People who come to Bluesky & block after the first interaction: maybe you could have remained on the other side

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/m... "Despite the carnage in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, and even in the face of the Trump administration’s apparent determination to dismantle what remains of the liberal international order, the human rights attorney Philippe Sands insists he is not giving in to despair"

"A determination that Myanmar committed genocide could foretell a similar judgment against Israel. If, on the other hand, the I.C.J. clears Myanmar, it would be interpreted as a positive sign for Israel"

"One reason the trial in The Hague is being closely watched is the implications that it might have for a case that the I.C.J. is expected to hear later this year: the genocide allegation that South Africa has brought against Israel over the war in Gaza" (Philippe Sands article in NYT)

How Trump imagines Greenland.

21th century phrenology

Sur Netflix, documentaire sur le journaliste du New York Times Seymour Hersh, qui enquêta e.a. sur des crimes de guerre commis par son pays à My Lai, au Vietnam, et dans la prison d’Abou Ghraïb, en Irak. Chronique d'Eva Roque www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/...

You do by this point have to wonder what the downside would be of putting out an EU statement anyway, and seeing if Orbán can become any more destructive. Would he really eventually find a legal way to challenge it?

"Move the King". Is this a chess game?

"Somalia, a country where Italy can count on a long-standing presence and a heritage of bilateral relations rooted in *more than a century of shared history.*" 🤔🤔🤔 🇮🇹 🇸🇴 www.ansa.it/english/news...

It is weird that American houses don't have washmachines

Robert Kagan: "President Trump wants to return to the 19th century’s international order. He will leave America less prosperous—and the whole world less secure." Tell me something I do not know, mate.

this is the dumbest diplomatic crisis of my life

Anne Applebaum still believe in the existence of "adults in the room" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

After a few days of looking through the identified victims of the massacre in Iran, what strikes me the most is how young they all are. Almost everyone is between 22 and 35 years old.

Another excellent article by @margheritacapacci.bsky.social on the latest updates concerning the non-cooperation of Italy with the ICC in the Almasri/Elmasri case www.justiceinfo.net/en/154252-li...

Bel reportage da Cipro, in questo semestre alla testa del Consiglio UE (e non del Consiglio d'Europa, come scrive la Stampa)

open.spotify.com/episode/2zXV... A conversation with Omer Bartov on Germany, genocide, Gaza

I think the White House badly underestimates the strength of the pan-European folk memory of 1930s appeasement, and how deep it still cuts. I suppose this is what happens when you learn in school that WW2 started in 1941 in Hawaii.

He doesn't need to stand for re-election. Why is this surprising?

Meanwhile in the UK, a Palestinian *citizen* of Israel has won his asylum battle and has been deemed a refugee due to the "substantial evidence of systematic discriminatory practices against Palestinians in Israel: apartheid, forced removal, restrictions of rights and exclusion from society”.

"Conseguenza di segno opposto del riscaldamento dell’Artico è la crescente possibilità di svilupparvi attività economiche" www.difesa.it/assets/alleg...

BTW, Central and Eastern Europe and Italy are really the outliers worldwide. Also interesting (and unexpected) is how many systems in Australia allow multi-door boarding

Folks, any help with populating this map of bus and tram boarding policies in South America would be most welcome! I suspect that 99% of cities are front-door boarding-only outside of BRT systems (so B*) and eventually trams (the few existing systems) but I'd appreciate more detail!

A lot of people don't know that Nobel laureates get two medals. A real gold one usually kept in a safe deposit box and a gold plated duplicate for public display. She gave him the dupe

These programs help to offset what I’ve previously described as a vampiric relationship between AI companies and the commons: www.citationneeded.news/free-and-ope...

With “Wikimedia Enterprise”, AI companies have to use (and pay for) dedicated APIs to scrape data, which helps to limit the strain on Wikimedia servers. (See eg arstechnica.com/information-...) This is a good thing for Wikimedia and for its readers.

www.maltatoday.com.mt/environment/... Today in Honest Headlines

I have no doubt that under-16s will be banned from social media before the next election. For all its many faults, It's a bad idea to ban things that you have simply failed to regulate or educate about properly. But we will nonetheless.

🇲🇹 🐅 "Despite Malta’s small size, some 400 wild animals were known to be kept in captivity in 2020. Last year, the government granted an amnesty to owners of dangerous animals who came forward to register their animals."

Le prime foto di Alberto Trentini e Mario Burlò dopo la liberazione

#BBCNews - Guantanamo detainee paid 'substantial' compensation by UK to settle torture complicity case www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“They’re conspicuously silent” said one EU official. “Rutte was supposed to be the man Europe could rely on to be our Trump-whisperer. But he wasn’t supposed to be this quiet.” Nato yet to issue public statement asserting territorial integrity of ally Denmark or Greenland as.ft.com/r/f125cd10-6...

My text on genocide denial in German discourse, first published with @pw-portal.bsky.social, now also appeared in English on @hahauenstein.bsky.social's Substack "Nullpunkt". I explore five types of denial as a synchronous and diachronous repertoire of rejecting the genocide claim vis-à-vis Israel.

Memo to EU institutions and officials: you need to get off the deepfake porn site you're still using as the main avenue for your public outreach.

I'm currently in 19th century Italy. I learned that Italians were the pioneers of psychiatry. Starting in the 17th century the mentally ill were often chained and locked up. Italian doctors were the first to unchain them, and emphasised the importance of treating the mentally ill as human beings.

Da due mesi in sciopero della fame per denunciare il genocidio a Gaza e la repressione del dissenso in Gran Bretagna 🇬🇧

The EU really knows how to hide its light under a bushel. It has just passed the world's biggest trade deal (with Mercosur) - using a written procedure among ambassadors, making the public barely notices a huge strategic step forward for Europe. Contrast with Trump's made-for-TV signing ceremonies.

As a "war" (vs "conflict") is defined as >1000 deaths per year, the U.S. 🇺🇸 have already been in a civil war for a good while.

"Secret police" is often misunderstood to mean a force that operates covertly, with all their operations secret. But a secret police force's actions are often public. The secret part is hiding their identities, because they're breaking laws to hurt politically disfavored people, and fear reprisals.

if in the process of defending ourselves from russia we destroy everything that actually makes us different from russia then what was the goddamn point. language? music?

Hello! Democracy expert here. This is a sign of major distress. Governments only do this when they are planning to ignore the results of elections.

Of course, I wonder why Laurynas Kasčiūnas, former member of the neo-nazi National Democratic Party of Lithuania, would have a problem with saying that Denis "WhiteRex" Kapustin is in fact a nazi.

It’s great that the champions and defenders of Western Culture are censoring Plato. The moral panic over accurately teaching about American racism was always about disciplining professors in general. We’re a check on propaganda, which propagandists hate.

Betting pool for the first new country to develop a nuke?

It should be fairly clear by now that our ruling class is banking on an oligarchy hardening into place and all of them will do whatever depraved shit the admin asks for to have a seat when the music stops

It might also time to stop using the Mercator projection that shows #Greenland 🇬🇱 as being bigger than North America or even Africa

Gerontocracy

I hope everyone at the Nobel Prize commitee and every other dunce around the world wakes up to the bill of goods they've been sold and enjoys the fucking ride they've put us on now the US is turning and going, "Oh what? The heroic Peace Prize lady in charge? Are you kidding? Nobody likes her."