Search

Would you inhabit a 3D-printed house erected in eight days? An affordable / mould-resistant / fire-resistant / seismic-resistant / climate-disaster-resilient house. SOURCE: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1420242892872158 A 3D-printed house that genuinely resolves the global housing crisis!!! What you are viewing in the video is no mere exhibition prototype. It is House Zero — the first luxury 3D-printed residence realised in Austin, Texas, by the American firm ICON in collaboration with the practice Lake|Flato Architects. Two hundred square metres, three bedrooms, a drawing room with exposed beams, a designer kitchen, and an independent casita in the garden. Its iconic undulating walls were extruded in a mere eight to ten days. A project so revolutionary as to have been included in TIME's list of the Best Inventions of 2022. But what does it truly signify to dwell in a 3D-printed house? WHAT A 3D-PRINTED HOUSE IS: No bricks or formwork are employed. An enormous robotic arm — ICON's Vulcan system — deposits, layer upon layer, a proprietary special concrete, Lavacrete, a material engineered to be eminently resistant, insulating, and printable. The entire process is governed by software that adjusts the formula every fifteen minutes according to weather conditions. Plaster and structure become one and the same. WHY IT IS THE FUTURE OF CONSTRUCTION: ALL THE ADVANTAGES 1. Record times: The walls of House Zero were completed in eight days, as opposed to the months required by a traditional building site. The site operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and never ceases for lack of labour. 2. Less waste and greater sustainability: Additive printing uses only the material that is necessary. Site waste and emissions from material transport are reduced to nigh on zero. Moreover, Lavacrete is designed for superior energy efficiency. 3. Lower costs (potentially): Fewer workmen on site, fewer deaths and injuries at work, less time, fewer errors. According to ICON, the system can substantially curtail construction costs and render housing more accessible. 4. Total architectural liberty: The curves, the fluted walls, the integrated niches you see in the video would be exorbitantly expensive or impossible by traditional methods. With 3D printing, form truly follows function. 5. Resilience and insulation: The walls in printed reinforced concrete are more resistant to fire, water, mould, and extreme atmospheric agents, typical of Texas. The thermal inertia of the material guarantees superior insulation. 6. A solution to the housing crisis: It is the technology that ICON is already employing to build entire neighbourhoods of one hundred houses in Texas and for social housing projects in Mexico. The question now is this: having seen it within, would you live in it?

Linda Kitchen recounts the tragic incident that occurred during Singapore Airlines flight SQ321, in which her husband Geoff died due to severe turbulence and she suffered serious spinal fractures, leading her to file a lawsuit against the airline in search of justice and answers. (translated)

Israeli officer Noczi Mendel, responsible for the attack on the World Central Kitchen humanitarian convoy in Gaza, expressed no remorse for the order issued, despite the death of Polish volunteer Damian Soból, stating that the shots were a result of mistaken identification. (translated)

Government press conference from today: Naive questions about the US dollar as the reserve currency, Israel's attack on "World Central Kitchen" 2024, autonomous killer robots, socialization of real estate companies, Pakistan/visa revocation, and Syria/Israel vs Turkey. (translated)

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland summoned the Israeli ambassador Jaakow Finkelstein. The reason is the dismissal by the Israeli military authorities of the proceedings regarding the shelling of a convoy of volunteers from the humanitarian organization World Central Kitchen that took place on April 1. (translated)

Izrael umorzył postępowanie w sprawie ataku na konwój World Central Kitchen, w którym zginął polski wolontariusz Damian Soból. Stanowisko @MSZ_RP? "Duże rozczarowanie". Nie za ostro wobec państwa, największego sojusznika naszego największego sojusznika? #Izrael #Wolontariat #SytuacjaMiędzynarodowa

Poland demands explanations from Israel regarding the death of Polish volunteer Damian Sobół, who was killed as a result of Israeli shelling of a World Central Kitchen convoy in the Gaza Strip, after Israeli military authorities closed the investigation into the matter. (translated)

The military prosecutor of the IDF announced the results of the investigation into five cases of suspected Israeli war crimes. This includes the killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, with her family, 15 medical personnel, or the attack on World Food Kitchen. (translated)

Rabaa: The Hour the World’s Conscience Stood Still On the anniversary of one of the largest single-day killings of protesters in modern history, one question remains unanswered: who will be held accountable? By Adham Hasanin Egyptian journalist and political writer, based in the Netherlands On 14 August, the anniversary returns of a day unlike any other in modern Egyptian history. Not simply because it was the bloodiest Egypt has known wars and massacres before and since ,but because it was the day a state chose to open fire on its own people in broad daylight, in front of the world’s cameras, and then let thirteen years pass without a single officer ever being held accountable. This article will not be a cold recitation of statistics, though the statistics exist, are documented, and are horrifying. It is an attempt to understand something deeper: how a square in the heart of Cairo, filled with tents, children, and worshippers, became the site of the largest mass killing the Arab world has witnessed in the past decade and why the echo of that day still reverberates in every Egyptian prison cell today. I. A Morning That Began Like Any Other For readers unfamiliar with the background: in July 2013, the Egyptian military, led by then-General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, removed Mohamed Morsy Egypt’s first freely elected civilian president, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who had taken office in 2012 following the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak. In response, tens of thousands of Morsy’s supporters staged an open-ended sit-in demanding his reinstatement. By 14 August 2013, more than twenty thousand people had spent weeks camped out at two Cairo squares, Rab’a al-Adawiya and al-Nahda, in a peaceful sit-in. They were not an army, nor a uniform bloc; they were entire families men, women, and children, some affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, many simply ordinary citizens who saw the restoration of elected legitimacy as a cause worth the risk. There were tents for sleeping, communal kitchens feeding the demonstrators, speaking platforms, and a small field clinic that no one imagined would, within hours, become one of the most terrifying places in modern Egyptian history. In the early hours of that morning, Central Security Forces and army units, under the command of then-General Sisi, began what was officially described as a "dispersal" operation targeting both sit-ins simultaneously. It was not a dispersal in any ordinary sense of the word. According to a year-long investigation by Human Rights Watch, it was a pre-planned operation that anticipated, from the outset, thousands of deaths. II. The Numbers the Regime Refuses to Speak The Egyptian government, to this day, cites a death toll of "over 600" for that single day a figure that, even at its official lowest, is horrifying enough to warrant an independent international investigation. But the field investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch, drawing on field hospital records, survivor testimony, and analysis of video footage from dozens of angles, arrived at a far more disturbing figure: at least 817 people killed at Rab’a Square alone, with the true toll likely exceeding 1,000, plus another 87 killed at the nearby al-Nahda Square. When the deaths from the weeks surrounding 14 August are added from the dispersal of the Republican Guard sit-in on 8 July, through the Mansoura Street killings, to the dispersal of an October 6 march the combined total reaches at least 1,150 deaths in just six weeks, according to Human Rights Watch’s meticulous documentation. This figure led the organisation to use a term not deployed lightly in international law: crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch described the Rab’a killings as "one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history." Not in Egyptian history alone in modern history as a whole. What happened at Rab’a is cited in international reporting alongside China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. This is the true scale of what the Egyptian state has spent thirteen years trying to minimise, justify, and reduce to a mere "security incident" in a news bulletin. III. "All According to Plan" When Mass Killing Becomes Administration, Not Chaos The title Human Rights Watch chose for its detailed report on the massacre deserves lingering on: "All According to Plan." This is not an emotive headline; it is a precise legal conclusion built on field evidence. According to the investigation, what happened at Rab’a was not a dispersal operation that spiralled out of control amid chaos or panic, as the regime later tried to portray it. It was a carefully planned operation that assumed, in advance, massive casualties. Then-Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim admitted, in a televised interview broadcast on 31 August 2013 just weeks after the massacre that his ministry had anticipated losses of "10 percent of the people" present at the sit-in, acknowledging that the number of demonstrators exceeded twenty thousand. By simple arithmetic, this is an official admission that the state anticipated, in advance, the deaths of roughly two thousand people and proceeded with the operation regardless. This is the true horror at the heart of the Rab’a story: it was not a security operation that spun out of control, but a conscious administrative decision, made in an air-conditioned room, with advance calculations, by men who knew precisely how many human beings would die under their fire and who proceeded anyway, or perhaps because of it. According to Human Rights Watch’s analysis, the objective was to send an unambiguous message: whoever challenges the new state will pay an irreversible price. IV. Snipers, Women, and Children The Faces the Reports Do Not Tell Behind every number in the Human Rights Watch reports lies a full human story, deliberately omitted from the state’s official narrative. The investigation documented how security forces opened fire from multiple angles, and how snipers positioned themselves atop buildings surrounding the square, targeting according to survivor testimony and analysed video footage any movement in the square, regardless of whether it was an armed combatant or a nurse trying to reach a wounded person. According to documented testimony, entire families had their tents burn over their heads as fire swept through the sit-in. Doctors and paramedics were killed while trying to pull the wounded from the line of fire. Most damningly of all, the documentation shows deliberate targeting of ambulances and field medical points meaning that wounded people who survived the first bullet then faced death by bleeding out, because anyone attempting to save them was themselves a target. This detail the targeting of medics is what elevates the event from "excessive violent repression" to what human rights organisations have described as a systematic crime. When security forces target those trying to save the wounded, they are not merely dispersing a sit-in; they are preventing witnesses from surviving to tell what happened. V. Thirteen Years of Total Impunity The most painful part of the Rab’a story is not only what happened that day, but what has not happened in the years since. From 14 August 2013 to today, not a single officer, of any rank, has been held accountable for the deaths of hundreds, or thousands, of Egyptians. Quite the opposite: the state has moved to entrench impunity through the force of law itself. Egypt issued legislation granting senior military officers immunity from questioning over any violations that may have occurred following Morsy’s removal a law specifically designed to close the door on any future judicial accountability, regardless of how political circumstances might change. Even the fact-finding committee established by then-interim President Adly Mansour to investigate the June and July events concluded, in its report issued more than a year after the events, that the sit-in’s leaders bore responsibility for the deaths, on the grounds that they had allowed weapons into the square even as the same report admitted, in a glaring contradiction, that security forces had failed to target only armed individuals, meaning they had fired indiscriminately on everyone: armed and unarmed, man and woman, adult and child. This is the pattern that has repeated for over a decade: as each anniversary approaches, official statements re-narrate the events and shift blame onto the victims, while the actual perpetrators — those who planned the operation, gave the orders, and pulled the trigger — remain free. Some now occupy the highest offices of the state. VI. Why This Anniversary, Why Now? A reader might ask: why revisit this story after all these years? Has the world not moved on to newer crises? The answer lies in the very nature of impunity. When a state is never held accountable for the largest massacre of protesters in its modern history, it does not simply "forget" the crime it sets a precedent, telling every future ruler and every future security apparatus: mass killing is possible, politically profitable, and free of cost. This poisonous lesson does not remain confined within Egyptian borders; its echo reaches every Arab capital contemplating how to handle its own opposition. More dangerously, this system of impunity did not stop at Rab’a’s edges; it is the foundation on which Egypt’s entire subsequent decade of repression was built: thousands of political prisoners, grossly unfair mass trials that produced death sentences for dozens of defendants in cases linked directly to the Rab’a events themselves, laws criminalising peaceful protest, a muzzled press, and a civil society hollowed of substance. All of it traces back to the morning of 14 August 2013, when the state learned that overwhelming force succeeds, and that the world will condemn for a few days, then move on. VII. Delayed Justice Is Not Forgotten Justice Despite more than a decade of official silence and impunity, the Rab’a case remains alive in international legal memory. Human rights organisations, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, continue to renew their annual calls for an independent international investigation, grounded in the legal principle that crimes against humanity are not subject to statutes of limitation: delayed justice is not forgotten justice. The victims who fell in that square were not numbers in a statistical report. They were fathers who left behind children too young, that day, to understand why their father would never return. They were mothers who, thirteen years later, are still searching for a clearly marked grave to which they can carry flowers, and young people who had decades of life ahead of them that they never got to live. Their memory does not fade with time; it grows with their children, who carry with them the same question their parents asked before they were killed: when will justice come? Conclusion: What Does This Anniversary Demand of Us? Every year, as the anniversary of 14 August returns, the same question resurfaces one the Egyptian state refuses to answer: who gave the order? Who planned the operation? Who decided that twenty thousand human beings deserved to be shot with live ammunition because they staged a peaceful sit-in? This anniversary is not a call for vengeance, nor an invocation of the past for its own sake. It is a reminder that justice, however delayed, remains a debt still owed. And that every instance of international silence over a massacre of this scale opens the door to the next one, elsewhere, under a different pretext, carrying the same lethal conviction: that the world will condemn for a week, then forget. We will not forget. And we will not stop asking the question that unsettles everyone who took part in that crime, regardless of the office they hold today: where is the accountability? Rab’a is no longer merely the name of a square in Cairo. In the conscience of everyone who believes in justice, it has become a test of the world’s conscience itself a test the world has not yet passed.

This podcast analyzes one of the most serious cases of political corruption in recent times, the Kitchen case, which involved police operations funded by public resources aimed at sabotaging the investigation into corruption linked to the former treasurer of the PP party, Luis Bárcenas. (translated)

In the Kitchen case, which concerns the illegal surveillance of the family of former PP treasurer, the defendants, including former minister Jorge Fernández Díaz and other commissioners, present a version of events that sharply diverges from the evidence gathered during the investigation and even from the previous testimonies of some of them. (translated)

The trial of the Kitchen case has concluded after four months of sessions in the National Court, where the Prosecutor's Office has requested sentences of up to 19 years for the accused, including former high-ranking officials of Mariano Rajoy's Government, for their alleged involvement in an operation aimed at spying on and stealing documents from Luis Bárcenas, former treasurer of the PP. (translated)