Fons van Lier 

journalist, tekstschrijver en nieuwsjunk. Speciale interesse voor (Oost-) Europa en Rusland. @[email protected] / @fonsvanlier.bsky.social

[Fons van Lier  @fonsvanlier]

@Ramoncp72 @EricRoeske Ja ik wilde al zeggen, daar waren iets van 10 jaar geleden toch al plannen voor, incl ontwerp?

[Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane]

HORRIFIC: Israeli settler terrorists are attacking the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank — burning fields and opening fire on civilians.
https://t.co/QiOAbofNdn

[Fons van Lier  @fonsvanlier]

Same here in Europe - more and more extreme right wing billionaires buying up or starting newspapers, tv networks, etc

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

CNN = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.
CBS = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.
FOX = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.
WaPo = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.
WSJ = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.

Ah yes, tell me more about how the mainstream media is “far left.”

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

No, sweetie.

Donetsk was a city of a million roses when its own Ukrainian flag flew above it.

Back then, it was also the fastest-growing and most rapidly prospering city in Ukraine -- home to what was the finest regional airport in Eastern Europe, one of the world's best football stadiums, a state-of-the-art railway terminal, and one of the cleanest, best-maintained cities in the region.

Its elites were running Kyiv, and every time I visited Donetsk as a student, riding the famous trolleybus Route No. 2 through the city, I was amazed by how many new office buildings were appearing, how much money was flowing into the city, and how many international companies were opening their doors there.

Fifteen years ago, to us kids from Donbas, Donetsk felt like the center of the universe because it had everything one could possibly dream of. It was a young city of universities and libraries, where the overwhelming majority of boys and girls from across Donbas went to study, including those from my own small hometown an hour away by bus.

Names like Liverpool or Detroit Rock City may mean nothing to you, but our Ukrainian Donetsk was a city of great rock clubs and unforgettable concerts. We traveled there to see Western bands perform.

We bought rock merchandise at the legendary Right House store near Krytyi Market. Scorpions, Rihanna, and Beyoncé performed at the famous Donbass Arena. Schoolchildren from across Donbas were bused in to watch Shakhtar Donetsk matches. The city even had a famous monument to The Beatles.

It was a city where we sang songs on guitars in its beautifully maintained parks and along the Kalmius embankment before heading out to buy the famous "green Donetsk burgers." Our older friends moved there after graduation, formed rock bands, recorded full albums, and held wedding celebrations in the squares around Donbas Arena. We traveled there to visit the legendary Radio Market in search of films, music, and books.

And then you arrived.

And you turned the wealthiest, most prosperous Ukrainian city into a piece of shit.

You deceived many of its people with sweet promises of Russian oil-fueled prosperity broadcast from television screens, but what you brought instead was war.

You transformed a thriving city into a criminal wasteland ruled by ethnic gangs from Russia, into a kingdom of Stalinist terror straight out of the 1930s, complete with torture chambers in the infamous Izolyatsia prison camp. You turned the magnificent Donetsk Airport into lifeless gray rubble, while the vast stands of Donbas Arena have spent a second decade slowly being reclaimed by weeds instead of hosting Champions League finals and Metallica concerts.

You swept away an entire generation of the city's men through your forced mobilization and threw them against Ukrainian machine guns until there were barely enough people left to keep basic municipal services running. Because of you, prosperous Donetsk became a withered desert without reliable water, because your war destroyed the canal system that carried water from the Siverskyi Donets River into Donbas. For years now, people have lived with chronic water shortages and have been reduced shitting into plastic bags forever.

You dragged Donetsk back like seventy years in time. You turned it into a depressed backwater, devoid of hope and future. Even ten years ago, tens of thousands of people, the most active, the most talented, the most entrepreneurial, fled the city and found refuge in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. Many of them still remember our Donetsk with tears in their eyes, the Donetsk that existed before the arrival of the "Russian World."

You transformed it into something that even my pro-Russian acquaintances are shocked to see when they return after years of occupation.

It was you who trampled the million roses of our Ukrainian Donetsk into shit beneath the tracks of your tanks and the boots of your death troops, turning them into a foul swamp of death and despair.

And that stain will forever remain on the conscience of fascist Russia, which brings nothing but destruction, decay, and death wherever it goes.

[Fons van Lier  @fonsvanlier]

@MartjanKuit 'Metra is volgens de NS een samenvoeging van Meta (‘verandering’) en Metro (‘sporen en infrasctuctuur’)' 🤮 Er zijn weer een paar marketingpipo's losgegaan hoor

[Alptekin @AlptekinAkdogan]

Het gaat nooit over de Nederlandse daklozen zegt Mona Keijzer aan het eind. OMG!! @Lisawesterveld heeft het hier regelmatig over. Maar wat deed voormalig minister Keijzer zelf voor deze daklozen? Precies.. helemaal niets in de periode dat zij minister was.

[Aleksandar Djokic (Александар Джокич) @polidemitolog]

Russian universities are mass-expelling students who completed military training at university centers for refusing to sign contracts with the Defense Ministry and are demanding they repay full tuition costs, Verstka reported. At least 28 such court cases have been heard across Russia since the war began, with claims ranging from hundreds of thousands to over a million rubles. Many signed training agreements years before the full-scale invasion.

[Sander Tordoir @SanderTordoir]

China policy is a possible area of EU-UK alignment.

For now the UK continues to be fully open to Chinese imports, meaning the EU will lose a vital export market.

The UK would benefit from being cut into EU industrial policy programmes and exempt from the blocs trade defence.

[Will Hutton @williamnhutton]

Europe’s industries - including Britain’s - are being savaged by too cheap Chinese imports. The EU is stirring, not least to resist the rise of populism. We must join them. No boats to China: empty ships tell the story of the EU’s failed industries https://t.co/GntNGMVnZs

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

Before I leave Ireland, I want to place on record that in the last 24 hours I have received constant stalking and death threats for my reporting. However I will not be intimidated.

What I have uncovered is deeply troubling, and the effort to silence it only makes that clearer.

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

The growing risk of a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system, of which the Gulf Stream is part, is nothing less than the number one long-term security threat to our way of life in Britain, Europe and the Western world in the era in which we live.

The consequences on our societies of an AMOC collapse would be simply devastating for Britain especially, beyond anything imaginable but a full blown super pandemic or nuclear war — with scientists modelling temperatures dropping around 15.c and half of our arable land being lost.

This is just one of many climate catastrophes starring at us of the modelling and the observed data and is why it is why Labour has continued to place such importance on Net Zero and international climate talks despite the Greens and progressive activists now looking elsewhere post-October 7th and the Conservatives joining Reform in now campaigning against them.

It is also one of the most important areas our foreign policy has and must continue to diverge from Trump’s America, an active opponent to progress on this agenda. It is also why despite the huge security, technological and industrial risks they pose we need an active and substantive dialogue here as far as is possible with China — which Labour has pushed for.

[Karel Burger Dirven @KBurgerDirven]

Terwijl rusland oorlog voert in Oekraïne🇺🇦 doet Aweta uit Pijnacker volop zaken in rusland. ‘Standard Investment’ (Hendrik Jan ten Have, Guido Grobbink) heeft als grootaandeelhouder een doorslaggevende stem om met Aweta uit rusland te vertrekken. Ga er weg. Moral above money. 1/

[Jelmer Visser @DieTukkerfries]

Wiens briljante idee was het eigenlijk om de oudewetse bejaardentehuizen van vroeger te sluiten, zo rond 2010-2013?

Ook weer de VVD (samen met PvdA), he?

Jarenlang zaniken over ‘doorstroming op de woningmarkt’ en ‘scheefwonen aanpakken’ terwijl ze zelf de bejaardentehuizen - die daar expliciet bedoeld waren - gesloten hebben en iedereen wist dat er een vergrijzingsgolf aankwam met de babyboomergeneratie.

Ook weer zo’n gecreëerde crisis van die partij.

[Rachel Moiselle @RachelMoiselle]

This is where we are at in Ireland apparently.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Landlord: Rent has gone up.

Businesses: That’s a natural part of doing business.

Suppliers: Materials cost more.

Businesses: That’s a natural part of doing business.

Worker: My labour costs more.

Businesses: Whoa, whoa... Let’s not get unreasonable here.

[Fons van Lier  @fonsvanlier]

@bswud Paris has grown much more since then - France was back then a much more rural country, so Paris and other French cities had many more people to mop up than London cs. Also, the green belt stopped London expanding

[Olena Tregub @OTregub]

Ireland defense for supplying roughly 90% of EU alumina exports to Russia is that the EU never sanctioned alumina.
But when it came to Israel, Ireland didn't wait for the EU.
Dublin pushed ahead with its own Occupied Territories legislation, openly challenging the EU's common trade policy and arguing that moral considerations required action.
Apparently, "we can't act without Brussels" applies to Russia, but not to Israel.
Interesting standard.

[Kateri Seraphina @KateriSeraphina]

En arrivant au Brésil et en étant témoin de l'esclavage de près, Charles Darwin écrivit :

« Près de Rio de Janeiro, ma voisine d'en face était une vieille dame qui possédait des vis-pouces avec lesquelles elle écrasait les doigts de ses esclaves. Dans une maison où j'avais séjourné auparavant, un jeune serviteur mulâtre était, chaque jour et à toute heure, insulté, battu et pourchassé avec une fureur capable de décourager jusqu'au plus vil des animaux.

J'ai vu un enfant de six ou sept ans frappé à la tête avec un fouet (avant que je puisse intervenir) parce qu'il m'avait servi un verre d'eau légèrement trouble...

Et ce sont là des actes commis par des hommes qui prétendent aimer leur prochain comme eux-mêmes, qui croient en Dieu, et qui prient pour que Sa volonté soit faite sur terre !

Le sang bout dans nos veines et nos cœurs s'emballent quand nous songeons que nous, les Anglais, et nos descendants américains avec leurs cris fanfarons pour la liberté, avons été et sommes encore coupables de cet énorme crime. »

(Charles Darwin, Le Voyage du Beagle)

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

So let me get this straight.

Jake Tapper is focused on attacking my Mom.

Jared and Ivanka are building a private island paradise on Albanian protected land.

Don Jr married the daughter of Epstein’s banker, and a startup his fund backs just got a record $620M Pentagon loan.

Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5B in the middle of a war with Iran that nobody wanted.

And I know: “But what about your paintings, Hunter?”

Please.

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

THIS IS NOT BEARISH.
This is ABSURD FANTASYLAND.

Total sales: $18 billion
Profit (Loss): -$5 billion

Where in the fuck do you get $780 billion? You can’t.
This is fraud at any price.