David W Versailles 🇱🇺🇪🇺🇺🇦

Research & consulting - Innovation / Strategy / Business Models - CEO @iskconsult - Co-head @cnewpic @PSBeduParis - VP @EURAM_BXL 🇱🇺 🇪🇺 🇫🇷

[Brendan May @bmay]

Brexit, forever the weirdest definition of ‘patriotism’.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet]

This is insane. France has made labor prohibitive for entrepreneurs to create new jobs and still runs huge fiscal deficit during good times.

Without deep structural reforms of its state spending and pensions, France will run into a debt crisis and the euro in the next crisis.

[Alex Taylor @AlexTaylorNews]

Massive victory for the pro-EU party in Armenia's elections, with more than double the votes (54%) than the pro-Russia Alliance (23%) - and this despite Moscow's huge disinformation and interference

Yet another country that clearly sees its destiny in the EU 💪🇦🇲🇪🇺

[NXT EU @NXT4EU]

Armenia has chosen EUROPE!

The exitpoll indicates that the Pro-European party has gotten 56% of votes.

Russia has tried to sway the vote by a variety of tactics, but Armenians have put their back towards them. The Pro-Russian party has only 17% of votes.

Europe ❤️ Armenia

[Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer]

Our support for Ukraine is ironclad.

We will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes. Ukraine’s security is Europe’s security.

Slava Ukraini.

[sarahximma @imma_cioffi]

prima posizione dei film più visti su netflix 🥹

[Netflix @netflix]

A certain countess shall find love again...

Bridgerton Season 5 is now in production. Starring Hannah Dodd as Francesca Bridgerton and Masali Baduza as Michaela Stirling.

[L'essentiel @lessentiel]

🇱🇺✈️🇮🇹 Une grève nationale des contrôleurs aériens est annoncée en Italie ce vendredi, de 13h à 17h. Certains vols sont annulés, d'autres reprogrammés, annonce Luxair.
https://t.co/CMqLM9cJ0v

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Gen. Patton’s grandson, BEN PATTON:

I visited one of Ukraine's command-and-control centers with my team. It was safe, 30 or 40 miles from the front. You go inside, and it looks like Newark Airport on steroids.

100 feet of LED displays with real-time statistics: tank or motorcycle, wounded or killed, North Korean or Russian, Kalashnikov or else. And real-time videos of every strike or kill.

The entire country is totally synchronized. This apparatus is extraordinary, everybody knows what's happening anywhere in the country in real-time.

[Ducon.space @duconspace]

Discover the Technology and Computing collection with graphic tees and accessories inspired by coding, tech culture, and modern computing for everyday wear and fans of tech-inspired style.

[Raphael Grably @GrablyR]

Les autorités américaines de santé, désormais sous l'autorité de l'antivax Robert Kennedy Jr., ont retardé la publication d'une étude montrant les effets positifs du vaccin contre le Covid.

[Volcaholic 🌋 @volcaholic1]

🚨 The emperor penguin is now officially endangered.

Climate change is shrinking the sea ice they depend on to breed, and when it breaks too early, chicks drown before they even have a chance. Some colonies are collapsing completely.

[VIEW @viewsoff]

Central Park, New York

[Volodymyr Tretyak 🇺🇦 @VolodyaTretyak]

Do you agree?

[LCI @LCI]

Le Royaume-Uni révèle avoir suivi trois sous-marins russes qui espionnaient des câbles dans l'Atlantique Nord
➡️ https://t.co/vi4FnSxqX1

[Adam Nimoy @adam_nimoy]

Two crews. The same dream.

Dad would have loved every second of this past week. He believed in what space exploration said about humanity: that our best instinct is to go further, together.

Safe travels home, Artemis II crew. LLAP 🖖

@nasaartemis #startrek #toboldlygo #nasa

[Emma Updates @updatesemmam]

13 anni fa usciva “Schiena”.

Tra le ere femminili più importanti degli ultimi 15 anni. Certificato triplo disco di platino (+150.000), ha trascorso 4 settimane alla #1 in classifica FIMI, ha all’interno la hit da 1º posto in FIMI, “L’Amore Non Mi Basta”, e tanti altri successi.

[Adenot Sophie @Soph_astro]

Jour 055, orbite 0855 – La structure Richat, en Mauritanie, est immédiatement reconnaissable depuis l’orbite… ce qui en fait une cible de choix pour les astronautes ! La structure mesure environ 40 km de diamètre, soit la distance qui sépare le château de Versailles de l’aéroport Charles de Gaulle en région parisienne. La surface de la structure est environ 10 fois celle de Paris intra-muros !

Contrairement à ce que l’on pourrait imaginer, il ne s’agit ni d’un cratère d’impact, ni d’un cratère de volcan… L’Œil du Sahara 👁️ serait en réalité un dome géologique érodé par l’eau et le vent, qui ont mis à jour des strates de roches couvrant plusieurs centaines de millions d’années de l’histoire de la Terre… une véritable aubaine pour les géologues !

📷 NASA/ESA – S. Adenot

#εpsilon • @esa • @esaspaceflight • @ESA_fr • @Space_Station • @nasa • @NASA_Johnson

[WarshipCam @WarshipCam]

French Navy Frégate de Défense et d'Intervention (Defence and Intervention Frigate) FS Admiral Ronarc'h (D660) coming into New York City - April 9, 2026 SRC: webcam