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TRUMP’S 10 SINS AGAINST UKRAINE 🇺🇦 Trump promised peace. Too often, his Ukraine policy has meant pressure on Kyiv while Moscow collects the benefits. 1️⃣ Aid withheld. 2️⃣ Intelligence sharing stopped. 3️⃣ Weapons deliveries delayed. 4️⃣ Crimea put on the negotiating table. 5️⃣ NATO https://t.co/EJyOzydSB0 #Trump #Ukraine #NATO #UA #RU

Thank you Minister @shinjirokoiz for the impressive military honours, the warm hospitality and the open discussion. The security of Europe and the Indo-Pacific can no longer be viewed separately. Russia is waging war in Europe, North Korea is supplying weapons and troops, and https://t.co/R6Bf74QTwr #Security #IndoPacific #Russia #JP #RU #KP

🇺🇸 31 AUGUST 2013 — THE DAY OUR TERRIBLE DECADE BEGAN This was the day Barack Obama blinked. He had drawn a RED LINE over Assad’s chemical weapons. Assad crossed it. Ghouta was attacked with sarin. America had warned him. America had the military power to respond. France https://t.co/DN1moCUaKs #Ghouta #Obama #ChemicalWeapons #US #FR

🇺🇸 31 AUGUST 2013 — THE DAY AMERICA BLINKED Obama drew a RED LINE over Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Then came Ghouta. On 21 August 2013, civilians were murdered with chemical weapons outside Damascus. America had warned Assad. America had the military power. America had https://t.co/WfZaxIaA6r #Syria #ChemicalWeapons #Obama #US

THE RED TSAR TURNED CHINA RED. 1945 changed everything. Stalin’s Red Army smashed Japan’s Kwantung Army and occupied Manchuria. That gave Mao something he had never possessed on this scale before: TERRITORY. INDUSTRY. RAILWAYS. WEAPONS. ARTILLERY. AMMUNITION. A STRATEGIC https://t.co/O9XjdBmzxt #Stalin #China #KwantungArmy #CN #JP

Nuclear tests shatter trust, fuel a nuclear arms race & betray every community still living with the legacy of past nuclear tests. I call on all countries possessing nuclear weapons to maintain existing moratoria & bring the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty into force. #NuclearBan #Disarmament #Peace #US #CN #RU #UK #FR #IN #PK #NK

“The escalating spiral of strikes is leading a growing number of Russian officials to the conclusion that Putin could eventually opt to use tactical nuclear weapons as a last resort in Ukraine, according to the people close to the Kremlin.” https://t.co/IouKemQSra #Putin #Ukraine #NuclearThreat #RU #UA

Wenn das WSJ recht hat, bestätigt es meine geäußerten Annahmen: Die US-Fachleute wussten sehr wohl, dass ein paar Bomben auf den Iran keinen Sieg bringen werden. Trump wusste es allerdings besser. "Days before going to war with Iran in February, President Trump summoned his intelligence chief to the Oval Office to ask whether a full-on assault was a good idea. Iran was at its weakest point in decades, senior aides and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told him, providing Trump the rare opportunity to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and bolster his legacy as a peacemaker. The question was whether a large-scale attack would work and possibly topple the regime. Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard outlined assessments from America’s intelligence apparatus. According to people familiar with the meeting, she told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons. Tehran would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market. And it would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East, prompting questions about American resolve and reliability with allies." #Iran #Trump #USForeignPolicy

Russia is producing ballistic and cruise missiles to attack Ukraine. Ukraine must be given the long-range precision weapons necessary to stop that military production at the source. Russian military missile factories must not be safe havens. Every missile destroyed before https://t.co/fBjXF0UnPK #Ukraine #Russia #MilitarySupport #RU #UA

🚨 101 YEARS SINCE THE SECRET IRA–SOVIET PACT 🚨 In June 1925, IRA representatives travelled to Moscow seeking Soviet money and weapons. They reportedly agreed to collect intelligence concerning Britain and the United States in return for Soviet funding. This was not Irish https://t.co/YTCGtMBVim #IRASovietPact #History #Ireland #IE #RU #GB #US

And you know what, the fact that I get along with him, that's a good thing not a bad thing. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. Should have never allowed it to happen. If I were president, I wouldn't have allowed it. But he's got them. I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he's going to be fine. As long as we have a smart president, he's going to be fine. If we have a dumb president, then he's probably not going to be so fine.

From day one of Russia’s full-scale invasion, large parts of the so-called “right” demanded the same thing: stop funding Ukraine, stop sending weapons, abandon Kyiv. At the darkest moment Europe has faced since World War II, when a sovereign European nation was invaded and its #StandWithUkraine #StopTheInvasion #EuropeanUnity #RU #UA #EU

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.

TOTAL TRUM TREASON. @POTUS Trump is rewarding Kim Jong Un’s nuclear dictatorship by weakening joint military exercises with democratic South Korea. This is exactly backwards. North Korea threatens Seoul, builds nuclear weapons, fires missiles and supports Russia’s war machine — #TrumpTreason #NorthKorea #SouthKorea #KR #US #RU

QUE LINDO! Sam Smith menciona Lady Gaga como uma figura fundamental para sua formação e autoexpressão na adolescência. 🏳️‍🌈 Em entrevista ao “The New Yorker”, Sam contou que encontrou em Gaga grande parte da linguagem e da coragem necessárias para se expressar como uma pessoa queer ainda na adolescência. O divo também relembrou sua relação intensa com a artista naquela época: chegou a passar a noite na fila para assistir à “The Monster Ball Tour” e até faltou à escola para ir aos shows. “Sinceramente, grande parte da linguagem que encontrei e da coragem que adquiri para me expressar como adolescente queer veio, na verdade, da Lady Gaga. Quando ela surgiu, havia muita história da comunidade gay em torno de tudo o que ela trazia, e eu aprendi muito com ela e com todas as pessoas incríveis com quem ela trabalhava. Semi Precious Weapons era a banda que fazia a abertura da turnê dela, com Justin Tranter. E eu tive a oportunidade de conhecê-los e trabalhar com eles algumas vezes. Eles significam muito para mim. Quando eu ia às turnês da Gaga, ficava na fila durante a noite para entrar na Monster Ball, conhecia pessoas incríveis, faltava à escola para ir e acabava tendo problemas na escola por causa disso. Mas Justin Tranter subia ao palco e aquilo explodia a minha cabeça. Eu ficava pensando: a coragem que essa pessoa tem, o quanto é sexy e confiante no palco... isso realmente me inspirava. Acho que foram as garotas do pop e as divas pop que realmente me inspiraram a ter coragem e a me expressar quando eu era mais jovem.” Mais alguém se indentifica com o Sam Smith e aprendeu a ser mais confiante com a Mother Monster na época da Monster Ball? 🥹 #LadyGaga #SamSmith #Pride