Don’t fall for the manufactured fall of veganism. The science and the benefits haven’t changed. Industrial animal agriculture is cruel and unsustainable. Give Veganuary a go. My latest for @thestar.com: www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Ukraine's intelligence warns Russia is planning a false flag attack with mass casualties around Orthodox Christmas—using Western drone debris planted at church sites to blame Kyiv The goal: derail Trump-mediated peace talks days after the Mar-a-Lago meeting ⤵️ 🔗 euromaidanpress.com/2026/01/02/u...

🧵 by @donmoyn.bsky.social on a NYT story for which „Adam Entous conducted more than 300 interviews over more than a year with government, military and intelligence officials in Ukraine, the United States, Britain, Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Turkey.“

THREAD: Verified videos of anti-establishment protests currently unfolding in Iran Protesters push back police and security forces on Tehran's Jomhouri Street. Location: maps.app.goo.gl/LKZH6YbnT2WE... @geoconfirmed.org

Vrai sujet qui commence sérieusement à m’énerver. Les politiques n’ont pas la compétence. Ces problèmes ne peuvent être adressés qu’avec un panel d’experts indépendants, à l’image de l’initiative citoyenne pour le climat, et à la condition d’adopter par décret les conclusions de leur travail.

I wanted to make a lemon pig but I didn’t have lemons or toothpicks now I’ve gone and summoned the spirit of Dali and will have a surrealist year ☹️

New research: Being car-dependent is so awful that some people who drive everywhere still support restricting cars in urban areas. "Dissatisfaction with car-based mobility can foster openness to change – even among those most dependent on cars." doi.org/10.1016/j.tr...

hot take: sabrina carpenter would have been a profoundly better glinda than ariana grande

Weiss believes she is engaged in a game in which the point is self-aggrandizement, and that everyone else is involved in that same game, and she fundamentally cannot *understand* criticism on the grounds of integrity or virtue.

60 Minutes (RIP 1968-2025) had an excellent story on the work Finland is doing patrolling the Baltic Sea to stop Russian attacks. It’s worth watching while you can. www.cbsnews.com/video/baltic...

You cannot have “AI” without having “machine that almost solely exists to create nonconsensual sexually explicit images of mainly women and children.” The former exists in tandem with the latter. That’s how this industry has worked so far, and it has only gotten worse with zero accountability

THIS IS WHAT YOU DO WHEN YOU'RE A REAL EUROPEAN

Begum may be 'distasteful', but it is pretty clear she was a victim of grooming and trafficking. The decision to make her defacto stateless is also clearly incompatibile with the principles of international law. Labour doubling down doesn't change that it is bad. 1/2 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Finnish police forces have boarded and seized the 132-meter-long Russian shadow fleet cargo vessel Fitburg moments after it destroyed 5 submarine telecommunication cables between Finland and Estonia by dragging its anchor on the seabed. www.hs.fi/suomi/art-20...

A Roman terracotta lamp with Victory holding a shield inscribed with a wish for a happy and prosperous new year. Around her are representations of things that were usually given as gifts to celebrate the New Year: money (here three coins), and dried fruit (dates and figs). 🥳 🏺 1/ #MetMuseum 📸 me

Joining the EU has been a magic ticket to prosperity for former Russian satellite states. Bulgaria is now going vertical. This will happen for Ukraine, and it's Putin's nightmare. Ukraine’s resources, size, brainpower and location assure it will make even Poland's success small on comparison.

Dmitry Glukhovsky : « Le pouvoir russe, une fusion entre KGB et crime organisé » Par @fabienescalona.bsky.social

Before returning to hibernation, I want to share one of the most fascinating chats I had last year. The great political theorist Ivan Krastev on why Europe feels disoriented, and how speed, psychology and habit matter as much as power in this moment.

"Le niveau de malnutrition infantile est plus de trois fois supérieur au seuil d’urgence de 15% fixé par l'OMS" 💡 D’après la FAO, "même si nous augmentons les rendements agricoles de 60% d’ici à 2050, 300 millions de personnes souffriront de la faim à cause d’un manque d’accès aux vivres".

Hey. We made it to the end of this year, through 12 months of blurred edges and unmoored sadness. We did it. We arrived at the end of this road. And now, a new road before us. I’m ready to hike up my pack & walk into the year ahead, wary yet hopeful. I'm glad you’re here. Let’s go.

#HappyNewYear! Utagawa Hiroshige (Japan, 1797–1858) New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji [MShōzoku Inari Shrine in Ōji, Tokyo] From One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, no. 118, part 4: Winter. 1857 Woodblock print commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hi... #JapaneseArt #Fox #Kitsune

Outlook for the new year ...

Happy New Years from Berlin where everyone per usual has lost their minds

They're going to *throw out* one-of-a-kind NASA archives?! Not even a year since the Inauguration & we're already at the 2nd-time-as-farce version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

If this year was about getting off US tech, 2026 is the year to reassess the digital revolution — what works, what doesn’t; what to keep, and what to reject. I’ve only just started to consider what needs to change about how I use digital technology, but I’m excited to learn more next year.

Gingerbread 2025 Dumpster 🔥

Labour won historical margins and then Starmer was like "Oh shit! This is a mandate to hate immigrants and trans people while welcoming nazis with open arms!" Gee, wonder why people think that sucks.

❗️Over 60,000 guided aerial bombs (KABs), around 2,400 missiles, and more than 100,000 UAVs were launched by Russia at the territory of Ukraine in 2025. Air raid alerts sounded at least 19,033 times, — United24.

Mind bogglingly low.

1/ I hate to close 2025 on a dark note, but there's a worrying development. Indonesia's Densus 88 has uncovered and intervened with 68 children across 18 provinces exposed to Neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies through True Crime Community (TCC) networks in 2025.

Anyway, all tankie content about the alleged desires of Eastern Ukrainians is complete nonsense. Donetsk and Luhansk voted /overwhelmingly/ for independence in 1991 and no actual separatist movement has ever existed. More or less 90% of those involved in the War in the Donbas were Russian mercs

The great dystopian fiction writers all failed to even approach the kind of nightmare we are currently entering

“We’ve re-invented the oracle, except THIS time, you can buy ad space in her esoteric prophecies.” what are we doing here guys

Ah, la France… Ce pays fascinant où on croit dur comme fer que trois granules de sucre peuvent sauver de la grippe, mais où un vaccin ferait pousser des antennes 5G et te rendrait stérile. www.liberation.fr/societe/sant...

This just looks like a cliche. They might as well have run away in eyemasks while carrying big sacks with “SWAG” written on the side and shouting “You’ll never catch me, rozzers!”

‘The more of her performances I watch, the more I think it’s pointless even to attempt to write about Garland’s art without superlatives.’ Bee Wilson on being a ‘Judyfan’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Jim Flora really was a fabulous designer, huh www.printmag.com/daily-heller...

19th century liberalism

Pu's cheap lying stunt exposed the uselessness of any US security guarantees to Ukraine (or to NATO members fwiw). If Trump believes the aggressor immediately and unconditionally without any evidence, Pu can accuse Ukraine of violating the terms of any peace settlement and voila, no help from the US

Mel - quoted in the manifesto of a fascist mass shooter who murdered seventy seven people, including a large number of teenagers he specifically targeted as children of socialists - says incitement to murder is disqualifying. Every day, these papers are rubbing everyone’s faces in their impunity.

People are sharing photos of their snow-covered cities — cozy streets, lights, winter calm. And this is Kupiansk under snow: silent, shattered, erased by russia.

[cherrypicking scenes to define genre the way people do with Ghibli movies] The Godfather is "cozy."

Politicians are terrified of an electorate they think is far more authoritarian and angry and right wing than it actually is, because they are out of touch because the literal media - the thing that mediates between public and polity - is corrupted

It’s incredibly dangerous, obviously malicious stuff. It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from this, to: “extremist” ethnic populations protesting is intimidating and threatening Britons; “extremists” voting is threatening democracy; “extremists” being here at all is a threat to all white people.

An essential development over the past decade-plus is that the ignorant went from feeling chastened when their ignorance was revealed to banding together and deciding that, actually, they were right. They might disagree at times, but they agreed that ignorance itself was an indicator of trust.

The invented drone attack on Putin's residence is another pretext to justify Russia's war. Putin has done this before, including in 2022 and 2014, and he will do it again if he gets the chance. This is why RELIABLE security guarantees are critical for a just and lasting peace.

Reminder that years ago it was found out that the FBI straight up made up a whole bunch of fake forensic sciences, plural. People have gone to jail and been executed due to literally pseudoscience. Hair forensics, for instance, is totally nonsense. They admitted it. slate.com/news-and-pol...

unstoppable force (US/UK boomer need for care labour) vs immovable object (the global g20 rage against immigrant labour)