RUSSIA’S RESTORATION & REVENGE 1996 → 2001 → 9/11 Putin did not simply “appear” in the Kremlin. His rise happened through a sequence of crises that transformed a weak post-Soviet Russia into a centralized security state. 1996: Yeltsin survives a shaky reelection. 1998: the https://t.co/CRfLl3lz5I #Putin #Russia #History #RU
SpaceX has just officially announced Starbase, Louisiana, a new $100+ billion spaceport in South Louisiana near Pecan Island. Construction starts in 2027, with the first Starship launch from the new site planned for 2029. Starbase, Louisiana will be built to support thousands of Starship flights a year. This self-sustaining spaceport will have propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport. SpaceX is committed to investing at least $100 billion and creating more than 3,000 new jobs at Starbase, Louisana hiring heavily from nearby communities and utilizing Louisiana workers’ extensive experience of building complex infrastructure in their unique environment. In Vermilion Parish, the shoreline is eroding between 3.3 and 23 feet per year. SpaceX is partnering with state and federal agencies to expand Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan and Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act projects, including Gulf shoreline protection breakwaters designed to reduce wave energy and slow loss along the Gulf edge. https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2092285684333625550
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.
Trump-appointed Kennedy Center board orders to put his name on building and everywhere after a judge ruled its removal, this time by the trick of adding "Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump" to the name of the centre https://t.co/fDd4rMoy1q #Trump #KennedyCenter #Restoration #US
US left is correct that Democrats need to offer voters far more than an end to Trumpism and a restoration of the earlier status quo. But the fact is that winning in 2026 depends above all on mobilizing the 60% of Americans who are fed up with Trump https://t.co/MtGLw4juQ7 #Democrats #Trumpism #2026Elections #US
🇪🇺 5 August – European Oluja Day Today I celebrate 5 August as a European Day of Liberation, Croatian Unity, and Oluja Day. Operation Oluja marked the restoration of Croatia's territorial integrity and remains a defining moment in Croatia's struggle for freedom and independence. #EuropeanOlujaDay #CroatianUnity #OperationOluja #HR #EU
Active farming & forest management reduce wildfire risk. The CAP helps by: 🐑 Supporting grazing that clears combustible vegetation 🌾 Creating firebreaks 🌲 Investing in forest restoration & roads for prevention + emergency access Abandoned land, by contrast, becomes fuel. https://t.co/GjoOwl1ivd #WildfirePrevention #SustainableFarming #ForestManagement #Therearenospecificcountrymentionsinthetweet.Thus #theresponseis:
🇭🇷 5 August – Croatia's Liberation Day should become a European Day of Freedom. Operation Oluja marked the restoration of Croatia's territorial integrity and was a decisive step toward ending the wars in Croatia. It demonstrated that aggression and occupation cannot prevail over https://t.co/rQlsmwrmHM #Croatia #LiberationDay #EuropeanFreedom #HR
At the World Congress of Constitutional Law in Bogota, Colombia, at the first plenary session, I ask whether the rule of law can be an obstacle to the restoration of democracy in the countries such as Poland, Hungary etc. https://t.co/bvDLe8pwlk #RuleOfLaw #Democracy #ConstitutionalLaw #CO #PL #HU
Nguyễn Dynasty woodblocks, Viet Nam’s 🇻🇳 first Memory of the World heritage, were severely damaged. With Japan’s 🇯🇵 JFIT support, 300 fragile blocks were restored and made printable again. 👉https://t.co/SeNpdr52vB @JapanUNESCO @DelUnescoJapan https://t.co/bzKfCo0xka #NguyễnDynasty #CulturalHeritage #Restoration #VN #JP
Internet access in Iran has begun to be partially restored after a nearly three-month blackout imposed by the government amid ongoing conflict, although significant restrictions and filtering still remain in place, raising concerns about the sustainability of this restoration. #IranInternet #InternetShutdown #DigitalFreedom
Despite a presidential order to restore international internet access in Iran after an 88-day blackout, a court has halted the enforcement of this decision, leaving citizens in uncertainty over their connectivity, even as reports of partial restoration emerge. #IranInternet #DigitalBlackout #InternetFreedom
21 May 2006 — Montenegro chose freedom, democracy and a European future 🇲🇪🇪🇺 Celebrate the End of Yugoslavia Day. The peaceful democratic restoration of Montenegro’s independence was another step toward: ✅ the end of Balkan wars ✅ the end of communist Yugoslavia ✅ sovereignty https://t.co/b31iB2m89r #Montenegro #EndOfYugoslavia #EuropeanFuture #ME #EU
The world's first vaccination clinic, the Temple of Vaccinia in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, is set to reopen to the public on May 17, 2023, after a major restoration funded by a £221,508 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, commemorating Dr. Edward Jenner's pioneering work in vaccination against smallpox. #VaccinationHistory #PublicHealth #HeritageRestoration #GB
The world's first vaccination clinic, the Temple of Vaccinia in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, is set to reopen on May 17, 2023, following significant restoration funded by a National Lottery Heritage Grant, marking Dr. Edward Jenner's 277th birthday and celebrating his pioneering work in smallpox vaccination. #Vaccination #PublicHealth #HeritageRestoration #GB
The Temple of Vaccinia, the world's first vaccination clinic where Dr. Edward Jenner performed the first smallpox vaccinations in 1796, will reopen to the public on May 17 after significant restoration funded by a £221,508 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. #VaccinationHistory #PublicHealth #HeritageConservation #GB
The world's first vaccination clinic, the Temple of Vaccinia in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, will reopen to the public on May 17, 2023, after major restoration funded by a £221,508 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, celebrating the site where Dr. Edward Jenner conducted the first smallpox vaccinations in 1796. #VaccinationHistory #PublicHealth #HeritageConservation #GB
Recent refinery attacks linked to the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine have resulted in a nearly 9% reduction in global oil refining capacity, exacerbating fuel supply issues and delaying recovery despite rising crude prices, with daily demand for liquid fuels remaining high and little potential for quick restoration of affected facilities. #OilCrisis #RefineryCapacity #GlobalEnergy #IR #UA #RU #SA #KW #NG
María Corina Machado: President Trump is the only head of state who risked the lives of his citizens to help my country achieve freedom and democracy. Rodríguez has the last chance to be seen as a figure that allowed a peaceful and orderly transition to democracy. There are signs of free speech, mobilization, and criticism that did not exist before. However, this does not mean a full restoration of civil rights. No one knows how high these investment amounts are or what the conditions of the contracts are. There is no oversight body.
