🇺🇸💔🇪🇺 Trump’s 2025 UN speech was the longest U.S. address on record and the most negative toward Europe. This is the focus of my first Medium article, where I track how Europe appears in U.S. UNGA speeches from 1946–2025 and visualize the results. 📖 Read on Medium: medium.com/@alfredo-hs/...

💯 this, "PhD level intelligence" is such a cringy expression clauswilke.substack.com/p/phd-level-...

Massacre after massacre, day after day - the deliberate annihilation of an entire civilian population. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

'Following Israel’s ‘pre-emptive strike’ on Iran earlier this month, which happened just as more people started speaking up about the genocide, attention has been averted from Gaza. But Israel’s assault on Gaza (and the West Bank), is continuing apace.'

So is the rest of the planet just supposed to shut its mouth and treat these everyday massacres of civilians as normal now because Netenyahu and Trump now run the world?

Meeting in emergency session today, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional and lasting ceasefire in Gaza. The United States & Israel were among the 12 voting against. news.un.org/en/story/202...

In 1963, Bernard Cohen wrote the press may not tell people what to think, but it does tell them what to think *about*. Similarly, in 1960s protests and media made civil rights salient. All to say, politicians may struggle to shape mass opinion, but they can influence which issues are salient.

Externalising asylum is the hottest trend in EU migration policy; but just 10 years ago the European Commission opposed it on humanitarian and legal grounds. Here's what you need to know. euobserver.com/migration/ar...

Perhaps we're getting closer to that day. Can't help but think of those who said it was "too complicated", who cast doubt on the death tolls, who claimed the images from Gaza couldn't be trusted.

truly jarring watching Israel nearly winning Eurovision Song Contest, immediately followed by BBC news coverage of Israels new ground offensive in Gaza

To the dad wearing the “taxation is theft” shirt while playing with his kids at the *public park*: Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Alarming amount of destruction in Rafah visible in recent @planet.com imagery. The city, already heavily damaged by the IDF previously, is now almost entirely gone with previously intact neighborhoods like Al Jneineh or Khirbet Al 'Adas now being further demolished. Comparison of April 29 & May 7.

“Illegal immigration, in particular, is poisoning our politics and trust in institutions.” Dangerous and reckless language in a deeply nativist @financialtimes.com column today. The normalization of far-right ideas in the name of fighting far-right actors is morally and strategically wrong!

📢New paper out on measuring global #migration flows using online data in @pnas.org We use privacy-protected records from over 3 billion Facebook users to estimate migration flows between 181 countries, accounting for biases in social media usage 🔗https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409418122

This is a tragedy and a historic shame. The public has a very strong interest in the intelligent, deep, and yes, highly balanced & non-partisan reporting that these institutions have given us my entire life. Endorsing InfoWars/Newsmax spittle while attacking PBS is perverse and contemptible.

Two months of Israel blocking *all* aid from entering Gaza www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

I’ve just published a hands-on tutorial on how to perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) using Python’s transformers library from within R via reticulate as part of my @firsa-eu.bsky.social project. #rstats #dataviz #python #ggplot2 #tidytuesday #nlp #ner firsa.eu/posts/ner_re...

Beautiful visualization of social media data and trends largely comport with international migration scholarship www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

New blog post: What does international trade actually look like? Where I made some pretty network graphs

I was scheduled to give a talk on Palestine at a student conference at @notredame.bsky.social. The University rescinded my talk a week in advance citing an extremely flimsy excuse. It is truly disgusting. Attached is the letter I received and my reply, link below...

Rain in Brussels This graph visualizes the daily rainfall in Brussels over the course of a year. Each circle represents the amount of rain recorded on a specific day. #30DayChartChallenge #RainInBrussels #WeatherData #DataVisualization #Graphane playground.graphane.dev/editor/grnn2...

GOLDMAN hikes its odds of US recession to 35% — from a prior 20%. The move reflects “the sharp recent deterioration in household and business confidence, and statements from White House officials indicating greater willingness to tolerate near-term economic weakness in pursuit of their policies.”

Hundreds of international students have just received an email telling them their visas have been revoked. The ‘justification’ is campus activism or social media posts. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/hun...

The president of Columbia agreed to Trump's demands to purge all academic freedom re Palestine but then privately said she'd slow walk them, which immediately leaked to Bari Weiss's outlet, so then the board purged her too

NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated. The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west). My column: www.ft.com/content/3046...

Hey @ec.europa.eu why is Eurostat not on bluesky and still posting on X? How can you promote high quality statistics and data about Europe on a platform that is owned and destroyed by someone who is actively undermining fact-based public discourse as well as the international order?

This person has no idea how many people have died, or will die, as a result of shattering our entire global infrastructure for providing lifesaving assistance. He did no analysis of those impacts before the reckless and illegal obliteration of USAID. These statements are made-up assertions.

For the German election we wanted to use a cartogram of German election districts but didn't find anything good, so we created our own. Here's a little nerd thread how the final algorithm worked 🤓 🧵 #gis #cartogram #election #datavis #cartography

According to this new analysis from Reuters, almost a quarter of those killed in Gaza were under 12. 1,200+ families were completely wiped out, the data showed, including one entire family of 14 people Great work by Sudev Kiyada, Simon Scarr and Nidal al-Mughrabi www.reuters.com/graphics/ISR...

Humanitarian folks, you already lost USAID funding, you truly have nothing left to lose if you start doing your goddamn job and scream from the rooftop about what's happening and who's doing what

Well, as America implodes from within, it’d be a *great* time for the EU to finally do official Eurobonds. It’d likely be very attractive as a safe haven given the destruction of US hegemony & spillover to US T-bills. Bonus: Eurobonds can finance a desperately needed European security build up! 🇪🇺💶 ‼️

NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany: Gender divide continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung sharply left. www.ft.com/content/29fd...

The hypocrisy is excruciating.

Basically right, except Die Linke are no-longer “populist left. More like “radical left” or even “progressive left”, like the Scandi equivalents. BSW have done Die Linke a huge favour, by detoxifying them.

Learn from Germany. When the left panders to anti-migrant sentiment, like the BSW, it just strengthens the far right. When the left fights solid, populist, grassroots campaigns, like Die Linke, it wins.

Younger German women in cities vs older German men in the countryside. The difference in voting preferences could hardly be bigger.

No final results yet, but a few pointers on the German election before I go do bed: CDU/CSU won, but real winners are Left who exceeds all expectations, and AfD who doubles votes as compared to 2021. Coalition options still open question, all eyes now on whether BSW reaches 5%. Quick thread:

German public TV just published this poll of first-time voters. A massive lead for socialist Left party on 27%. Left + SPD + Greens on 54% among first-time-voters. Those voters were also slightly less likely to vote AfD than national average. So much for the “far-right youth”.

Good @iamjburnmurdoch.bsky.social on the increase in time spent in loneliness by younger generations (using ATUS, ONS Time Survey and European Social Survey) www.ft.com/content/2305...

Providing information often not effective in correcting misperceptions about immigration. This new study shows that combining information with perspective-getting might do the trick

“USAID-backed studies have been shuttered, data streams have dried up, researchers and technical staff have been fired or put on leave, a system to predict food crises has been muzzled, and a USAID-supported global health journal has stopped reviewing manuscripts.” From our @science.org news team 🧪

The sudden and illegal elimination of all US aid personnel worldwide immediately reduces US soft power. It makes Americans less secure, everywhere. Economists have shown that pro- and anti-American attitudes are directly shaped by aid given in time of need.

My depressing thought for the day: it seems increasingly inevitable that quite soon, Trump decides to simply disregard a court finding that some of his actions are illegal or unconstitutional. Impeachment is attempted & fails thanks to loyal Republicans. At which point there are no good options.

We just released an enormous trove of US labor market data, all compiled from government surveys, now under threat The @epi.org State of Working America Data Library provides comprehensive data on the US jobs and wages, with detailed cuts by demographics, over time and across states data.epi.org

My latest story just went up. I fear it may go out of date any minute so please read now www.economist.com/united-state...

USAID's foreign aid dashboard with data on all foreign assistance is down now. I downloaded all data last night after USAID's other database, the DEC, was removed. If you know others archiving government data, please share. In the meantime, contact me if you need the files.

"This is what genocide looks like." Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History, Hebrew University Daniel Blatman, Director, Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University archive.ph/WGtkB

Remarkable: Spain's post-2008 GDP has now grown more in % terms than Germany's, mainly thanks to the last three years (h/t @danielkral.bsky.social).

Terrific piece of data journalism from my colleagues @eadehemingway.bsky.social and @janinaconboye.ft.com examining falling fertility rates around the world, the reasons for the decline, and the consequences for the future. www.ft.com/content/2f4e...

With <4 weeks until election day, how strong is #Germany's #farright #AfD? I have compiled 19 months of polling data so that you don't have to. Several major scandals have done no lasting damage to their support. And the events & debates of the last 12 weeks have been a boon for them.