Ang Santas

[Rémi Kasprzyk @KasprzykRemi]

Cette photo mérite absolument tous les prix. Elle a même sa place au Louvre.

Elle relate précisément l’inertie de l’individu face à l’effondrement.

Regardez la composition. Un chef-d’œuvre involontaire.

Au premier plan, le sable doré, les tongs abandonnées, la glacière. Le décor ordinaire du bonheur estival. Deux personnages assis, de dos, comme dans un tableau de Caspar David Friedrich. Sauf que Friedrich peignait des hommes contemplant le sublime. Ici, ils contemplent la catastrophe. Et ils ne bougent pas.

Au centre, le parasol. Publicitaire, criard, dérisoire. Un pastis face à l’apocalypse. C’est presque trop parfait : la France qui prend l’apéro pendant que le monde brûle. Aucun scénariste n’aurait osé.

Et puis le ciel. Les deux tiers de l’image. Cette muraille de fumée qui avale la lumière, ce dégradé d’ocre et de noir digne d’un Turner. La nature qui reprend la palette des maîtres pour peindre notre propre fin.

La femme photographie l’incendie avec son téléphone. Mise en abyme totale : nous documentons notre disparition au lieu de l’empêcher.

Cette image dit tout. Le déni, le confort, l’habitude. Nous sommes tous sur cette plage. Nous voyons tous le nuage. Et nous restons assis, parce que l’eau est bonne et qu’on a posé nos congés.

Les historiens de l’art parleront un jour de cette photo comme on parle du Radeau de la Méduse.

Sauf que cette fois, le naufrage, c’est nous qui le regardons depuis la plage.
💔🌍

[Tom the whistleblower @blowingtom2]

Maybe if Pauline didn’t employee her daughter who has a zero policy background she could use that spot for someone with knowledge. Just remember, Lee Hanson is paid $180k a year because her mother wanted her in Canberra. Not because she is experienced!

[Ang Santas @angsantas]

@Simi_2210_ 13

[Ang Santas @angsantas]

@hicasamadim 2x2=4 & 2x2=4 is 8
5x5=25 & 5x5=25 is 50
6x6=36 & 6x6=36, so th answer is 72

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE

There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"

Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?

Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!

And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.

Francesca Albanese is that someone.

She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."

Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.

And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.

Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.

There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.

There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."

There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”

Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.

She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".

Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.

What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.

These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.

Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.

We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."

Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.

So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.

A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.

Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.

Let us stand with her.

Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.

[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Lebanon is being destroyed.

1.1 million people, including 390,000 children, forced out of their homes by relentless bombardment. Towns and villages flattened. Infrastructures destroyed. Innocent civilians killed. There is no justification for this.

[Hend Amry @LibyaLiberty]

Jewish troops will be looking for Muslims hidden in the attics of Christians. Let that sink in.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel murdered every single person in this photo today in South Lebanon.

Every. Single. One.

2 journalists
7 paramedics
1 Lebanese soldier

They bombed the journalists’ vehicle — then bombed them again when paramedics rushed to help.

[Phillip Adams @PhillipAdams_1]

Trump said he would end wars in his second term instead he started at seven

[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

ICE agent asked why he's taking pictures of a legal observer's car, replies: "Cuz we have a nice little database and now you're considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that."

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

For the record: cops aren't supposed to kill guilty people either.

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

Any Royal Commission should also examine Islamophobia. Mosques have been vandalised, Muslim women abused and assaulted in shopping malls. Is this to be ignored ? It would be very, very divisive.

[Antony Green - elections @AntonyGreenElec]

@matt_barrie That is an absolute lie. All ballot papers were hand written and first counted by hand before a check count by data. It is disgraceful that you repeat such egregious lies without checking. You should be ashamed.

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

Oil reserves (billion barrels)

🇻🇪 Venezuela: 303.8
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia: 258.6
🇮🇷 Iran: 208.6
🇨🇦 Canada: 170.3
🇮🇶 Iraq: 145
🇰🇼 Kuwait: 101.5
🇦🇪 UAE: 97.8
🇷🇺 Russia: 80
🇱🇾 Libya: 48.3
🇺🇸 US: 47.1
🇳🇬 Nigeria: 36.8
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan: 30
🇨🇳 China: 26
🇶🇦 Qatar: 25.2
🇧🇷 Brazil: 12.7

(US EIA)

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

The United States is bombing Venezuela while the people are asleep!

Venezuela produces less than 1% of the world’s illegal drugs. But they do have the world’s largest proven oil reserve.

Still think this is really about stopping the cartels?

[BreakThrough News @BTnewsroom]

BREAKING: The Trump administration has begun an illegal bombing campaign of Caracas, Venezuela, striking various parts of the city.

[KNEECAP @KNEECAPCEOL]

Having murdered EVERY journalist in Gaza, and many of their families.

Having banned ANY international journalist from entering.

Having destroyed almost every structure in Gaza and even laughing as they blew up water treatment facilities and cancer wards.

Israel is now BANNING all aid agencies from operating there from tomorrow.

The last thread of charitable aid removed.

An evil beyond humanity.

Take ACTION
Free PALESTINE

[Brad @BraddrofliT]

"EVERY RECORD HAS BEEN FALSIFIED, EVERY BOOK REWRITTEN, EVERY PICTURE REPAINTED, EVERY STATUE AND STREET BUILDING RENAMED, EVERY DATE ALTERED..." - GEORGE ORWELL, "1984"

[Quentin Dempster @QuentinDempster]

Lawsie and Richo: a state burial. Here Phillip Adams de-eulogises these two Sydney characters. 👇