I can remember a group of you unleashing the wrath of the Polish twitterati on me for my Wars car comment, yes

Hi it’s me, I cover the “misfit toys [countries].”

it….could have turned around. it was a ship. it would have taken a few minutes. and you can’t turn the wreck of it around cuz it’ll fall apart the second you try and raise it. what are we doing with our metaphors here man

Carney must act: Canada must join Eurovision

In maart 2025 gebruikte de Servische regering een mysterieus geluidskanon tegen demonstranten. De Russische FSB was ook geïnteresseerd, schrijft @unawrites.bsky.social in @politico.eu www.politico.eu/article/serb...

No notes. This excellent article really nails what so many of us who cover countries the U.S. promised *so much* to have been talking about for years.

My hot take for the evening is that good indie music peaked in the early-mid 2000s and nobody appreciates/makes it like before (currently listening to Shoot the Runner by Kasabian)

Visionary

„Serbian intelligence officers tested sound cannons on dogs in collaboration with Russia’s security service (FSB), according to 🇷🇸 government documents seen by POLITICO - 2 weeks after an anti-government demonstration in Belgrade was disrupted by what protesters described as a crippling sonic blast.“

There’s very little that manages to shock those among us still covering the protests in Serbia. Still, the idea that illegal tests were done on dogs to prop up the govt’s claim that protesters weren’t subjected to cruelty is about as grim as it gets. My story here: www.politico.eu/article/serb...

Serbian intelligence officers have tested sound cannons on dogs in collaboration with Russia’s notorious security service, according to government documents seen by POLITICO.

An absolutely wild one from @unawrites.bsky.social - intelligence officials in Serbia worked with Russia’s FSB to test ‘crowd control’ sound cannons (LARDs) on dogs in defiance of Serbia’s own animal protection laws www.politico.eu/article/serb...

So… people from the Western Balkans (apart from Serbia), Moldova, Belarus and Russia won’t be able to travel to the US anytime soon?

I feel like Gen Z took the confidence boost we tried to pass on to them (like standing up for yourself and your work) and upgraded it to full-blown arrogance. Also: to all my old editors who are here… sorry if we were difficult. We didn’t realize it (these kids are worse!)

I’m not convinced they actually believe this video to be exculpatory. It reads as more triumphalist to me — i.e., a ‘look what we can do’ vibe meant to shock and numb and intimidate

Trump is “singularly obsessed with the spectacle of power. That’s nothing new for the far right—fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were, [too] but Trump, who calls himself a very aesthetic person, takes it to another level.” Michael explains (again) how often fascism surfaces in Trump’s everyday choices

Yeah, so Trump’s use of CCR's anti-war song “Fortunate Son” in his TruthSocial video of the military raid in Venezuela wasn't a mistake — it’s part of a very deliberate far-right approach to aesthetics. A short thinkpiece I did for @newrepublic.com newrepublic.com/article/2049...

Shamelessly stolen from the other website, because of course that specific part of the crisis would have been averted if Europeans were involved 🤣🤣🤣

16 hours in, my guess this was all intended basically as a coup to put VP Delcy Rodriguez in power (likely without her knowledge but 🤷). At least for democracy & human rights, that might be even worse than the "opening shots in a war" scenario. All speculation, but let me explain:

This was the second-biggest wtf moment of the presser (after announcing "we will run the country")

Welcome back, 19th century wars of American expansion 🫠

Trump just announced “we are going to run the country” until they can guarantee a just transition because they “can’t run the risk of someone else taking over” Venezuela. “We are going to run it, essentially.”

This is Gen Z’s Saddam Hussein capture photo

“But what if Russia tries to do this to Zelensky???!!” - people who just woke up from a years-long coma

The US alleges Maduro and other officials participated in a “narco-terrorism conspiracy” involving Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles and Colombia’s FARC—a far-left guerrilla—dating from at least around 1999 through about 2020 incl. negotiating cocaine shipments and directing support such as weapons.

Venezuelan opposition figure and actual Nobel Peace Prize winner (and Trump policy supporter) Maria Corina Machado said that “what had to happen is happening” and that Venezuelans should be ready to set in motion “what will be communicated to [them] via official channels.”

Meanwhile Balkan countries like Kosovo and Albania appear to have decided this was the right moment to back the current US administration and its approach to Venezuela

Get ready for Phase Two: a raid on Oslo to seize the Peace Prize.

Prediction markets really expose some of the most disgusting human impulses in our push to monetize every aspect of daily life 🤯

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

Just imagine being an IR Realist this morning

BBC World Service talking about Maduro's "apparent defenestration"? Not sure that's quite right, but if you're going to throw someone out of a window, Manhattan's the place to do it

Venezuela’s had about 6-8 coups and failed coups, depending on who’s counting — sadly not unusual for South America. What’s new is seeing a decapitation event publicly framed as US-led in real time and rolled out almost entirely on social media. Welcome to coups in the digital era

Cilia Flores gets a lot less international attention than Nicolas Maduro, but she’s been a high-profile Chavista insider for years. Flores was on Hugo Chavez’s defense team and helped secure his release from prison/clemency in 1994 (without trial) after the failed 1992 coup attempt.

The rules-based international order was always a euphemism for what the US government was prepared to back with force, but kidnapping a foreign leader does suggest that DJT needs to watch much less television. This is the scheme of a Batman villain.

Democrats — who, unlike much of the rest of the world, have some capacity to curtail the administration — will likely respond by offering still more restraint and ever more milquetoast candidates

To sum up, a US president is going to war without congressional authorization against a sovereign nation that has not attacked or threatened it, and is doing so like a thief in the night, with no explanation for the American people or the world. It is all so unimaginable that it strains credulity.

FIFA peace prize in action

2026 has barely begun and we are already in the kidnapping-heads-of-state era

Trump warns US will intervene if Iran attacks protesters. So Trump finally found protesters he likes- the ones in Iran!!

The Iranian government aren’t Nazis, they’re just doing the heart-to-you gesture

I’m happy to stand corrected — HAL, the hyper-aware AI software managing an advanced space invasion in a movie that came out in 1968 — is in fact MORE advanced than ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, etc. and is a warning for a future when machine-generated decision-making will actively decide to kill humans.

Articles about Brigitte Bardot after her death on Sunday have referred to her far right sympathies, which supposedly emerged later in the film star's life. Here she is, though, in 1958 with Jean-Marie Le Pen and Pierre Lagaillarde, future founder of the extremist OAS terror group

Rewatching 2001: A Space Odyssey and realizing it’s basically about a primitive form of ChatGPT killing all the astronauts

Some of you might be wondering why I’m being petty about the death of a beloved French and European icon. It’s because figures like her used their popularity as a shield, getting a pass while helping normalize the very forces we now pretend to be shocked have overtaken Europe and beyond.

“Convicted five times for inciting racial hatred, Bardot remained, for three decades, an exception in French culture – the only celebrity to openly defend the far right. In the 1990s…the star adopted those views and married…[an] adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen” www.lemonde.fr/en/obituarie...

Zelensky lands in Florida with a 20-point plan and a prayer as Trump hosts a summit to redraw Europe’s map – all while Russian missiles provide a grim backbeat to the Mar-a-Lago diplomacy. www.kyivpost.com/post/67038

Worth noting, before the misty-eyed tributes begin, that Brigitte Bardot was handed six fines for “inciting racial hatred,” opposed to MeToo-era reporting on sexual assault and publicly endorsed far-right leaders in France.

Denis Kapustin (“Nikitin”), Russian neo-Nazi leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) fighting on the Ukrainian side against Russia, has been killed in battle, reportedly by an FPV drone strike International neo-Nazi Telegram is already full of remembrances and eulogies for ‘White Rex’

“Starmer urges Europe’s leaders to curb ECHR” An absolutely shocking headline and not what I expected from a Labour government. The Prime Minister won’t achieve ‘decency’ over ‘division’ by trying to be Reform Lite www.theguardian.com/law/2025/dec...