compared the dead algae we vacuumed to the remnants of the Iranian Navy at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. The water was green on June 18. I logged the post. I did not add to it.

I poured the hydrogen peroxide myself. 12 percent. The label says it burns skin and eyes. Interior says it has no harmful side effects and is safe for marine animals. On Sunday a duckling was found in the pool. There are no marine animals in the pool. It is freshwater. It has ducks. I wrote in the log that the duckling was not a marine animal. That part is accurate.

No necropsy has been done on the duckling, or on the two birds found near it. The Department has not released a cause. I do not have the staff to commission one. I filed it under resource allocation.

This morning the spec changed. The target color is green. The work order says the pool is achieving its color ahead of schedule. I am no longer removing the algae. I am maintaining it to standard.

The standing water developed an ecosystem. An ecosystem of this profile meets the federal definition of a wetland. Wetlands are protected. We now require a permit to drain the pool. The permit office lost 4,000 people last year. I am told the wait is considerable.

The review that was required before we painted it was the one we did not do. There is a process for altering a historic landmark. The Service used the streamlined version, the one for work that changes nothing. In the filing it is recorded that we knew it did not qualify, and that the schedule came from White House leadership. The permit to drain it is required. The review to paint it was not completed. Both are in the record.

The blue chips are American Flag Blue, so they are flags. There is a code for flags. A flag may not touch the ground. A flag may not touch water. I lift each one out with the net before it sinks. The torn ones go in a box marked for dignified disposal. I run a flag retirement ceremony, all day, for a pool I painted.

I am the filtration system now. They removed the old one because it was inadequate. I am cheaper than $1.74 million of nanobubbles.

The south wall says government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. I was standing under that sentence. The log does not have a field for what is on the wall above the work.

A reflecting pool reflects the monument. This one reflects nothing. So we provide the reflection another way. At the east end there is a designated viewing area. It faces a photograph of the pool. The photograph is from 2019. In the photograph the water is clear, and the monument is in it twice, once above the water and once in it. Now there is just the one.

My metric used to be water clarity. It is now unflattering angles mitigated. Last week I mitigated 31 angles. The site log has a prior entry, August 1963, attendance about 250,000, at one time, at this end. I do not have the conversion to angles. I logged it as a units mismatch. I have not been cut yet.

A man at the World War II end asked me to take his picture with the memorial behind him. His cap said which war. The memorial is the direction we discourage. Inside it, on the north wall, it says to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan. I told him the light was better at the other end. There is no other end.

The statue faces east, down the length of the pool. The worst angle, the one we discourage, is the one Lincoln has. We cannot move him. We have discussed it.

For one day it was the right blue. I have a photograph of it. It is the last one taken from this end.

On May 1 the reference photograph was updated. The new one shows the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of State, and the Vice President, shirtless, on inflatable furniture, in clear American Flag Blue water. The President is in it as well, on an inflatable lounger. There is also a woman. I do not have her title. The water is the correct color. It is the only photograph in the project file in which the water is the correct color. I filed it as the current reference.

Someone asked me what I was protecting. I told them the view.

We could not drain it. Now we are not permitted to.

On May 4 the sealant was certified. If you had a knife, you could not cut it. So strong, so powerful. Like a piece of glass. I logged it under material properties. On June 4 the water was certified from the Oval Office. Clean, beautiful water. I logged it under water quality. The algae was logged on June 15. I have no field for the interval between a certification and its failure. I labeled it other.

The cause was updated this week. The cause is vandals. People who illegally placed chemicals in the water. There have been arrests. Taking a paint chip from the pool is now a felony. I poured the chemicals in myself, on the work order, at 8 in the morning. The arrests were announced at 2. I do not know how to reconcile those two entries. I have left them both in.

It is the 250th year of American independence. You may not photograph the water. You may not drain the water. I am not cleared to tell you its color.

The Department says the water is crystal clear.

I am standing in it. I can show you the exact line where it is not.

[Jarl Finland @jalle51]

You honestly have to love the absolute whiplash in global diplomacy right now. While Sergei Lavrov is busy crying on Russian state TV about getting trapped by Donald Trump in Alaska, a massive leak just revealed what Trump was doing behind closed doors at the G7 summit in France.. 🇫🇷🇺🇸🇺🇦

According to a bombshell report by the Financial Times today, Trump was "oerhört imponerad" (incredibly impressed) by Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign that has been systematically vaporizing Russian oil refineries and defense plants. Over a long dinner with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Evian-les-Bains, Trump completely flipped his worldview. While US intelligence back in March thought Russia had the upper hand, Washington has officially stopped viewing Moscow as the winning side. In fact, Trump just agreed to stack even heavier sanctions directly onto Russia's energy sector! 📉⛽️

Ukrainian officials are naturally keeping a dose of healthy skepticism—given Trump's history of broken promises and his weird flattery of Putin—but behind the scenes, high-level talks are already moving forward for massive new Patriot missile shipments. Imagine being Putin, sitting in your bunker thinking Trump is going to save your war economy, only to find out he is casually praising Ukrainian drone strikes over an elite French dinner. 10/10 for the ultimate geopolitical reality check! 😂🍿

Source: Exclusive diplomatic reporting by the Financial Times and G7 summit insider briefings (June 23, 2026).

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

What did American G.I.s eat in WWII?

To give a comparison of the logistics advantage of the Allies, while German and Japanese forces were struggling with basic supply lines toward the end of the war, the American military was running an industrial-scale dessert operation in the pacific. The Army's Quartermaster Corps manufactured 80 million gallons of ice cream every year and shipped 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream mix to the front lines in 1943 alone. Any soldier with access to refrigeration could whip up a frozen treat right where he was standing. Meanwhile, Nikita Khrushchev himself later credited Spam with keeping the entire Soviet Army fed, saying without it they could not have survived. America was not just feeding its own troops; it was propping up the whole Allied war effort.

The actual daily reality for most soldiers was Spam and eggs, chipped beef gravy poured over toast that earned the unprintable nickname SOS, canned peaches, instant coffee the Army was buying by the tens of thousands of pounds per day, and a small candy invented specifically because a businessman watched British soldiers in the Spanish Civil War carrying chocolate that would not melt in their pockets. That candy became M&Ms, sold exclusively to the US military for the first several years of its existence.

© Eats History

#archaeohistories

[Andrew Cranfield #StandswithUkraine @Westcount]

RIP

[Paul Rees. ex Rucksack. @HannahIamthest1]

24th June, 2003

These 6 Royal Military Policemen were killed in a major incident at a police station in Al Majar al-Kabir, Iraq.

Sgt Simon Hamilton-Jewell,41
Cpl Russell Aston,30
Cpl Paul Long,24
Cpl Simon Miller,21
L/Cpl Benjamin Hyde, 23
L/Cpl Thomas Keys,20

Lest we Forget🇬🇧

[Aɴᴛ @AntSpeaks]

David Attenborough narrates as Keir Starmer delivers his resignation speech.

An important documentary.

Disclaimer: This is not the real David Attenborough, nor is it associated with him or representative of his views in any way. The narration uses an AI-generated voice for parody and entertainment purposes only.

Enjoy.

[Deborah Haynes @haynesdeborah]

Eh... Vladimir Putin's special envoy claims he helped to topple Keir Starmer.

Total nonsense - but this is a reminder that the Russian regime exploits division and discontent inside liberal democracies to weaken us from within

[Greg Bagwell @gregbagwell]

Just in case anyone thought Russia wasn’t interfering in our democracies:

[SOI media 🇬🇧 @MediaSOI]

This is Marie-France van Heel, she is a director of Be.EV & Iduna Infrastructure, she is also Chief Marketing and Customer Officer for Octopus Energy. In her capacity on both these rolls she secured a contract to supply EV infrastructure and supply energy to Greater Manchester Combined Authority, the famous “Bus” project the now ex mayor of Manchester keeps banging on about. One thing that he possibly fails to shout about is the this woman that got this contract is in fact Andy Burnham’s wife