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If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth - Julian Assange 🌞🌍🌊🏔🌒

[Angelo Giuliano 🇨🇭🇮🇹 @angeloinchina]

No food shortages in Iran

While I was in Tehran last September 2025 doing grocery shopping, I grabbed this quick clip.
Shelves are stocked with fresh local dairy — milk, yogurts, kefir, cheeses — plus juices and all the everyday staples.
Prices have gone up over the years because of sanctions, mainly for imported products, but the basics are still there and widely available. Iran has pushed hard on self-reliance and domestic production, and you can see it in the supermarkets.

Impressive how normal life continues in a city of 9+ million under constant external pressure.

This is everyday Tehran, not the headlines. 🇮🇷

[Free Palestine 𓂆 from the river to the sea @MuznaShihabi]

🚨 HISTORIQUE : La justice suisse refuse de criminaliser la solidarité avec la Palestine !
À Genève, le tribunal vient de rendre une décision majeure qui fera date en Europe :
1️⃣Il reconnaît qu’un génocide est en cours.
2️⃣Il juge qu’aucun motif ne justifie de sanctionner des militants pacifiques.
3️⃣Il rappelle que la liberté d’expression protège la désobéissance civile non violente et que réprimer ces mobilisations est incompatible avec la démocratie.
Une victoire cruciale : défendre les droits humains n’est pas un crime. 🍉✌🏼

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

Today is the opening of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), which was met with a Ukrainian drone attack. Everyone knows the Baltic States participate in these attacks, thus the line between proxy war and direct war has been crossed. This will end in disaster.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Now that Gaza lies in ruins—shattered, like a beloved face after a long brutality—Israel moves with a terrible confidence to the next act: The act of leaving every soul there not merely wounded, but permanently disabled. Injured, sick, hungry, homeless, without work, without hope. This is not war’s collateral damage. This is design.

As my friend Gideon Levy writes—and he knows, he knows—this is the prelude to expulsion. Think of it: a society without teachers, without doctors, without social workers, without engineers, without clerks. That is not a society. That is a holding pen. A slow erasure. And when nothing functions—no school, no hospital, no office, no heart—then it becomes ‘easy,’ they tell themselves, to scatter the people to the four corners of the earth. Like seeds from a broken pod, except no soil will take them.

We must name this. Not with rage alone, though rage is honest. But with the cold, clear tears of recognition: they are making life impossible so that departure becomes the only ‘choice.’ And the world watches, adjusts its spectacles, and calls for restraint. Restraint! There is no restraint in a slow drowning.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

There is a strange development in which academics of international politics are expected to publicly condemn adversarial countries before they are allowed to participate in public discourse. The complexity of international politics is reduced to a moral question of good versus evil, and academics must make moral declarations before even discussing facts, history, strategy, and interpretations. Academics should explain why states behave as they do; they are not moral validators.

What value does it bring to an analysis if the analyst "condemns" one side? After Russia invaded Ukraine, the former Norwegian foreign minister actually argued that "this is not the time to understand, but to condemn". This ridiculous position is pushed on academics. However, understanding is not endorsement, explanation is not advocacy, and ignorance is not strength. I argue it is in Russia's security interest to push NATO away from its borders, it is in Iran's interest to control the Strait of Hormuz, and it is in China's interest to create a new international economic architecture. This is not advocacy, nor is it a normative position about how the world should work; rather, it is a recognition of how the world actually works.

An academic should examine interests, capabilities, and strategic calculations that produce such policies—not participate in ritualised declarations of virtue that contribute absolutely nothing. Furthermore, moralism and condemnation often lead to a lack of understanding and increased conflict. When the conclusion is always that the good guys are confronting the bad guys, then the solution is always "peace through strength", "weapons are the path to peace", and defeating the latest reincarnation of Hitler. If you want war, condemn the other side as pure evil. If you want peace, the first step is to understand the other side.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

Heavy attacks on Kyiv throughout the night, which demonstrates a new direction of the war. As I have discussed in many interviews over the past weeks, a decision has been made in Moscow to go up the escalation ladder to restore deterrence. Attacks originating from NATO territory, along with European leaders announcing their intentions to mass produce weapons to strike deep inside Russian territory, have fundamentally changed the nature of the war. NATO territory is also no longer off limits. Make peace now!

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

I, together with ICC judges and Palestinian HR defenders, need your help to counter US admin's abuses.

Please sign and share the petition.

The EU must not ignore its responsibilities toward us!

[Myret Zaki @MyretZaki]

L'UDC, malgré son langage populaire, vote ultra-libéral: contre les loyers bas, contre les salaires minimum, contre les transports publics, contre la limitation des primes maladie. Sur https://t.co/1SqfTERsKh, on constate que l'UDC devient le parti n°1 des lobbies de l'économie et du patronat, devant le PLR 👇
https://t.co/5NgfDUIDcj

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

BREAKING: The US just quietly removed UN expert Francesca Albanese from its sanctions list, a week after a federal judge temporarily blocked the measures over free speech violations, according to Reuters.

This was never about law or policy … it was about silencing among the most powerful advocates for Palestinian human rights.

Judge Richard Leon saw through it. He called out the Trump administration for targeting @FranceskAlbs "because of the idea or message expressed"—for daring to recommend arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for their crimes in Gaza.

They weaponized sanctions to weaken her mission, to make an example of anyone who dares challenge Israeli impunity. But Francesca never backed down.

The prosecutor’s ICC charges against Netanyahu remain. The genocide in Gaza continues. But today, truth scored a win.

[Ewald Engelen @ewaldeng]

Waarom moet deze terechte opmerking van @mariannezw komen? Waarom horen wij @milieudefensie of @Greenpeace of @urgenda hier niet over? Terwijl al die eerdere rechtzaken klein bier zijn vergeleken met de carbonbom van #militarisering...

[Fidias Panayiotou @Fidias0]

EU-Israel Agreement is in Trouble

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Maximum alert on the Flotilla!

Israel has been given license to threaten, kidnap and shoot at civilians ALSO in int'l waters!

Welcome to Apartheid without Borders - soon to be Apartheid Mediterranean Consortium.

Shame on the EU, its main enabler in this part of the world.

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

The line that Americans live in the freest country in the world is one I will not argue with. They do. They have for 70 years. I just think people misread who the freedom was actually for.

Every country is a platform for something. The British state was a platform for the East India Company for two centuries, and when that wound down it became a platform for the City of London, which is the same operating system with different shareholders.

The French state has historically been a platform for its industrial champions, which is why TotalEnergies and Airbus get treated as French nouns rather than companies.

The Chinese state is a platform for the Party, which uses its corporates as instruments rather than the other way around.

The American state is a platform for the four sectors of capital. Finance, military, consumer, tech. They share an operating environment that rewards the same behaviour, and the country has been organised around their convenience since the late 1970s.

This is where the freedom narrative is.

Because the freedom is real. Capital is freer in America than in any comparable country. It is free to enter, exit, restructure, lay off, relocate, lobby, deplatform, sue, settle, write its own regulations and then write the press releases announcing the new regulations.

It is also free to outlive any single administration that tries to constrain it, and it does. The military sector outlived three wars. The financial sector outlived two collapses it caused. The consumer sector outlived an opioid crisis it engineered. The tech sector is currently outliving the antitrust posture aimed at it. This is what freedom looks like at the level it was actually granted.

The citizen receives a different version of the same word. The citizen is free in the sense that nothing is illegal about being poor, sick, indebted, uninsured, undertrained, surveilled or replaced.

Nothing is illegal about being abandoned by a town that lost its industry. Nothing is illegal about being aged out of an office job by an algorithm.

The freedom is the absence of obligation running both ways.

And it's beautiful how the system does not discipline itself. A country with this much inequality should produce a class-aware politics.

America does not. Why?

Because the freedom narrative does the work. The American is told, from kindergarten, that he is in an open free for all game where the prize is unlimited and the only thing between him and the prize is the next guy.

So he watches the next guy. He resents the next guy. He votes against the next guy. He never looks upward.

And as long as a small number of winners can be paraded as evidence that the game is open, the rest of the field stays heads-down. The lottery ticket is the political tranquiliser.

In effect, the freedom Americans celebrate is the freedom to compete with each other for resources their economy is no longer generating in the volumes it advertises.

Real wages flat since the late 1970s. Housing tripled in 20 years. Healthcare effectively privatised at the point of bankruptcy. The bottom 50% of households holding around 2% of the wealth. Inter-generational mobility, which used to be the country's identity, now lower than most of Western Europe.

These are the readings of a closed game packaged as an open one.

You will hear the counter, which is that America still produces the world's largest GDP, the dominant currency, the deepest capital markets and most of the world's frontier technology.

But a country can be the wealthiest in the world while the median citizen sees almost none of it, and you cannot read America properly without sitting with that line until it stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like an accounting question.

The American state stopped being a state in the conventional sense decades ago and started being a hosting environment.

Most of the things a state is supposed to do for its citizens, healthcare, retirement, housing, education, child welfare, are run as private products with the state acting as the billing layer.

Most of the things a state is supposed to do externally, war, sanctions, trade, energy, are run on behalf of one or another of the four sectors, which is why the foreign policy across Obama, Trump and Biden has been operationally indistinguishable to anyone outside the country.

The slogans rotate. The contracts continue.

And the slogan has to stay. The moment the freedom narrative cracks the disciplinary fiction goes with it, and you cannot run an arena economy without the participants believing they are competing on level ground.

The freedom story is the moat around the whole arrangement. It is the most load-bearing piece of fiction in the country, and it is defended accordingly, by both parties, by Hollywood, by the academy, by the press, by anyone whose own position depends on the arena continuing to function.

I think Americans will figure this out. Not soon. But the arena has been showing strain for a decade in opioid death rates, in deaths of despair, in the political extremity that arrives when people who were promised mobility realise they were sold an advert.

The system's response so far has been to push the freedom slogan harder, which is what every empire does in the late phase, when the substance has thinned and only the wrapper is left. The wrapper is louder right now than at any point I can remember.

Americans really do live in the freest country in the world.

They are correct.

The question they have not yet asked, in numbers that would matter, is what the freedom is for, and whose.

When that question is asked seriously, the four sectors will quietly move their operating environment elsewhere, the way capital always does when the host runs out of substrate.

The British did not collapse. The City of London simply moved upstairs. The American version of that move, when it arrives, will look the same on the flag and feel the same in the press releases.

The citizens will be told they won.

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

🚨LMFAO. The Secretary of War flew to Kentucky to campaign against THOMAS MASSIE, the one Republican who actually votes against your kids dying in another forever war.

And he seriously opens with this:

HEGSETH: "I have to say up front for the lawyers that I'm here in my personal capacity. As a private citizen."

Bro! You are the SECRETARY OF WAR. You did not wake up this morning and become Dave from accounting.

The regime is sending a cabinet official to take out the most anti-war and pro America guy in Congress and we are supposed to pretend it's a personal hobby?!

Massie lives rent free in their entire Epstein apparatus for a reason.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Breaking: Israel has. just raided vessels of the Sumud flotila off Cyprus. Many more are continuing their journey to Gaza. Time to rise up against Israel's assumption that it has a god given right to the Mediterranean, to violate Int Law at will, to complete the genocide. .

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Netanyahu's plane "Wing of Zion" returned from Berlin to Israel on 17 April

It had been in the German capital since 28 February, the day Israel/US began attacking Iran

Germany (ICC member) protected the plane of an ICC war crimes fugitive so he could launch another illegal war

[George van Houts 💻📣 @georgevanhouts]

Zo waren de Europese bevrijdingstochten na D-Day een gigantische plunder- en roofpartij voor de Amerikanen, Canadezen en Engelsen.
In Groesbeek beroofden de Amerikanen toen ze het dorp binnentrokken allereerst de bank waarbij ze de kluis opbliezen "We need money".
In en om Nijmegen werd 90% van de huizen, winkels, boerderijen, kerken, banken die geëvacueerd leeg stonden geplunderd en leeggeroofd.
Generaal Eisenhower zat er mee in zijn maag en stuurde officieren om dit tegen te gaan.
Lukte niet.
De bevrijde nederlanders waren verbijsterd en geschokt; dit gebeurde door vrienden...
Meteen in de doofpot gestopt.
Lees: "Bezet, bevrijd en geplunderd."

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

If a lobby can buy an election, it's not a democracy, period.
And if an evil lobby can buy an election, it's far worse than any form of autocracy.
Let that sink in.

[Variety @Variety]

Javier Bardem says in #Cannes that genocide being committed in Gaza "is a fact."

"You can fight against, you can try to justify it... it is a fact. If you justify it with your silence or your support, you are pro-genocide. Those are facts for me."

https://t.co/8PctbmMzM3