Debs

Freelance - Art. Illustration. Design.

[Debs @debbieflorence]

@ewnreporter @MongeziKoko This is so dangerous, vigilantes not acceptable. Lawless SA 🇿🇦

[Footballogue @Footballogue]

🔴 Énorme DINGUERIE encore des États-Unis...

L'arbitre somalien Omar Artan 🇸🇴 s'est vu refuser son entrée aux États-Unis, alors qu'il est sensé officier pendant la Coupe du Monde ! 🙄

Malgré l'aide appuyée de l'ambassade somalienne de Nairobi, qui lui a fourni un PASSEPORT DIPLOMATIQUE, M. Artan a dû faire demi tour à son arrivée aux USA.

On parle d'une personne qui a été élue MEILLEUR ARBITRE AFRICAIN EN 2025 ! 🤦‍♂️

(@Romain_Molina)

[Debs @debbieflorence]

@ferialhaffajee @AyandaTankiso 💯they didn't

[Ferial Haffajee @ferialhaffajee]

Hi, our public broadcaster did you ask Jacinta about the repeated violation of a court order granted against Operation Dudula but applicable to March and March too? Also, did you ask a lawyer if Jacinta is correctly quoting the CPA provision? Also did you ask her about what the President said about organisations that take the law into their own hands?

[Whistleblower @RClinto57113970]

@BulwarkOnline

[Sibo@Sibs @SiboLekala]

It’s clear that SABC doesn’t take what Ramaphosa says seriously and strategically platforms Jacinta to water down his speech.

SABC is trash

[SABC News @SABCNews]

President Cyril Ramaphosa says government will intensify efforts to curb illegal immigration while warning there is no place for xenophobia in South Africa. https://t.co/91Kh1CfYKC

[Debs @debbieflorence]

The pointless electronic 'music' is overwhelming the interview with Claire Mawisa and the Dr.
Ruined this interesting segment of Carte Blanche. 😔

[Carte Blanche @carteblanchetv]

In 2024, Dr Leané van der Merwe developed the PRIME app. PRIME stands for Protective Response Integrating Medical Expertise and helps nurses in rural areas make diagnostic and treatment decisions much quicker. #CarteBlanche @clairemawisa

[Geoffrey York @geoffreyyork]

@SaddatSim You seem unaware that MSF is one of the biggest humanitarian agencies on the ground in the Ebola zone, and they need to get supplies across borders all the time. If they say the aid flow is hindered, they know better than anyone. And they are fully independent, unlike governments

[Debs @debbieflorence]

Interesting read.
#Albania

[Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH]

I doubt the barefoot hike. I'm no fan of the Christopher Columbus complex, and I happen to admire elites who develop a country rather than exploit one. So let me explain what is actually going on here.

I did, among others, property across Eastern Europe during my years at Babcock & Brown, and I spent the better part of a decade fighting a court case in Romania against people who tried to defraud my land title. I won. And here is the lesson I paid for: the one thing that separates an investable Eastern Europe from an uninvestable one is European Union membership. It is the guardian of the rule of law in an otherwise wild East, the easiest place in the world to lose your money.

That is the lens through which I read what is happening on Sazan Island.

You see, there was a time when Western elites saw themselves as custodians of institutions, rules and the places they touched. That instinct is fading. What remains too often is the Columbus reflex: arrive by yacht, "discover" land that people already know perfectly well, and treat the rules as obstacles reserved for everyone else. And then have the wisdom to go on camera and brag about it. Jesus. No wonder Albanians are now on the streets in their thousands.

"We were on a friend's boat and stopped for a swim. That's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated."

What she "found" has been there for millions of years, in the Adriatic, not "the Mediterranean." It has a name. Sazan Island sits where the Adriatic meets the Ionian: a former military base, Italian and then Cold War, including a Soviet submarine base, inside a protected national marine park that has been open to the public since 2017 via boat tour from Vlorë. An island crawling with snakes, including the nose-horned viper, Europe's most venomous. So much for the barefoot hike.

Nothing was discovered, and nothing justifies any entitlement. Quite the contrary.

What actually happened is that Jared Kushner set out to cash in on his father-in-law's temporary power as President of the United States. That status means precisely nothing in Switzerland, with its seven centuries of direct democracy and institutions no outsider can buy. But it means everything to a weak man like Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, cornered at home, courting Washington, and now under criminal investigation for how his government handed this deal away. Kushner understands that asymmetry perfectly. And he wants to exploit it. Period.

In Albania, he can. Albania is chronically bureaucratic, the long tail of its communist heritage, a home-grown Stalinism so absolute it broke even with Moscow and sealed the country off from the world. That legacy is the same one that ran, and still runs at times, from Sarajevo to Tirana, from Bucharest to Belgrade: decades of one-party rule that hollowed out the courts, the press and property itself, and left a vacuum filled by the personalised, strongman power of a connected few. It is the soil in which corruption flourishes, and Albania's greatest vulnerability.

And on that soil, in one of Europe's poorest countries, the island's protected status was suddenly changed in December 2024, in the weeks between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Just like that. The public-tender rule was bypassed. "Strategic Investor" status went to a Kushner-linked SPV before the inauguration: no business plan, no feasibility study. Wonderful. Because Ivanka "discovered it". Right? Wrong.

A country vulnerability like that can be met in two ways. A responsible investor sticks to the rules and ties his fortunes to the country's long-term development, because that is what makes returns durable in the first place. And that will take a lot of time and upfront investment, with a highly uncertain reward. That's called risk-taking.

A powerful one, on the other hand, willing to bend the rules, as this deal suggests the Trump family is content to do, sees only something to exploit.

The subsequent damage runs far deeper and longer than a few harmless bungalows built without a proper concession. What is happening here is that Kushner is becoming part of the problem that corrodes Albania's path into the European Union. That is the real issue here. Just like the issue when JD Vance travelled to Europe and openly campaigned for illiberal politicians while lecturing Europeans about democracy. Who do these people think they are? Guardians of democracy?

Consider what the Albanian path actually looks like right now. The Balkans, like much of post-communist Europe, are chronically corrupt. But they are also full of people fighting to turn their countries toward something better, and EU accession is the single most powerful tool they have. It forces the one thing that actually develops a country: predictable rules, secure property, contracts that hold, and the credible belief that the same rules apply to everyone.

That belief is what brought the great wave of investment into Poland. Its absence is why Romania and Bulgaria remained under special monitoring for years after accession. The rule of law that eventually held in that Bucharest courtroom, and saved me, exists because membership forced it into being. Brussels learned the lesson. Today enlargement runs on a "fundamentals first" basis.

Which is exactly where Albania stands.

Last month it became only the second candidate after Montenegro to clear those rule-of-law benchmarks, with the EU's own enlargement commissioner describing SPAK, the very prosecutor now investigating this deal, as the country's "most trusted institution." The concession lands squarely on the chapters that decide membership: the judiciary, justice and public procurement. So this is not a side issue to Albania's European future. It is a direct test of it.

And that is why this does not help. It does the opposite. A single family connected to the presidency of the United States showing that the rules bend on demand corrodes the one asset a poor country cannot afford to lose: the belief, hard-won and easily lost, that the rules are real.

Then those same people have the chutzpah to complain about corruption in Eastern Europe and lecture the world about American exceptionalism. It is all so deeply wrong. And make no mistake, it erodes our democracies too, ever so slightly.

The thousands in the streets of Tirana understand all of this instinctively. They are not protesting a resort. They are defending the only thing that gives their country a future and hope: the rule of law applied equally to all.

And make no mistake about who the brave ones are. They are not on a yacht. They are on the street of Tirana and inside SPAK, because in Albania, stepping on the toes of the powerful is done in the knowledge that the danger is real. Confronting entrenched corruption in the Balkans has cost prosecutors, judges and journalists their their lives. That is the issue here, ladies and gentlemen!

I doubt Ivanka loses any sleep over any of this. Her concern is closing the deal while her father remains in office. And on a timeline that tight, a public tender, one they may well have won fairly, becomes an inconvenience rather than a safeguard.

That is the difference between a custodian of capitalism and democracy like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger and a primitive land-grabber without any moral compass and integrity.

[Debs @debbieflorence]

@DalrympleWill 🙏
History had a direct impact on the world - conflicts, poverty and wealth. It seems to me most people have no curiosity in understanding centuries of historical background- peeling away the layers to understand our problems and conflicts of this century. Wilfully ignorant.

[Abier @abierkhatib]

Y’all need to check this out, the Albania situation is getting more intense by the day. Apparently, Saudis entered the chat!!

This is top-tier reporting.

[Patricia Marins @pati_marins64]

When I hear Rubio talking about terrorism, I immediately remember the case of Luis Posada Carriles. He was the terrorist who planted a bomb on a civilian airliner, -Cubana Flight 455-, which exploded in 1976 off the coast of Barbados, killing all 73 people on board.

Despite facing legal proceedings, he was protected by powerful allies, lived freely in Miami, and died peacefully of old age at 90.

The Cuban regime certainly has many serious issues, but terrorism isn’t a word that applies to its classification. This case remains a textbook example of how the label “terrorist” is used selectively, depending on who holds power and whose side you’re on.

[Syrian Girl @Partisangirl]

Glory to Albania kicking out the Israeli settlers on Sazan island.

You have to nip it in the bud before cancer spreads, Cyprus we are looking at you.

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

“It’s not your country, it’s our country.” In an exclusive interview, Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun @LBpresidency has scathing words for Iran: “They are using Lebanon as a bargaining chip in their negotiation with the US. It’s unacceptable.”

Airs 8pm Beirut time @cnni

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

“Entire families have been wiped out.” Lebanese President Joseph Aoun recounts the devastating toll of Israel’s war in his country against Hezbollah. “This is a 3-month-old baby,” he says, holding up a heartbreaking picture. “Is this an imminent threat?”

@LBpresidency

[MeidasClips @MeidasClips]

Charlie Angus: "Israel's announced that they're going to go ahead with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This is a war crime ... Either the international rule of law stands for something or it's a joke. Either we have the Statute of Rome and we hold gangster criminal regimes to account, or hey, you can do what you want, because the next country will do what they want. That can't be allowed to happen."

[Debs @debbieflorence]

I wonder which gangsters/cartels/ mafia are taking notes?
This "stolen" drug haul belonged to some nefarious criminals.

[IOL News @IOL]

Colonel Jacob testified that after his office furnished General Flynn with "credible information" about the Port Shepstone drug theft (from a whistleblower/informer), Flynn had several weeks to investigate but did not compare this new information with his initial theory or narrow down suspects. Jacob stated that the false narrative is that those involved in the seizure had a hand in the theft. However, he also confirmed his belief that "DPCI members have conspired with criminal elements to carry out this crime" (paragraph 71). Regarding the value of the cocaine, Jacob explained that at the time, cocaine sold for R300,000–400,000 per kilogram (average), leading to an approximate R200 million valuation. He noted that grade affects price—"two-way" cocaine (which can be cooked into crack cocaine) can yield significantly higher street value. He added that the FSL can now test purity/percentage, but this was not done at the time. #MadlangaCommission
https://t.co/JOblHwBTGy

[Debs @debbieflorence]

@80_incognito The details 🌿❗️Gorgeous!

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Jewish groups are now boasting more explicitly than ever that they will use Jewish wealth to destroy any US politician who refuses to "stand with" Israel: as they did to Massie.

But if you observe the same exact thing in order to criticize it, you're instantly branded a bigot.