No France and no Portugal. We’re told the letter was mostly coordinated by Italy and the Danish. Funnily enough, the language is softer than the individual statements on Spain, irritated by “lack of solidarity”. Madrid and Rome in open clash. Macron doesn’t endorse letter. Focus on Commission response next.
Is Google dumb? Or is it evil? Genuine question. The ability to fake satellite imagery with simple prompts was rolled out yesterday to all users & the potential harm is so blindingly obvious, it’s almost as if they’re profit-seeking chaos edgelords who simply don’t give a shit
NORTHERN HEMISPHERE STATE OF THE HEAT
21 Jun, Western Europe heat wave is global warming, with France nearing record. So is Southern US, with Texas records; also Brazil and West India. Heat wave in Siberia has Boreal forest looking like record burning. Climate Central's Climate Shift Index rapid attribution.https://t.co/yDDL5Hiv90
#heatwave #climatechange #globalwarming
AEGEAN BOAT REPORT
WEEKLY UPDATE – WEEK 24 (JUNE 8 – JUNE 14)
This week, 15 boats carrying 312 people attempted to reach the Greek Aegean Islands.
• 🚫 9 boats were stopped/pushed back — 184 people intercepted
• ✅ 6 boats arrived — 128 people were officially registered on the islands
• Several pushbacks were documented during the week
⸻
Of all boats that attempted the journey:
✅ 40.0% reached Greece
🚫 60.0% were intercepted — either pushed back by Greek authorities or stopped by the Turkish Coast Guard
⸻
📉 Arrivals decreased by 13.5% compared to last week
➡️ The number of registered boats arriving on the islands remained unchanged at 6 boats this week
📉 The total number of boats departing towards the Greek islands decreased from 21 boats last week to 15 boats this week
📉 Transfers to the mainland decreased by 34.0% (258 people relocated)
👥 Official island population: 3,985
⸻
So far in 2026:
• 🚤 241 boats carrying 5,653 people have been stopped by Turkish and Greek authorities
• 🏝️ 3,514 people have been registered on the Greek islands on 126 boats
⸻
Many of these numbers should have been significantly higher if not for the continued use of pushbacks carried out by the Hellenic Coast Guard — a practice that violates international law and continues to put lives at risk.
⸻
Island overview – registered population:
• Lesvos: 233
• Chios: 347
• Samos: 1,284
• Leros: 1,173
• Kos: 941
• Other islands: 7
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📊 For more detailed statistics:
🌐 https://t.co/ZyvIhfvRuv – ABR Statistics
⸻
Our work continues around the clock to monitor people in distress, document human rights violations, and provide independent evidence from the Aegean Sea.
If you want us to continue answering distress calls and holding authorities accountable, please consider supporting our work:
💙 Support Aegean Boat Report
👉 https://t.co/YrK02yByie
Space for freedom of expression shrinking as govts use tech to suppress dissent & digital giants manipulate info for enrichment, warns @Irenekhan@UN_HRC. “Freedom of expression has been privatised, monetised, manipulated & unlawfully restricted. #UNHRC62
https://t.co/lNtRzLmsAt
Europaparlament beschließt toxische Abschiebungsverordnung
Mit den Stimmen konservativer und rechter Fraktionen wurde heute unter grölendem Beifall und "Send them back" Rufen der Völkischen die neue EU-Rückführungsverordnung im Europaparlament verabschiedet.
SCOOP: The chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect American workers from discrimination, moved to delete the agency’s affirmative action rule that was implemented almost 50 years ago.
A judge has sentenced the Filton 4 as terrorists, behind the back of the jury, who only ever considered charges of criminal damage.
This grotesque distortion of the law tightens the screws on the public’s right to protest, placing more limits on our freedom to fight injustice.
Today, the reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), agreed in April 2024, comes into effect. It does not mean more rights and protection for people seeking safety, but more deterrence and closed doors.
1/4
New EU rules on return need to respect international and EU human rights standards. Creating offshore return hubs with limited safeguards, expanded use of detention - including of children, and weakened protections that risk refoulement, all warrant careful reconsideration. Reforms must genuinely reflect the EU's commitment to fair, sustainable and human rights-based migration governance - @volker_turk
We must protect vulnerable people, the underdog,truthtellers,those who fight for #Peace,#Truth,#Justice. We must protect @FranceskAlbs. If you haven't signed @couragefound's petition for @FranceskAlbs, pls do it now!
https://t.co/a7XDmJ0CjO
In southern Lebanon, the Israeli army is using #glyphosate and white phosphorus to render the border region uninhabitable. They're being used to destroy farmland—depriving farmers of their livelihoods. This violates the UN convention introduced in response to use of Agent Orange.
Yes, #NATO is not the solution, but the problem for Europe, in the same way as some countries of the gulf region, who thought that US-military bases would protect them, had to experience that they became military targets! @battleforeurope
🔴Violence at sea is intensifying.
Civil SAR vessels in the Central Mediterranean face gunfire and threats by the Libyan Coast Guard, putting lives at risk.
Silence and complicity allow this violence to continue. Accountability is urgent.
@seawatch_intl@SOSMedIntl
Francesca Albanese is trying to stop a genocide. That is her crime.
The United States and Israel are trying to stop her – by destroying her life, her career, her family, and her voice.
The US has sanctioned UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs along with 8 ICC judges, 3 court officials, and Palestinian human rights organisations Al-Haq, Al Mezan, and PCHR.
The message is chilling: investigate genocide and we will destroy your life.
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]
Thiago Á. & Saif A. have been kidnapped, mistreated, arbitrarily detained, to punish them and crush the growing solidarity movement against Israel's genocide in Palestine. Do not let it happen!
Demand their freedom and freedom for all Palestinian hostages!
#FreeThiago#FreeSaif
The Global Sumud Flotilla was attacked last night, more than 500 nautical miles - or several days sailing time - from Gaza.
Organisers have described the illegal interception as "piracy in plain sight".
Here's what we know so far:
- The flotilla was attacked at around 11pm local time (GMT+3) by warships, drones, jet skis and speedboats full of heavily-armed Israeli commandos.
- Most boats were just off the Greek coast, very near to where they were attacked by drones last mission, in Autumn 2025.
- Of 57 boats at sea, 22 are believed to have been intercepted in the attack.
- 35 others escaped interception, with many sailing to Greece, and some continuing towards Gaza.
- Around 175 participants are understood to have been detained (according to fairly consistent reports from organisers and Israel). They are likely being taken to Israel on a frigate (warship).
- The Israeli foreign ministry has claimed participants are on a boat travelling back to Israel, although videos posted online are likely to be fake.
- Some other participants were left stranded at sea on boats with destroyed engines and navigation equipment. In a statement, GSF described their situation as “a calculated death trap” due to an oncoming storm.
- Boats were abandoned. Organisers are attempting to retrieve them today, but finding them empty of participants. (Worth noting that the IDF struggled to sail the yachts last time, with many commandos getting seasick and participants forced to sail their own vessels into detention.)
- There have been some reports of “extreme violence” against participants, although Novara Media has not yet been able to confirm this. In October 2025, many flotilla activists were severely beaten during interception or in Israeli detention, so violence would not be without precedent.
- Brazilian activist and flotilla leader Thiago Avila posted an SOS video at around 7am GMT+3, saying that the mission had either been intercepted or attacked by Israel. His wife also posted a video saying he had been detained - however other participants who are believed to have been on his boat are now in Greece.
- While Israel has illegally intercepted dozens of past flotillas in international waters, including the last GSF mission in autumn 2025, the distance from Gaza and proximity to Europe this time is unprecedented, with many asking how European governments could allow it to happen.
- UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese said on Instagram that the attack should send “shock waves across Europe”. She wrote: “Alarm! How on earth is [it] possible that Israel is allowed to assault and seize vessels in international waters just off Greece/ Europe?”
Here is the complete architecture of how you keep a poor country poor while convincing its educated class that this is their own fault:
Step one: During colonialism, extract capital, destroy domestic industry, structure the economy around export of raw materials.
Step two: Grant formal independence while maintaining the economic structure, the debt obligations, the currency arrangements, and the trade relationships established under colonialism.
Step three: When the economy underperforms, as it must, being structurally designed for extraction, not development, offer loans conditional on policies that deepen the existing structure.
Step four: Train the country's economists in Western universities where the theories taught do not acknowledge steps one through three as economically relevant.
Step five: Staff international institutions and domestic finance ministries with these economists.
Step six: When the policies fail, attribute failure to cultural factors, corruption, and weak institutions.
Step seven: Publish a report with recommendations.
Step eight: Return to step three.
The machine runs on its own now.
The colonial administrator retired.
The indebted finance minister presenting his structural adjustment plan to the IMF board doesn't think of himself as administering colonialism.
He has a PhD from LSE.
He genuinely believes the model.
This is not a conspiracy.
It is an education system.