Colleen Benn

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

If a mercy rule existed in litigation, it would be invoked to spare the Department of Justice further embarrassment in its futile effort to obtain sensitive voter data from the states.

DOJ is 0-15 in those cases and has lost its first appeal.
https://t.co/P9cwprwO3R

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

Darline Graham, younger sister of Lindsey Graham, has been sworn in to the US Senate to complete the remainder of her late brother's term. Read more: https://t.co/bnvISYl6h1

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

In the autumn of 1942, a slight, 32-year-old Polish social worker named Irena Sendler passed through the gates of the Warsaw Ghetto with a carpenter’s toolbox in her arms. Beneath the hammers and nails lay a drugged six-month-old infant, breathing softly, utterly silent. One cry would have meant instant death for both of them. Irena smiled at the guards; they waved her through. They never suspected that this quiet woman would repeat the journey 2,499 more times.

The ghetto was a slow-motion extermination. Starvation, disease, and random murder stalked every street. Jewish parents faced a choice no human being should ever have to make: keep their child and watch them waste away, or hand them to a stranger who promised a chance—however thin—at life.

Irena came officially to inspect for typhus. In reality, she came to steal children from death.

Babies left in toolboxes or ambulances under false bottoms. Toddlers sedated and tucked into potato sacks. Older children led by the hand through the stinking, lightless sewers while German boots marched overhead. “Not a sound,” she whispered as rats scurried past their feet.

She knew that the rescued children would be given new names, new religions, new families. Their pasts would vanish unless someone remembered. So, on fragile scraps of tissue paper, Irena wrote each child’s real name, their parents’ names, and their new hiding place. She rolled the papers tight, slipped them into glass jars, and buried them beneath an apple tree in a neighbor’s garden. If she were caught and killed, the truth might still survive.

She was caught.

On October 20, 1943, the Gestapo kicked in her door. They took her to Pawiak Prison and demanded the list. When she refused, they smashed both her legs with iron bars. Then her feet. Then her arms. For weeks the beatings continued. She never spoke. They scheduled her execution. On the appointed morning, guards dragged the broken woman from her cell.

Instead of a firing squad, she found herself outside the prison walls—alive. The Polish underground council Żegota had bribed a guard to mark her file “shot while trying to escape.” Officially dead, Irena Sendler limped back into the shadows to keep working.When the war finally ended, the first thing she did was dig up the jars under the apple tree. She spent years trying to return the children—now scattered across convents, farms, and foster homes—to whatever family might remain.

Almost no parents had survived. But the children had. Because of her, 2,500 Jewish boys and girls lived to grow up, to marry, to have children and grandchildren of their own—an entire secret branch of the human family tree that the Nazis never managed to cut down.For decades her story stayed buried deeper than the jars themselves. Then, in 1999, four high-school girls in rural Kansas stumbled across a brief mention of her name. They found the old woman still living quietly in Warsaw and brought her courage back into the light.

Journalists called her the greatest rescuer of the Holocaust. Irena only shook her head.“I could have saved more,” she said. “That regret follows me to the grave.”Irena Sendler—armed with nothing but a ghetto work permit, a toolbox, and a refusal to look away—proved that even in the heart of the worst evil humanity has ever devised, one determined person can still keep the darkness from winning completely.

[Colleen Benn @cab0602new]

THIS.

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

TRUMP DIARRHEA OUTBREAK: Cyclosporiasis cases are surging now across 40+ states, a severe diarrhea outbreak linked to contaminated produce. Reports indicate Trump admin CDC changes made Cyclospora surveillance optional and restructured the parasitic diseases division.

[Rep. Jim McGovern @RepMcGovern]

Immoral and unconscionable. The International Criminal Court exists to provide justice to victims when countries can’t or won’t. By trying to destroy it, Trump and Rubio seek to give themselves—alongside Putin, Netanyahu, Maduro, and other human rights abusers—impunity for war crimes committed under their orders.

[Ben Crump @AttorneyCrump]

We are fighting for answers on behalf of the family of Daniel Erving. For three months, they have asked what happened to their son, an 18-year-old honor student and swimmer who went to Lake Ray Hubbard with two others and never came home. Now police have arrested two individuals for allegedly tampering with evidence in Daniel's death. They are accused of hiding his clothes, throwing away his phone, and deleting messages. If this was an accident, why hide the evidence?

[Colleen Benn @cab0602new]

@RadioFreeTom Gross

[Ted Lieu @tedlieu]

I regret to inform you that the Acting Attorney General of the United States is an unethical, lawbreaking partisan hack.

@DAGToddBlanche will be investigated next year by Congress.

And if the facts warrant, he will be prosecuted by a future Administration.

November is coming.

[Gabriele Corno @Gabriele_Corno]

The way he puts his little paws behind his back to mimic the keeper is pure genius.
He's got that "retired and taking a morning stroll" energy down perfectly!

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

NEWS: Senate Democrats blocked a $1.15 trillion defense bill, saying they refuse to advance a massive Pentagon funding package after Trump launched the Iran war without congressional authorization. The procedural vote failed 50-46, short of the 60 votes needed.

[Colleen Benn @cab0602new]

I love this story.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

London, 2007.

Johnny Depp is on a film set when his phone rings. His daughter Lily-Rose has been rushed to Great Ormond Street Hospital. E. coli infection. Acute kidney failure. Critical condition.

He leaves immediately.

For the next three weeks, he barely leaves the hospital. The first nine days are touch and go. Machines monitor every breath. Doctors work around the clock to stabilize her as her small body fights an infection shutting down her kidneys.

Lily-Rose is seven years old.

Johnny sits beside her bed. In that room, he is not a movie star. He is not famous. He is just a father watching his child suffer, unable to do anything except wait and hope that tomorrow she will still be breathing.

Awards don't matter in a pediatric ICU. Box office numbers mean nothing when you're watching your daughter fight for her life. Fame offers no protection against the terror of waiting for a doctor to open a door with news.

Gradually, agonizingly slowly, Lily-Rose begins to respond to treatment. Her kidneys start functioning again. After weeks of uncertainty, she recovers enough to go home.

Most people would have walked away from that experience and never looked back.

Johnny couldn't forget.

He couldn't forget the other families in that hospital. The parents holding vigil in uncomfortable chairs. The children hooked to machines, trying to be brave. The nurses moving from room to room, carrying hope and heartbreak in equal measure.

In 2008, he donated over two million dollars to Great Ormond Street. The hospital publicly thanked him. He didn't make a spectacle of it.

But the money wasn't enough. Not for him.

He realized something: he had spent years playing a character that children loved. Captain Jack Sparrow — the eccentric pirate with the slurred speech and unpredictable swagger — was one of the most recognizable characters in modern cinema.

That character could do something medicine alone couldn't. It could lift the weight in a hospital room, even if only for a few minutes.

So Johnny started showing up at children's hospitals.

Unannounced. In full costume. As Captain Jack Sparrow.

No press releases. No cameras. Often, even hospital staff didn't know he was coming until he walked through the door in full pirate regalia — tricorn hat, beaded hair, eyeliner, the works. He'd stay in character the entire time. Speaking in Sparrow's signature drawl. Improvising stories about buried treasure. Kneeling beside hospital beds to look sick children in the eye.

In 2017, he spent nearly five hours at a children's hospital in Vancouver, visiting dozens of young patients one by one, going room to room, including children in isolation who couldn't leave their beds.

Similar visits followed — Brisbane, Paris, London, Madrid. In September 2024, he appeared at a hospital in San Sebastián, Spain — again in full costume, with no film promotion attached. In June 2025, while filming in Spain, he made another surprise visit to a children's hospital in Madrid, touching pinkies with kids too sick to get out of bed, laughing with families living their worst days.

Nurses and parents consistently describe the same pattern.

He doesn't rush. He treats each child as if there is nowhere else he needs to be. As if that conversation, with that one child, is the most important thing in his world.

"I was one of those parents," he told an audience in 2015, his voice breaking. "I lived in the hospital for three weeks with my kid, not knowing if she was going to make it or not."

He knows what those parents are feeling. The terror. The helplessness. The desperate need for something — anything — to make their child smile.

He's continued these visits for nearly two decades. Through career changes, through personal struggles, through everything. He keeps showing up.

Because he remembers the sound of machines in the dark. The feeling of waiting for a doctor to walk through the door. The sight of other parents sitting vigil, holding on to hope by their fingernails.

Captain Jack Sparrow is fiction. But the reason Johnny keeps putting on that costume and walking into children's wards is real.

His daughter survived. He never forgot the families whose children didn't. And he never forgot that in those rooms, fame only matters if you use it to bring light into the darkness.

For nearly twenty years, that's exactly what he has done.

No cameras. No publicity. Just a man in a pirate costume, making sick children smile.

Because he was once the parent sitting in that chair.

And he never wants another parent to feel alone in that darkness.

He sat beside her bed for three weeks not knowing. She survived. He never forgot the families whose children didn't. He's been going back ever since.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

AOC just tore into Senator Susan Collins over the Maine shooting:

“Senator Collins wrote the blank check to allow these officers to conduct themselves in the way that they have in Maine in the first place, and she's the one who's poured resources into it.”

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) lost its 14th and 15th voter roll cases Tuesday, when federal judges dismissed* the government’s lawsuits seeking access to Virginia and New Mexico’s full voter records. https://t.co/3jv1Ow0uDt

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

The world just got its first trillionaire.

At the same time, millions of people are struggling to get by and a generation is falling behind their parents.

If that’s not a five-alarm fire, I don’t know what is.

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

Trump retreat over Hormuz tolls suggests he is struggling to end Iran war https://t.co/Axu6OHdG9c

[Colleen Benn @cab0602new]

@POTUS stop acting like a tyrant.
#FollowTheConstitution

[Colleen Benn @cab0602new]

I don’t want Todd Blanch for Attorney General of the U.S.

He’s untrustworthy.

[Colleen Benn @cab0602new]

@RepMcGovern 😂😂😂

[Colleen Benn @cab0602new]

This.

[Captain Mark Kelly @CaptMarkKelly]

Trump is attacking @Ossoff and @ReverendWarnock because he knows they’ll hold him accountable — whether it’s for his blatant corruption or his failure to fix this economic crisis.

If we want to end Trump’s chaos and right our country, we have to re-elect Jon and flip the Senate.