Touchy Me 🐝

...no matter who you are and what you do...there are still some things that make us all the same: you, me, them, everybody, EVERYBODY!

[Haaretz.com @haaretzcom]

On average, 11 children are killed or wounded every day in Lebanon, UN says https://t.co/XCJfbBMVPh

[Touchy Me 🐝 @marte2379]

Everywhere, at all times.

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

The abominable treatment of civilians aboard the flotilla, including that which is documented in footage shared by Itamar Ben-Gvir, is unacceptable.

Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs has directed officials to summon the Israeli ambassador to demand assurances regarding the safety and security of Canadians involved.

Canada has already imposed strict sanctions on Mr. Ben-Gvir, including asset freezes and a travel ban, in response to his repeated incitement of violence. The protection of civilians and respect for human dignity must be upheld everywhere, at all times.

[Quirinale @Quirinale]

A commento del video sugli attivisti della Flotilla trattenuti in Israele, il Presidente Mattarella ha parlato di “trattamento incivile inflitto a persone fermate illegalmente in acque internazionali, che tocca un livello infimo ad opera di un ministro del governo di Israele”.

[Touchy Me 🐝 @marte2379]

Vigliacchi noi che continuiamo a permetterglielo!

[Ilaria Salis @SalisIlaria]

L’esercito e gli apparati di sicurezza israeliani hanno sempre avuto questo modus operandi.
Per non parlare poi del livello di disumanizzazione e tortura riservato ai prigionieri palestinesi e arabi.

Ma la cosa allucinante è che ormai non provano nemmeno più a nasconderlo, non se ne vergognano.
Anzi, ci tengono a esibirlo davanti al mondo intero.
L’orrendo ministro Ben Gvir, nella sua brutalità, quanto meno è trasparente rispetto alle intenzioni.

Caduta la ridicola maschera della “più grande democrazia del Medio Oriente” – narrazione di comodo e suprematista che anche in Italia tanti ‘sinceri democratici’ hanno contribuito a diffondere, nonostante si tratti di un sistema coloniale e di apartheid –, il loro obiettivo è ormai palese:
comandare per mezzo del puro terrore.

Vigliacchi noi che continuiamo a permetterglielo.

Richiamare l’ambasciatore non basta.
Serve rompere subito e in modo netto con questo Stato terrorista.
Basta complicità!

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

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.

[Dario Carotenuto @Dario5S]

Abbiamo visto navi da guerra israeliane avvicinarsi alle imbarcazioni della Flotilla e poco dopo abbiamo perso la connessione.

Nel frattempo alcune navi sono state intercettate. Per questo rivolgo un appello immediato alle autorità italiane e internazionali: liberate subito gli equipaggi della Freedom Flotilla.

A bordo ci sono attivisti pacifisti, persone disarmate che vogliono solo portare aiuti umanitari e chiedere la fine del genocidio a Gaza.

Non possiamo continuare ad assistere in silenzio a violazioni così gravi del diritto internazionale.

Fermate Israele.
Liberate gli equipaggi.
Fermate il genocidio del popolo palestinese.

[Matteo Villa @emmevilla]

🌈 Diritti LGBTI.

La Spagna è prima in Europa.
L'Italia è ultima in Europa occidentale, e siamo ai livelli dell'Ungheria.

Nient'altro da aggiungere, purtroppo.

[Amnesty International @amnesty]

Failure to suspend Israel from Eurovision, as it continues to commit genocide in Gaza, unlawful occupation and apartheid against Palestinians, is an act of cowardice and double standards. #HumanityMustWin

Read more: https://t.co/1XDnwGOY7n

[pier luigi pinna @pierpi13]

Nel silenzio totale dei mezzi di informazione, il governo Meloni ha approvato una norma che consente l'apertura di sale operatorie senza controlli preventivi sui requisiti minimi di sicurezza.
Ripeto, vista la gravità: senza controlli preventivi.
Con verifiche rinviate fino a un anno dopo.
1 anno.
Dodici mesi di interventi chirurgici, anestesie, bisturi, infezioni possibili, pazienti ignari.
Dodici mesi prima che qualcuno vada a vedere se la sala operatoria è a norma.
La norma non nasce in un provvedimento sulla sanità. Sarebbe stato troppo onesto. È stata nascosta dove nessuno guarda.
Infilata in un decreto che parla di grandi opere, commissari, infrastrutture, Ponte sullo Stretto.
Un contenitore omnibus, uno di quelli che scorrono veloci in Parlamento e ancora più veloci nei telegiornali.
Dentro quel decreto, lontano dagli occhi dei cittadini, si smonta un principio basilare dello Stato di diritto sanitario: prima i controlli, poi apri.
Qui si fa il contrario: apri, opera, incassa. I controlli (forse) dopo.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Possible title: "If this is a lawyer".
***
When Netanyahu will be brought before the Court for his many crimes, many more will remain to be prosecuted. The level of acquiescence and complicity of the entire Israeli institutional apparatus is astounding.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Israel must immediately release the activists it has kidnapped in int'l waters. Persecuting those who oppose Apartheid is part of the crime of Apartheid.

Israel won't stop bullying killing and torturing people until it is forced to:
Boycott, Divest, Protest, Activate courts now.

[Global Sumud Flotilla @gbsumudflotilla]

URGENT PLEASE READ

The Greek government owes explanations to the Greek people, the international community, and the international humanitarian justice system.

Following the illegal, piratical operation in which hundreds of members of the Global Sumud Flotilla were seized by the israeli occupation forces within a Greek search and rescue zone west of Crete and south of the Peloponnese, the Greek government cooperated with the genocidal state to disembark the abducted individuals at a port in Crete.

israel has officially acknowledged that two of those detained, Thiago Ávila and Saif Abukesek, are being unlawfully transferred to Occupied Palestine against their will. The Greek government is enabling an international operation of abduction of citizens from third countries and is consenting to blatant violations of international humanitarian law and the law of the sea.

The Greek government is acting without restraint, positioning the country as the most privileged ally of a genocidal state. At a time when israel is facing widespread international delegitimization, Greece is disgraced and risks becoming a pariah state in the international community.

We will continue the struggle for Gaza, for Palestine,
for freedom and for justice.

End the illegal siege of Gaza now.
Freedom for our comrades.

[Global Sumud Flotilla @gbsumudflotilla]

🚨 URGENT: GSF PARTICIPANTS BRUTALIZED BY IOF AFTER 40 HOURS AT SEA 🚨

Global Sumud Flotilla participants have just survived 40 hours of calculated cruelty aboard an iOF navy vessel in Greek waters.

They were denied adequate food and water. They were forced to sleep on floors that were deliberately and repeatedly flooded.

When the military moved to abduct two participants, Saif Abukeshek (Spain / Palestinian origins) and Thiago Ávila (Brazil), our crew peacefully resisted and the response was sheer violence.

Participants were punched, kicked, and dragged across the deck with their hands bound behind their backs. They suffered broken noses, cracked ribs and bloody beatings. Shots were even fired at them in the chaos.

The nightmare isn't over. Greek police are now trapping our battered crew on buses, denying them the freedom to leave while Saif and Thiago have been abducted and taken back to Occupied Palestine.

Our participants remain unbroken: 60 participants have immediately launched a hunger strike.

This is a vicious attack on peaceful civilians. We will not look away. We demand their freedom and international accountability NOW.

[Ultimora.net @ultimoranet]

❗️ Si è dimessa l'intera Giuria internazionale della Biennale di Venezia, composta da Solange Farkas (presidente), Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma, Giovanna Zapperi. La decisione clamorosa arriva dopo settimane di tensioni sulla riapertura del padiglione russo e sulla presenza degli artisti israeliani e all'indomani della visita degli ispettori del ministero della Cultura

[Amnesty International @amnesty]

There are grave concerns for the safety of the around 175 activists arbitrarily detained and being transported to Israel, after their vessels were boarded in international waters near Greece and Israel jammed their communication channels, severing their ability to coordinate or ask for help.

This underscores the dangerous consequences of decades of impunity for Israel’s ongoing atrocity crimes against Palestinians, including genocide in the Gaza Strip and apartheid, and its unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory.

The crew of the intercepted vessels must be immediately and unconditionally released. While in custody, the Israeli authorities must ensure that all activists are immediately granted access to consular support, treated humanely and protected from torture and other ill-treatment.

[Touchy Me 🐝 @marte2379]

How on earth is it possible that Israel is allowed to assault and seize vessels in international waters just off Greece?
What are European governments doing?

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

The Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) was attacked last night by warships, drones and speedboats full of heavily-armed Israeli commandos, despite sailing just off the coast of Greece, more than 500 nautical miles from Gaza.

Of 57 boats at sea, 22 are believed to have been intercepted in the attack, which began at around 11 pm local time. 35 others escaped interception, with many sailing into Greek territorial waters.

Around 170 participants are believed to have been detained, and are likely being taken to Israel – several days sail away. Others were left stranded at sea. In a statement, GSF described their situation as “a calculated death trap”.

“After smashing engines and destroying navigation arrays, the military retreated – intentionally leaving hundreds of civilians stranded on powerless, broken vessels directly in the path of a massive approaching storm.”

Organisers initially assumed that all intercepted participants had been detained. Many activists posted pre-recorded videos to their Instagram accounts saying they had been taken hostage. But with systems down and phones thrown overboard, it is possible some are actually adrift and unable to communicate.

In October, the IDF pirated flotilla boats and sailed them back to Ashdod – but Israeli commandos reportedly found this challenging because they got seasick and didn’t know how to sail. The journey then was only hours long; this time it could last several days.

While Israel has illegally intercepted dozens of past flotillas in international waters, 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”.

“Alarm! How on earth is [it] possible that Israel is allowed to assault and seize vessels in international waters just off Greece?”

[Al Jazeera Breaking News @AJENews]

Israeli forces have intercepted around a dozen Gaza-bound aid boats from the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters near the Greek island of Crete, more than 1,000km from Israel.

Organisers call it an illegal attack on civilians in international waters.

[Reuters @Reuters]

Israel intercepted humanitarian aid ships bound for Gaza in international waters near Greece, flotilla organizers said. The group called the move an 'escalation of Israel's impunity' https://t.co/kEL9hCOpP7