Quanah Hudson

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption. #NoDeathPenalty

[Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani]

I think the grand irony of MAGA is they constantly rant about the Third World but they are the ones who want America to resemble some of the least advanced places in the world rather than the most

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Televising a public execution is beyond disgusting and barbaric. The death penalty should not exist, let alone be a live-streamed spectacle.

This is a grotesque violation of human dignity. We must oppose this - and the death penalty - everywhere.
https://t.co/VGHDcHryHo

[Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani]

America has imposed a whites-only refugee policy that David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan themselves could never have imagined

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I was having dinner last night with a friend working in the chicken industry and I learned something that blew my mind.

Where do chicken farmers get their chickens? Most of us would say "from their existing chickens obviously, they breed and lay eggs."

That's what I thought too, but turns out I was dead wrong.

The reality is that the immense majority of meat chicken farmers in the world get their chickens from one of 2 companies: Cobb-Vantress, owned by Tyson Foods, or Aviagen, controlled by Germany's EW Group (the Wesjohann family).

They have a concept specific to the industry called grandparent stock: what you buy from these 2 companies is - essentially - a bunch of chickens with planned obsolescence.

The way it works is that each company keeps "pure" bloodlines on its own farms. Let's label them A, B, C and D. Those are the crown jewels - these companies' IP - and they never leave the building.

What they sell you are the "grandparents": chicks from those four lines, but each line in only one sex. You get A roosters but no A hens, B hens but no B roosters, C roosters but no C hens, D hens but no D roosters. Which means you can never breed more A, B, C or D birds yourself.

What you can do is cross them. A roosters with B hens give you the fathers, C roosters with D hens give you the mothers - these are the "parents". The parents then give you the chickens that actually end up on our plates, slaughtered at around 6 weeks.

And that's the end of the road. If you tried breeding those chickens, their chicks would be a complete genetic lottery: still chickens, sure, but without the genetic properties that make them commercially viable. They'd grow slower and less evenly, you'd have to sell them for way more than your competitors, and your business would be dead.

So you have to go back to Cobb or Aviagen for new grandparents. Forever.

Why buy grandparents at all, and raise 2 generations just to sell the third? The answer is scale. If you buy say 100 grandparents, each of them gives you around 50 parents, and each parent hen then gives you around 150 chicks: from those 100 grandparents, you have yourself some 600,000 chickens whose meat you can sell.

It makes no sense for these 2 companies to sell the final chickens directly. They'd have to hatch tens of billions of chicks a year and ship them all over the world. Much easier to simply sell the grandparents and let farmers do the multiplying and pay for the farms, the feed and the labor.

And, you knew this was coming, there is also a China angle here: as you can imagine, China isn't too pleased to be dependent on foreign companies for such a basic food item as chicken.

So China did what China does best: long-term planning. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs launched a plan for "national broiler genetic improvement" (2021-2035), which aims for domestically bred breeds to make up at least 60% of the domestic market by 2035 (https://t.co/INHrS7YUpD).

And, of course, they're ahead of the plan. As of 2025, homegrown breeds held more than 30% of the market: halfway to the 2035 goal in just four years (https://t.co/hF0HvB6Q5y).

Can you escape all this as a consumer? Sure, you can buy organic or Label Rouge chicken, from slower-growing breeds raised for at least 81 days instead of 6 weeks, for two to three times the price.

Except, plot twist: the genetics behind most of those slow-growing birds come from a French company called Hubbard... which has belonged to Aviagen since 2018 (https://t.co/URsRSI3gI0)😅

And even if you could truly escape, you wouldn't want everyone to: we'd need vast new swathes of farmland, both for the chickens and their feed. Ironically, advocating for organic free-range chicken for everyone is one of the worst positions one can take for the planet's resources.

If you want to minimize your environmental footprint, the counterintuitive answer is to buy the cheapest supermarket chicken - or eat less meat, of course.

As my friend was saying last night, you may not like the way this industry works but, at the end of the day, it's what puts affordable protein on the plates of billions of people, using proportionally fewer resources than any other way of raising chicken.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

The corruption in the second term of the Trump presidency -- profiteering off public power to enrich not just himself but his kids and their spouses with billions of new wealth -- is unlike anything seen before by any American president in scope or shamelessness.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

It's always strange how the US uses its unparalleled military and economic power to strangle and suffocate the economies of small nations it dislikes, then points to the intended devastation as proof that those countries are bad and don't work, with no reference to the US role.

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz:

Twenty-four Lebanese villages, hundreds of years old—we destroyed all the buildings, not house by house, but entire villages.

Their destruction has been completed. You need to understand: 15,000 to 20,000 homes across all 24 villages have been destroyed.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This shows that Germany obviously still doesn't get it: their "historical responsibility" isn't to support Israel even as they commit genocide.

When the lesson of Nazism is obviously a universal one about justice, they instead think it's a blood debt to a particular people.

Which is, when you think about it, the Nazi way of looking at it: hierarchizing peoples and assigning collective responsibility - or collective impunity - on that basis.

[The Serfs (youtube.com/theserftimes) @theserfstv]

Israel has killed more journalists than any other nation in history.

More than the total number of journalists killed during the U.S. Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

Israel didn't just kill Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil; they hunted her down and dropped grenades on the medics who tried to save her.

In other news, Europe - in its infinite moral void - voted against imposing even minor consequences on Israel for its countless war crimes.

[The Cradle @TheCradleMedia]

VIDEO | "I received direct threats targeting me on my phone from the Mossad, from the Israelis, and they threatened to kill me. They were literally saying they would sever my head from my shoulders if I didn’t leave south Lebanon."

In an interview recorded before her targeted killing, Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, from the southern village of Baysariyyeh, reflects on the threats she received while covering Israeli aggression in south Lebanon for Al-Akhbar.

"Before 23 September, I definitely didn’t take precautions and I didn’t pay attention to these threats, because I said if I’m going to do what they want, why would I let the Israeli enemy impose its own narrative on me? It brings journalists onto my land and promotes the narrative it wants, while preventing me from moving freely on my own land."

Amal Khalil, along with her colleague Zeinab Faraj, was deliberately attacked and subsequently killed by Israel yesterday in the southern Lebanese village of Tayri. Zeinab Faraj was severely injured and, as per latest reports, remains in stable condition after undergoing emergency surgery.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Israel’s murder of journalists continues. The details of what happened to Amal Khalil are horrific. The Red Cross tried to rescue her but were themselves fired on.

How is Israel allowed such total impunity? Why is the international press not in uproar?

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

Everyone should read what the Israeli military did to journalist Amal Khalil today in this minute-by-minute account as the international community watched in horror. First the text messages threatening her then trapping her and a photographer in a house then bombing them then firing on international rescue crews, all with the world watching in real time. There are no words left for the horrors that U.S. political leaders are enabling.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

Kallas starts her sentence with "Under international law..."

Yet, under the entire genocide in Gaza, Europe completely ignored international law. When the US attacked Venezuela, EU leaders explicitly stated that this was not the time to discuss international law. They repeated that when the US attacked Iran.

But now, Kallas returns to opening her sentence with "international law."

International law is not an optional feature of international relations that you invoke only when it suits you.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

The most f*cked up aspect of this is the "DoorDash grandma" t-shirt she's wearing, and the implications of this: I checked and this is a pre-organized PR stunt between DoorDash and the White House (they boast about it on their website: https://t.co/AHDUwKQfgj).

The lady - Sharon Simmons, "a grandmother of ten" who has "completed more than 14,000 deliveries" - isn't even from DC, they brought her over from Arkansas as a prop for this.

Think about just how uniquely rotten things need to be in order for this to happen.

She is literally a grandmother relying on gig work because she can't afford healthcare for her husband's stage-3 cancer. She doesn't even get paid a living wage and needs to rely on tips. And as an "independent contractor," she gets no benefits, no healthcare, no retirement.

Which means she is an almost perfect illustration of the failure of the American social contract on almost every level: healthcare, labor rights, retirement, wages, etc. Any decent human being looking at her story - let alone policymakers - should feel only one thing: shame.

Yet DoorDash and the White House looked at this woman and saw a photo op. They flew her from Arkansas, branded her "DoorDash grandma" and used her as a mascot for a tax tweak - no tax on tips - that wouldn't even begin to cover her husband's chemo sessions.

Watching the actual video of her "delivery" to Trump (https://t.co/xzNDJq71Jx) is almost unreal. Trump opens up by saying, smiling at the camera, "who says it looks staged? It doesn't." They immediately proceed to do a joint press conference to a bunch of journalists who were conveniently standing right there.

None of the questions that follow during the next 15 minutes are related to Simmons' situation who just stands there. Journalists, the President, and cameras all obsessing over culture wars and the actual war in Iran, while the walking embodiment of the country's deepest structural failures - healthcare, labor, retirement - stands silently in a corporate t-shirt, unmentioned and too uncomfortable to confront.

[Richard Burgon MP @RichardBurgon]

The war criminal who leads Israel is now trying to undermine the new ceasefire and causing immense suffering in Lebanon with Israel's bombing there.

Sanctions helped end apartheid in South Africa. They are needed to force Israel to end its repeated wars across the Middle East.

[حيدر | Haydar @chronicalihere]

The Lancet recently published a study which found that sanctions from the US have caused 38 million deaths since 1970. The average death toll ranges from 400,000 to over 1 million per year.

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

US-Israel have hit 20 schools and 10 hospitals and killed 400 children in less than a week, but US media continues to take for granted they only bomb civilians in “error.” As with Gaza, how many civilians do they have to snuff out before we can entertain the idea this is policy?

[Quanah Hudson @quananama]

Yakov Rabkin‘s view on the war in Iran
https://t.co/Fy2HDGIQ69