On December 28, 2024, the IDF kidnapped Dr Hussam Abu Safiya from his post as pediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza. He had refused to abandon his patients. He has been held in Israeli prison without charges ever since, tortured, starved, refused family visits.

Hard to disagree

When people talk about the idea that some universities must go under, there’s a certain tendency to behave as if these smaller local campuses are negligible- regrettable casualties perhaps but not ‘real’ universities. This report does a great job of illustrating why that’s wrong.

The photos from a UN fact finding mission to northern Gaza which were part of a diplomatic cable suppressed by the US Ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, have been released by Drop Site News. These are the genocidal conditions in Gaza that Lew specifically tried to hide from the White House and public.

two years today since Hind Rajab was killed by the IOF. she was 5.

To close the educational attainment gap, we are rolling out a scheme to get poorer students addicted to amphetamines

Matt Goodwin makes a living out of railing against university educated elites & his whole schtick is "he was the first person in his family to go to university", which is a bit weird given that his Dad, now being heavily invoked for his Manchester connection, appears to have a string of degrees.

Muhammad Shehada: Gazan politics “did not interest” military planners who are convinced Palestinians will move into their biometric ghettoes “if you dump enough food there”. Once again, the essential ideological tool of imperialism is the denial that the Global South has any capacity for politics

May the history books never forget the "Butcher of Hama" and may we find alternate ways to bring Rifaat al-Assad's victims and their loved ones even a semblance of justice for the crimes he evaded accountability for during his lifetime.

This will be excellent — “Partisan Virtue” by Geertje Bol @whpt.bsky.social 👇 global.oup.com/academic/pro...

33 month postdoc (0.8 FTE) on a really interesting project at Essex on #EarlyModern German and English witchcraft... www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQC497/s...

Some professional news: I'm now hiring two postdocs to be part of the research project I'm leading on global republicanism and the making of democratic cultures in the early 19th century. If you know someone for whom this may be relevant, don't hesitate to let them know. www.au.dk/om/stillinge...

Being a historian of the French Revolution means occasionally looking up some minor political figure only to discover they've somehow been picked up as a character in an anime series castlevania.fandom.com/wiki/Vaublanc

the graduation of a cohort of gaza’s new medical professionals in front of the ruins of al shifa hospital. No words, really.

Please join Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and many others in signing this call for an academic and cultural boycott of the UAE, in relation to its complicity in genocide in Sudan. spectrejournal.com/for-a-cultur...

Last week, the Committee to Protect Journalists (@pressfreedom.bsky.social), Amnesty International (@amnesty.org), & 3 U.S. lawmakers urged accountability for Israel’s Oct. 13, 2023 strike in south Lebanon that killed Issam Abdallah, critically injured Christina Assi, & wounded 5 other journalists.

Israel hunted a 70 year old lady down with a gun drone and then hoovered above to make sure she bled out next to her dying son. They both join almost 1,000 Palestinians Israel has massacred or maimed in its genocide during the "ceasefire". www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12...

Not only did he do this, but literally three months later he refused to challenge the UAE over the RSF's genocidal massacre in Zamzam at a "peace" conference in London, and instead made a priority of meeting -- you guessed it -- the Israeli FM www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

In Lebanon. Can hear the Israeli drone constantly now. I’ve only been back for a day but folks here deal with it 24/7, for months. It’s psychological torture. You can even see it, just flying around. The Israelis want to let everyone know that they can kill whoever they want whenever they want.

Au printemps 1803, Henri Grégoire séjourne à Bruxelles, où il passe un bon moment en dégustant les bières locales, la faro et celles du village d'Hoegaarden. "Vous autres gens de Paris, vous ne connaissez pas cela, vous êtes des ignorants" écrit-il à sa gouvernante Madame Dubois.

"Israel has “a de facto state policy of organised and widespread torture”, according to a UN report covering the past two years, which also raised concerns about the impunity of Israeli security forces for war crimes." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

"Filiu’s accusations echo those made by some aid officials at the time. An internal United Nations memo described Israel’s “passive, if not active benevolence” towards some gangs responsible for looting in Gaza." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

The diplomatic "achievement" of the ceasefire was to recalibrate the tempo of the genocide sufficiently to get it off the front pages and the news bulletins, thus alleviating the political pressure on Israel's western accomplices. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Come and take my job here in beautiful (if currently slightly chilly) Turin: turinhumanitiesprogramme.fondazione1563.it/research-pro... Happy to answer any questions anyone might have about the programme

For all postdocs and ECRs: don't miss out on this great opportunity with the Turin Humanities Programme! voltaire.ox.ac.uk/news-item/tu...

Filed under the category "perils of typos whilst note-taking"

We use the Weimar comparison a lot but Britain increasingly feels like ancien régime France, where the monarchy desperately flogged off tax-exempt offices to fund its immediate spending in the full knowledge that it was only shrinking its own tax base

Quand soudaingue, en 1790, on tombe sur un créateur d'automates appelé wak-wok-vauk-an-son Frankésteïn

Enjoying the suggestion in this piece that Larry is now fulfilling the traditional function of the constitutional monarch www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

How universalist was Enlightenment thought? In our 2025 Besterman Lecture, Antoine Lilti (Collège de France) discusses 'The three languages of universalism: thinking globally in the Enlightenment’. Thursday 13 Nov, 5pm @magdalenoxford.bsky.social: voltaire.ox.ac.uk/event/bester...

Other news from this trip: I wore my Wedgwood Benn for Pope! t-shirt to the Vatican and a carabiniere stopped me and asked for my ID

There are adverts on the Rome metro to remind drivers that however much pedestrians might annoy them, it is always wrong to run them over

Il y a soixante-quatre ans, le 17 octobre 1961, la police française massacrait des Algérien·nes qui manifestaient pacifiquement pour leur dignité.

Honestly don't know how Starmer is so bad at this. The choice is between a few isolated criticisms now or a massive violent blow-up in two weeks' time that dominates the front pages and obviously benefits the far right. Completely incapable of thinking ahead

Al Jazeera is doing videos of the Palestinian releases and they're heart wrenching. One man was detained for over a year and was released to find out that Israel had killed his two kids. The youngest was three. Her birthday would've been on Saturday. He'd made a small bracelet for her in prison.

British politics: if we can just prove we're delivering on the economy and public services we might be able to inch our way back up towards 25% of the vote American politics: our record speaks for itself. beer no longer woke. Retired football player mostly standing

A labour government wants to make amendments to our laws to bring in conditions, and possible outright ban on protests in the UK because the Palestine movement got too big for them to continue to ignore. A Labour government. Not Tory, not reform, but Labour.

It's an unfortunate reality that it's-for-your-own-good authoritarianism is a component of Labour's political DNA, and when you put people like Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid, Jacqui Smith et al in the Home Office, you get plain old you-can't-do-that authoritarianism on top...

I'll say it again. Our horror at the Gaza genocide and at the atrocity in Manchester comes in both cases from the same, inherent part of our shared humanity. We need to assert that shared humanity in the face of both these evils as loudly as possible, and in as many practical ways as we can.

In fact, if this New Yorker story is anything to go by, the generals probably largely agreed with this section of Hegseth's speech. That's what happens when one chooses selective outrage over war crimes www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Yolande Knell reports that Israel bombed a school sheltering displaced people "& then when civil defence workers went to the scene there was another attack" 'double tap' strikes are designed to deliberately kill rescue workers & other civilians. This is what Israel does.

Trump controversially endorses traditional Marxist historiography on the Gracchi brothers

After more than a decade of war, Aleppo’s historic citadel has reopened its gates to visitors, symbolizing resilience and recovery for the war-torn city.

Call me a cynic but I just don't buy that this is Klein being too good-hearted to recognise a bad-faith actor. He portrays Kirk like this because his own liberal programme can only be sustained if one assumes there are good-faith actors on the other side; it's a psychological and political necessity

HUGE HUGE NEWS FROM EGYPT!! Egyptian President Sisi has issued a presidential pardon for activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah.

A last resister passes aged 99. Son of Italian refugees from fascism, "raised on red milk", only 14 at the Fall of France, his first resistance was pasting anti-Pétain messages on postboxes. By 16, he was in armed conflict. Captured in July 1944, tortured, escaping prison... Lifelong Communist.

Likewise, people are fond of saying Arafat rejected a Palestinian "state" at Camp David, when said state was under US proposals going to be demilitarised, territorially non-continguous, and deprived of control of its own foreign policy, airspace, and even water -- i.e. not a state