In Denmark, McDonalds workers make $25 an hour and, if they are over twenty, the company starts paying into a pension plan for them, and in addition they have a full 6 weeks of paid vacation.
Now how much do you think this costs customers? The Economist looked into this and found out that the Big Mac costs 76 cents less than it does here.
Don't believe the lies that raising the minimum wage would force prices to go up.
🇨🇦 Tomorrow marks another anniversary of D-Day, and Canada's role in those events deserves far more than a brief mention.
On June 6, 1944, approximately 14,000 Canadian soldiers landed on Juno Beach, overcoming fear, intense enemy fire, and extraordinary pressure to help open the path to the liberation of Europe.
Many of them were barely older than teenagers. Many never made it home.
Their courage, selflessness, and sacrifice became part of the great victory over Nazism and helped lay the foundations of the freedom that millions of people enjoy today.
We remember their bravery. We honor their memory. 🇨🇦🌺
BREAKING: HELL YES! Albania strikes a crushing blow against Jared Kushner's corrupt private island development by FREEZING the bank accounts of a major company tied to the project.
And it gets even better...
According to Albanian reporter Lindita Cela, the nation's anti-corruption prosecutors have frozen the accounts of a landholding company involved in Kushner's $4 billion luxury resort plans.
The move comes as massive protests sweep the country, with local residents incensed at the idea of Ivanka and Jared gobbling up coveted real estate to create a vacation spot for the Epstein Class. The slogan “Albania Is Not for Sale" has been spreading like wildfire and clashes between police and protestors are increasing in intensity.
The asset seizure was ordered by the Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organized Crime and is part of a broader investigation into possibly fraudulent property titles.
Suspiciously, the company in question is owned by Qatari oligarchs Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat. Kushner's ties to dirty Gulf money are well-established. They blossomed during his time in the first Trump administration, where he twisted American foreign policy to benefit specific actors in the region in return for massive investments and business advantages. This deal is rotten all the way to the core.
The Al-Khayyats have snatched up property along a protected stretch of coastline of the Adriatic Sea and it's here and on a nearby island that Kushner intends on erecting his resort for the top 1% of the top 1%. Given what we know about the Trump family, it's safe to presume that the development will serve as a paradise for pedophiles, war criminals, and human traffickers.
But this time, Jared bit off more than he can chew. Albanians are a proud, defiant people. They've survived centuries of larger regional powers seeking to divide their land, rewrite their history, and erase their culture. They're not going to let one greedy businessman defeat them now.
We stand with Albania!
Kushner out! Ivanka out!
Do you stand with the Albanian people?
Please ❤️ and share to demand more investigations into Kushner!
GOD BLESS YOU SIR 🫵🏻🫡
My respect 96 years .
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
AMERICAN MADE .
The GOAT !!
Clint Eastwood Said Something About Getting Old That Stopped Me Cold.
Aging is not gentle.
You are still here. Still present. Still watching the world move. But the body that carried you through everything - the wars, the work, the wildness of youth - begins to ask for more than you can give it. Joints that never complained now speak up in the morning. Eyes that once took in everything now flinch at the light. Breathing, which never required a single thought, starts needing little pauses.
But none of that is the hardest part.
The hardest part is the quiet.
At a certain age, you reach for the phone and remember there is no one left to call.
The people who knew you when you were young - who remembered the same summers, the same streets, the same faces
- are gone. One by one, then all at once, until the memories you carry have no one left to share them with.
So you tell the stories anyway.
To whoever will listen. With a little more color than perhaps the truth deserves. With a touch of pride you've earned and a grief you don't always name. You know the person across from you wasn't there. You know they can't quite feel it the way you do.
But you tell them. Because the telling is the holding on.
Those stories are not just memories. They are the proof that a life was lived. That people were loved. That things mattered.
And if no one asks for them - you offer them anyway, quietly, like setting something down on a table and hoping someone picks it up.
Old age is not simply what happens to a face or a body.
It is memory looking for a place to rest.
And what an older person needs - more than advice, more than solutions, more than someone telling them how to feel - is simply someone willing to sit down, be still, and listen.
Not to fix anything.
Just to be there.
That is the whole gift. And it costs nothing.
~Wild Whispers .
Trump's National Guard surge violently detains U.S. citizen—for holding a sign.
She was standing on her own front porch.
3 soldiers block her from entering her home—tackle her to ground.
"Help! Help! You're breaking my arm!"
she cries.
"You came onto my property—you have no authority to detain me!"
Trump Administration announced a "surge" in the number of National Guard and ICE agents in DC to at least 5,000 last month.
On at least three additional occasions in the last two weeks, National Guard soldiers have handcuffed and detained people in DC.
This footage was submitted to FilmThePoliceDC on June 2.
Incident occurred in the Truxton Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.
Her name is Audrey van der Meer.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.
Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.
The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.
Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.
Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.
Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.
Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.
Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.
The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.
The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.
That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.
Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.
Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.
You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.
The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.
Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
This is NOT good news re the hantavirus ⬇️⬇️⬇️
The virus can remain in human semen for up to SIX YEARS following infection, according to a high quality Swiss study.
Like some other viruses including Ebola, it has the potential for sexual transmission even after a person has recovered.
The discovery means male patients are likely to be advised to change their sexual practices, as is the case with Ebola.
The research was conducted at the Spiez Laboratory, a Swiss government institute tasked with fighting nuclear, biological and chemical threats, and was published in the journal Viruses.
They investigated a Swiss 55-year-old man who had become infected with the Andes strain of the hantavirus in South America six years earlier.
They found that although there was no longer any trace of the virus in man’s blood, urine and respiratory tract, it was still detectable in his semen 71 months later.
They say the male testes may act as a “reservoir” where the virus can essentially “hide” and evade the body’s immune system, said the paper.
“Taken together, our results show that the Andes virus has the potential for sexual transmission,” the 2023 study said, although this has never been documented with hantavirus.
With Ebola, on the other hand, sexual transmission long after infection has been documented.
A 2021 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, which resulted in 23 cases and 12 deaths, was later linked to a survivor of the West Africa 2014-2016 epidemic, who had gone on to spread the virus through sex.
More....
There is a video circulating on the internet that is difficult to watch. A woman sits on a pavement in Louisville, Kentucky. She is wearing a hospital gown. It is 36 degrees outside. Her belongings, everything she apparently owns, are in a plastic bag on the concrete beside her. Behind her, through the glass doors she has just been escorted through, the hospital hums along as normal. The security guards who brought her here have already gone back inside.
She couldn’t afford her bill.
This is not a scene from a developing nation or a history book. This is the United States of America.
The country in which it happens has spent decades telling the rest of the world that it has the highest GDP on earth. Which is a bit like a restaurant proudly displaying its bill on the wall. Enormous number. Terrible meal. The lobster was frozen, the wine came from a box.
Europe, by comparison, has spent the better part of a century building something rather different. The food, for a start, is extraordinary. Not in a showy way, but in the way that a simple lunch in Lyon or a glass of wine on a terrace in Lisbon reminds you that eating is one of the genuinely good things about being alive. The wine is the wine that the rest of the world has spent generations attempting to replicate, mostly without success.
Roughly 35 percent of Europeans live with a chronic illness. In America, that number is 76 percent. The difference is not genetic. It is architectural. It is the slow accumulation of decent food, walkable cities, actual holidays, and a healthcare system that does not require you to crowdfund your own appendix.
Europeans work fewer hours. They have more purchasing power on a smaller salary once you subtract the cost of health insurance, medical debt, and the private school their child needs because the local public one has a metal detector at the entrance. They live, on average, about ten years longer. Not ten years of decline and doctor visits, but ten years of being a person in the world.
In the first quarter of 2025, the number of Americans leaving the United States doubled compared to the previous quarter.  Europe was their top destination. Not for a sabbatical or a gap year. Permanently. These are not people who failed. These are people who did the maths.
There is a man somewhere in America right now who has worked fifty-hour weeks for forty years, taken one week off when his employer permitted it, and will, statistically, be dead before he sees seventy. And there is another man, not very far away on a map but an entire civilisation removed in practice, sitting on a terrace in the afternoon sun with a glass of something cold and no particular place to be. He has had six weeks off every summer since 1987. He knows his neighbours by name.
The first man’s country has the higher GDP.
The first man’s country tops the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) index. The second man tops the Quality of Life Index (QLI). The better health. The longer life. The afternoon.
MAGA America calls that losing.
Ask anyone.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
NATO turned its back? The United States spent the last year threatening to annex Canada and seize Greenland. Both NATO members. Both allies who have sent their soldiers to fight and die alongside Americans for decades.
You do not get to spend a year threatening to absorb two allies and then express disappointment when the alliance feels a little strained. That is not NATO turning its back. That is NATO processing a very large and very public middle finger to Washington.
Delta airplane engine explodes after takeoff—flying from Brazil to Atlanta.
U.S. FAA is gov't authority to last certify this plane safe to fly.
Trump Administration got rid of 1200 FAA workers by firing or buyout—including maintenance mechanics.
"We're going to die!" kids cry.
"The plane is on fire!" passengers yell out.
Pilots declared an emergency, kept the climb low, and returned safely to São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport—with no injured passengers.
Brazilian government agency, CENIPA, has now taken charge of the official safety investigation and post-incident inspection of the aircraft.
🇲🇽🚨 Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum just made it clear: Mexico has every right to send fuel to Cuba, whether for humanitarian or commercial reasons.
No apology. No hesitation. No asking permission.
Washington has spent six decades telling the world who can trade with Cuba and who cannot. Mexico is saying that era is over. Sovereign nations make their own trade policy. They do not wait for a blockade to be lifted. They act.
First Mexico restarts oil shipments. Now the President is putting the empire on notice. Cuba is not alone. Latin America is waking up. And the days of Washington dictating who gets fuel and who gets starved are coming to an end.
The air traffic controller cleared the fire truck onto the runway. Seconds later, the same controller screamed “stop, stop, stop.” The plane was doing 93 to 105 mph.
Both pilots are dead.
Everyone will frame this as controller error. One controller was simultaneously managing a United flight that aborted takeoff after an anti-ice warning, dispatching a fire truck across an active runway, and sequencing an inbound Air Canada landing at highway speed. At 11:40 PM. On a mandatory overtime shift at a facility that has been understaffed for years.
A system that assigns one person that workload will produce exactly this outcome. The only variable is when.
The FAA is short approximately 3,000 controllers. The headcount dropped 13% from 2010 to 2024 while flight volume rose 10%. Over 40% of the FAA’s 290 terminal facilities are understaffed. The New York TRACON, which manages the most congested airspace in America across LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark, has been chronically below target. Newark was operating at 59% of its staffing goal. LaGuardia handles 900 flights a day.
The hiring pipeline is broken at every stage. Only 2% of applicants complete the full process. Training takes up to 6 years. The FAA Academy in Oklahoma City is a bottleneck, with roughly 35% of trainees washing out. Congress blocked legislation to build a second academy. In one recent hiring cycle, the FAA brought on 1,512 candidates and lost 1,300 in the same window. Net gain: around 160 controllers for an entire country.
Three things need to happen and everyone who can make them happen has known for years.
Congress needs to fund and authorize a second FAA training academy. One facility in Oklahoma City cannot produce enough controllers for 900 million annual passengers. Members of Congress from Oklahoma have actively blocked this. That needs to end yesterday.
The FAA needs to cut certification time. Six years from application to fully certified controller is absurd. The agency’s own data shows tower simulators reduce certification time by 27%. They’ve installed them at 95 facilities. That should be every facility, and the simulated hours should count toward more of the certification requirement.
The FAA needs to stop plugging staffing gaps with mandatory overtime. Controllers at understaffed facilities are working six-day weeks rotating between morning, mid, and night shifts. The NTSB has flagged fatigue repeatedly. The controller last night was managing overlapping emergencies during a nighttime operation. Overtime is not a staffing plan. It’s a countdown to the next runway collision.
The controller said “I messed up” to a Frontier pilot who watched the whole thing. The pilot responded “No man, you did the best you could.”
One of them is right. The answer determines whether this happens again.
Important note regarding the accident at LaGuardia Airport. United 2384 wanted to return to gate. Odor in back of plane. Pilot couldn’t raise anyone at United to help get him a gate. Air traffic controller tried to help. There were no gates. Pilot asked for fire truck. 1/2
The war in the Strait of Hormuz will reach your local pharmacy within six weeks. Not because your pharmacist follows geopolitics. Because the active pharmaceutical ingredients in roughly half of America’s generic prescriptions begin as petrochemical derivatives manufactured in India, and India’s petrochemical industry begins as crude oil that transited 21 miles of water that closed on March 4.
Nearly 70 percent of the active ingredients in US generic drugs are produced in India. India imports approximately 40 percent of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The crude feeds refineries that produce naphtha. The naphtha feeds petrochemical crackers that produce intermediates. The intermediates feed pharmaceutical plants in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Hyderabad that produce the API, the active pharmaceutical ingredient, that is shipped to contract manufacturers in the United States, Europe, and across Asia. The chain from the strait to the tablet is six steps long. Every step requires the one before it.
CNBC reported that the Hormuz closure puts America’s generic drug supply at risk. Fierce Pharma warned of longer-term effects on US manufacturing and generics. Think Global Health mapped the pharmaceutical supply chains most vulnerable to disruption. The consensus across trade publications, health policy analysts, and industry executives is identical: four to six weeks of current inventory exists in the pipeline. After that, shortages begin with the most complex formulations first.
Cancer drugs are the highest risk. Biologics requiring cold-chain storage have the shortest shelf life and the longest replenishment cycle. Clinical trial medications depend on uninterrupted supply chains that are now interrupted. Insulin analogues, antivirals, and cardiac medications all contain intermediates sourced from Indian manufacturers whose input costs are rising with every day the strait remains closed.
Air cargo is the emergency bypass. But air freight rates from India have climbed 200 to 350 percent on some routes since the war began, according to logistics tracking firms. Gulf air capacity is down 79 percent because airports in the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar have been damaged or operate under restricted conditions. The Suez Canal route adds 10 to 14 days to maritime shipping times. The Cape of Good Hope route adds 21 to 28 days. Both alternatives assume the Red Sea remains navigable, which the Houthi threat has complicated since 2024.
The World Health Organisation reported a 70 percent funding gap for its operational response in the region. Medical supply chains to Iran itself have been devastated, with hospitals reporting shortages of surgical supplies, blood products, and anaesthetics. But the downstream pharmaceutical effect extends far beyond the war zone. Every Indian manufacturer that pays more for crude pays more for naphtha, pays more for intermediates, and passes the cost forward into API prices that American generic drug companies absorb until they cannot absorb any further.
The molecule does not know it is a medicine. The strait does not know it is a pharmacy. The petrochemical derivative that becomes a blood pressure tablet transits the same water as the petrochemical derivative that becomes a fertiliser pellet. Both are trapped. Both have shelf lives. Both have planting windows or prescription refill cycles that do not negotiate with blockades.
Six weeks. Then the pharmacy starts calling patients about substitutions.
https://t.co/iFmUcarGdV
Another two Canadian charities have had their registration revoked after the CRA found they were using donor funds to support the Israeli military.
https://t.co/gdcdTtm2SD
Why have International Law, please please tell me?
Some of the primary areas of law that international law is concerned with are state sovereignty, human rights, international trade, and international use of force and warfare, as well as the settlement of international disputes.