John Youril

Writer; Photographer; Artist; Hedonist. Non-denominational socialist. Things are entirely what they appear to be. -- Sartre

[John Youril @JohnYouril]

Maya

[Reza Nasri @RezaNasri1]

President Trump's claim that "missiles were flying all over the place" over Minab is absurd. The school was struck on the very first day of the war, before Iran had fired a single retaliatory shot. The skies over Hormozgan that morning contained one nation's missiles. They were American.

The New York Times, CNN, Amnesty International, and multiple independent investigations all concluded that the strike used a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon Iran does not possess. Such a missile is engineered to strike within five metres of its target. It does not mistake a classroom for a military base. And it did not strike once. The school was hit three times, the second strike targeting the prayer room where surviving children had been moved to shelter. Triple-tapping a girls' primary school is not an accident. It is a method.

The policy context makes the intent undeniable. In the opening days of the war, War Secretary @PeteHegseth declared the assault would proceed with "no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no politically correct wars." He later pledged "no quarter, no mercy."

Before the first strike, he had purged the senior JAG officers, which is the military's own legal guardrails. Al Jazeera's investigation concluded the targeting was either grossly negligent or deliberately designed to "inflict maximum societal shock and undermine popular support for Iran's military establishment." Either finding is a war crime.

Trump now says accountability is "a strange question." That answer closes the case for self-investigation and opens the door to external jurisdiction.

The Rome Statute's complementarity principle is precise: where a state is unwilling to genuinely investigate, the ICC may act. The evidence of unwillingness here is the president's own words.

Beyond the ICC, states exercising universal jurisdiction - Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, and others - are not merely empowered but obligated under the Geneva Conventions to investigate grave breaches, including the willful killing of protected civilians. Once indictments issue, the named individuals face arrest in any cooperating jurisdiction they enter.

The children of Minab were killed in the first hour of a war they did not know had started. The legal record is built. What remains is the will of the international community and third states to honour the obligations they have assumed.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

The deceitful tactic of labelling everything anti-Semitism -- not just the growing opposition to US financing of Israel but also the broader political changes reflected in last night's NYC vote -- has tried desperately to hide the reality that all these causes have large amounts of Jewish support.

The anti-Israel campus encampments were filled with Jewish supporters and even Jewish leaders. Zohran Mamdani's staff and his grass-roots organizers featured large numbers of Jews. The new martyr of anti-Semitism Dan Goldman lost to a Jewish politician who was one of Zohran's key endorsers. Bernie Sanders endorsed Claire Valdez. The DSA -- vital to many of last night's most consequential results -- has countless Jewish activists.

The very idea that Jews are somehow endangered by political changes that are supported by large numbers of Jews is just laughable. But in America politics, screaming "BIGOTRY!" has become the last refuge for losers.

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

"The hardest decision we had to make in completing this report was.. not to name the Palestinian children, whose deaths, injuries & suffering we describe.. we didn't name them because we feared the consequences for their families"

He means Israel would go after them too.

[kev joon @never_oppressed]

Calling a Jewish politician a parasite in the name of stopping antisemitism. Amazing stuff.

[Mouin Rabbani @MouinRabbani]

Best meltdown yet!

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Nah because there’s nothing you can hate about Netanyahu that isn’t also innately true of the apartheid state of Israel.

Hate Netanyahu because he’s racist? Israel has always been racist.

Hate Netanyahu because he’s a war criminal? Israel has always committed war crimes.

Hate Netanyahu because he abuses and oppresses Palestinians? Israel has always abused and oppressed Palestinians.

Hate Netanyahu because he starts wars with Israel’s neighbors? Israel has always started wars with its neighbors.

Liberal Zionists act like Netanyahu has all these bad qualities that the genocidal apartheid state of Israel does not also have, but that’s just plain false. Israel was built on the premise of nonstop violence and abuse, and nonstop violence and abuse is all it has ever delivered, from its very inception.

Israel was built on a political ideology that is inherently racist and violent, and it is that racism and violence that elevated Benjamin Netanyahu to power.

Netanyahu didn’t create Israel’s violence and racism. Israel’s violence and racism created Netanyahu.

[Sophie Vershbow @svershbow]

Brad Lander and Micah Lasher are Jewish New Yorkers being sent to congress by Jewish New Yorkers and non-Jewish non-New Yorkers seem to have a real problem with that allegedly on behalf of...Jewish New Yorkers.

[Omar Baddar عمر بدّار @OmarBaddar]

Where the quarter-Jewish 10th district elected a great Jewish member of Congress?

If progressive Jews electing progressive Jews scares you, at least have the intellectual honesty to accurately identify what makes you upset.

[Justin Glyn SJ @JustinGlynSJ]

Quite. Similar reflections apply to other forms of discrimination too. Impolite #disability discrimination (unacceptable) beats up blind folk in the street. The polite form (acceptable) strips the #NDIS of funding & funds the Israeli military to kill folk with Down's Syndrome.

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

Again, “I support human rights and progress and oppose racism but also am pro killing 20,000+ children in Gaza” is simply not a tenable position anymore. The contradictions are too heightened, blah blah terrorism blah blah antisemitism doesnt have the juice it used to. It’s over.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Excitement over yesterday's Montreal shooting was palpable. The opportunity for politicized narrative exploitation appeared limitless: a violent attack in a Jewish neighborhood filled with key Jewish insitutions.

But then the facts emerged. The shooter's name is Seth Hatfield. The police officer he murdered was Const. Mohamed Lamine Benredouane of Algerian or Moroccan dissent.

The only Jewish person killed was a Lebanese immigrant who apparently was accidentally shot by one of the cops. And the shooter's lengthy manifesto had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, Israel or leftist ideology but instead relied on a nuanced and hybrid form of an incel worldview.

And just like that, interest in this incident evaporated as quickly as it emerged:

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

A student submitted an essay she wrote by hand. Her university ran it through an AI detector. The detector said she cheated. She is autistic.

Her name is Moira Olmsted. Adelphi University. February 2026. Turnitin flagged her essay as 100% AI-generated. She was disciplined.

Two other AI detectors classified the same essay as human-written.

She sued. She won. The court called the school's decision "arbitrary and capricious."

She is not the only one.

In May 2026, a high school student in Palo Alto was expelled after an AI detector flagged his work. He faced visa revocation. He filed a federal civil rights lawsuit.

A researcher at Griffith University just proved mathematically why this keeps happening. The paper is on arXiv. The finding is one sentence.

AI text detectors have a structural flaw that no amount of better engineering can fix.

Here is what the math says.

If a university wants its detector to catch 80% of cheaters, at least 750 out of every 10,000 innocent students will be wrongly accused. That is not a software problem. It is a theorem.

If the university tries to limit false accusations to 1%, detection power collapses to 6%. It catches 6 out of every 100 AI-written papers. The other 94 get through.

There is no setting where the detector is both fair and effective.

The reason is diversity. Every student writes differently. Non-native English speakers use simpler vocabulary. Shorter sentences. Clearer structures. So does AI. A Stanford study found that 61.3% of TOEFL essays written by non-native English speakers were misclassified as AI-generated. A separate analysis tested 14 commercial detection tools. Zero out of 14 reached 80% accuracy.

The students most likely to be wrongly accused are non-native English speakers, neurodivergent students, and anyone who writes with clarity and precision. The qualities that make their writing effective are the same qualities the detector mistakes for a machine.

Vanderbilt University understood this. They disabled Turnitin's AI detection in 2023 after calculating that even a 1% error rate across 75,000 submissions would produce 750 wrongful accusations per year.

750 students accused of cheating for writing like themselves.

The paper's conclusion is not that we need better detectors. It is that the diversity of human writing itself makes accurate detection mathematically impossible.

The same thing that makes your writing yours is the thing that gets you accused.

https://t.co/L91ldtXP05

[Omar Baddar عمر بدّار @OmarBaddar]

Bad night for the genocide apologists, and a great one for those who believe in freedom and justice for all!

[Tarik Cyril Amar @TarikCyrilAmar]

Yep, very, very high time that Turkey really boycotts Israel. For starters. Don't play around with your declared lethal enemy.

[Jesus Chrysler @JesusChryslerII]

Five Mexican guys could have fixed the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in one weekend, but we deported them.

[Alonso Gurmendi @Alonso_GD]

Essentially, her most fundamental human right - her right to exist in the modern world - has been destroyed because of her speech and advocacy; because she said something a powerful government did not like. And they call this “the law”

[Justin Glyn SJ @JustinGlynSJ]

A wise exposition on "Teflon brain" v "Velcro brain" (what we ignore and what we cling to) and why the latter tends to be focused on negative input.

[Omar Baddar عمر بدّار @OmarBaddar]

I'm old enough to remember when Israel's apologists used to engage in sophisticated propaganda to whitewash Israel's crimes.

Since Israel's conduct is now impossible to defend or whitewash, the apologists have become a one-trick pony: smear anyone who objects to these crimes.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

This report is haunting even for someone who has documented the most horrific aspects of this genocide - which too many world leaders pretend not to see.

I commend the Commission of Inquiry for its effort to bring about accountability and make the truth accessible.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

A new UN report says Israel is committing genocide by DELIBERATELY TARGETING PALESTINIAN CHILDREN and I can’t find anything about it from @nytimes @AP @washingtonpost @CNN @SkyNews…

How is this not the top headline at every major news outlet?