You’d be forgiven for thinking that life on Tristan da Cunha is quiet: a hammock-strung-between-two-coconut-palms kind of existence, somewhere in the shimmering blue Pacific. It is anything but.

Tristan da Cunha is a rugged Scottish highland dropped into the middle of the South Atlantic. Towering volcanic cliffs rise from the sea. There are no palm trees or white sandy beaches here; instead, you’ll find potato fields, fierce winds and plenty of activity.

Extreme isolation has shaped every part of life on Tristan. With no airport and only a handful of ships visiting every year, residents say they rely largely on themselves — and each other — to keep life on the island running.

With so few residents, there are simply too few people for all the jobs that need doing. When someone is off island or unwell, others have to fill in, whether that means covering shifts, running errands or slaughtering a cow. The limited labor pool means skills are shared and tasks are stretched across families, making daily life a constant balancing act.

President Donald Trump says the United States Navy will begin blockading the Strait of Hormuz “immediately” after peace talks between the US and Iran in Pakistan ended without an agreement.

Trump, in a social media post on Sunday, accused Iran of “extortion” and said the US Navy would hunt down and interdict ships in international waters that have paid Iran a toll to traverse the strait.

“So, there you have it, the meeting went well, most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR, was not,” Trump said. “Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iran has essentially taken control over the Strait of Hormuz, a vital chokepoint for the global energy market, since the US and Israel launched a war on Iran on February 28.

Traffic through the narrow strait has slowed to a trickle, nearly paralysing about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas shipments and sending shockwaves through the global economy.

Iran has denied US claims that two of its warships recently passed through the strait for mine-clearing operations, warning that any military vessels seeking to do so would receive a “strong response”. Trump called Iran’s control over the waterway “world extortion” in his social media post and added that any Iranian forces who fire at US forces or “peaceful vessels” would be “BLOWN TO HELL”.

He added that the blockade would involve unspecified “other countries” and he would not allow Iran to benefit from the closure of the strait.

Iran has continued to send its own ships through the strait since the war began and has allowed a handful of vessels from other countries to pass through. Iranian officials have also discussed setting up a toll system after the fighting ends whereby users would pay a fee to Iran for traversing the strait.

“I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran,” Trump said on Sunday. “No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas.”

Around 9 on a weekday morning at a community center in China’s southern city Shenzhen, a woman pauses in front of a white cabinet that looks like a vending machine. Using her cellphone, she scans the QR code on the machine, a compartment door clicks open, and she takes out a bag of leafy greens and a bag of steamed buns nearing their sell-by dates.

It looks like any quick, on-the-go purchase, but with one exception: no price pops up on the screen.

The woman receives the city’s minimum living allowance, and this is not a typical vending machine — it’s China’s latest, high-tech food bank. At this food bank, there is no line, no clipboard, and no one at the counter asking about her situation.

In China, food banks are a relatively new concept. And Shenzhen, China’s “Silicon Valley,” is approaching such redistribution from an alternative angle. Lacking a network of centuries-old church-affiliated charities and widespread grassroots NGOs, this tech hub has moved food banks to the cloud. Initiated by the local government and supported by enterprises, it operates as a centralized platform that uses data and smart cabinets to connect market surplus with community needs, transforming ad-hoc charity into a precise, scalable, and dignified public utility for its 20 million residents.

Across the city’s Futian District, 22 such machines have been installed, mostly at community service centers or on street corners near subway exits to ensure easy access. Over the past three years, the program has received close to half a million donated items from dozens of corporate partners. Suppliers include tech-driven, Alibaba-founded grocer Hema Fresh and more traditional names like the Great China Sheraton Hotel.

Volunteers screen the — often near-expiration — donations to ensure food safety, after which dedicated staff use cold-chain transport to deliver the goods across the district throughout the day. The cabinets themselves are also cooled.

I know this is a fraught topic, but blowing up entire villages is past a red line. Just as with Gaza, they're blowing up people just because they can. We in the U.S. are complicit in this.

Just to reiterate, opposing Bibi is not antisemitism, it's anti war-crime. Like how opposing Trump isn't unamerican but rather saying "this is wrong."

The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations.

The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims.

The demolitions came after Israel’s minister of defence, Israel Katz, called for the destruction of “all houses” in border villages “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza” to stop threats to communities in northern Israel. The Israeli military destroyed 90% of homes in Rafah, in south Gaza.

The tactic of mass destruction of homes in Gaza, where Israel has been accused of committing genocide, was described as domicide by academics, a strategy that is used to systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable.

edition.cnn.com/travel/central…

archive.is link

But on that day in Beit Lahia, something happened, says Yoni (a psyeudonym, as are the names of other interviewees). "Terrorists, terrorists," one soldier shouted. "We go into a frenzy, and I get on the Negev [a machinegun] right away and start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. We then charged forward, and I realized it was a mistake."

There were no terrorists there. "I saw the bodies of two children, maybe 8 or 10 years old, I have no idea," recalls Yoni. "There was blood everywhere, lots of signs of gunfire, I knew it was all on me, that I did this. I wanted to throw up. After a few minutes, the company commander arrived and said coldly, as if he wasn't a human being, 'They entered an extermination zone, it is their fault, this is what war is like.'"

Pope Leo XIV on Friday offered a new criticism of war, in a social media post that named no names but appeared to hint at the Trump administration leadership harnessing Christian nationalism to glorify the US and Israel’s war against Iran.

“God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs,” Leo wrote on his official X account. “Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.”

The pope, who was born in Chicago and is the first American to lead the Catholic church, has consistently spoken out against the fighting in the Middle East since the US and Israel began strikes on Iran in February.

Leo’s post on Friday appeared to be an oblique response to the Trump administration’s repeated references to God while conducting Operation Epic Fury in Iran.

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has especially portrayed the conflict in religious terms, describing it as a holy war carried out “in the name of Jesus Christ”.

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It took Israel only 10 minutes to carry out one of the worst mass-killings in Lebanon since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990.

Omar Rakha heard the war planes but did not feel the explosions; it was only when he woke up face down on the street, bleeding, that he understood what had happened: the building next to his in the Barbour neighbourhood of central Beirut had been destroyed by two Israeli bombs. He then ran through the flaming wreckage to find his sister, screaming.

Shaden Fakih, a 24-year-old calisthenics trainer, also ran towards the impact site; his friend Mahmoud was inside the struck building. He could only get so close; the multistorey building was a pile of burning rubble. Fakih began to pull people out of the apartments in front of the site, carrying in his arms an old woman who could not walk. There was no sign of Mahmoud and the neighbourhood – once thought to be safe from Israeli bombs – felt like a war zone.

Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah was in the emergency room when the casualties began to arrive. Among the wounded were children pulled from under the rubble; many arrived alone, without parents, their identities unknown. “The youngest was an 11-month-old. I had to operate on him just to relieve some pressure in the head,” said Abu-Sittah, who works as a surgeon at the American University of Beirut Medical College (AUBMC).

You have to be pretty shady to get a "claims" hed.

JD Vance has pushed back against claims that the US is interfering in Hungarian politics, describing the accusations as “darkly ironic”, as a set of polls suggested the opposition Tisza party could win a supermajority in the forthcoming elections.

After spending his first day in Budapest excoriating the EU and accusing it of being behind one of the “worst examples” of foreign interference, the US vice-president spent part of Wednesday morning speaking at a thinktank and educational institution linked to Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán.

With four days to go until Hungarians cast their ballots – and with Orbán trailing the opposition in most polls – Vance acknowledged the singular nature of his visit.

“It’s unprecedented for an American vice-president to come the week before an election,” he said. But he said he had decided to come because of what he described as the “garbage happening against” Orbán in the election.

“We had to show that there are actually lots of friends across the world who recognise that Viktor and his government are doing a good job and they’re important partners for peace,” he said.

Ah, yes, the old "many people say" trope the Nazis love to use.

The fate of the two-week ceasefire in the Iran conflict looked uncertain on Wednesday as both sides gave divergent versions of what had been agreed, Israel intensified its bombing campaign in Lebanon and Iran halted the passage of oil tankers because of an alleged Israeli ceasefire breach.

Iran and Pakistan, which brokered the 11th-hour truce, both asserted that the ceasefire included Lebanon. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, disagreed and Israeli forces unleashed their heaviest attack of the war so far on more than 100 targets and killing at least 254 people.

Iran’s Fars news agency said oil tankers passing through the strait of Hormuz had been stopped as a result of Israel’s “ceasefire breach”. Iran was due to have reopened the strait during the two weeks of the ceasefire, and the oil price had dropped sharply below $100 a barrel in the hours after the truce was announced, prompting a global stock market surge.

In Mathias Döpfner’s 2023 book Dealing with Dictators, the chief executive of the German media company Axel Springer SE proposed a fix for western democracy: states that respect the rule of law should stick together and prioritise trading with each other. Better that, he declared, than indulging the illusion that doing business will tame “self-styled strongman leaders”.

So it came as quite the surprise when last month Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was given a prominent opinion article in Welt am Sonntag, less than four weeks before the riskiest elections of the rightwing populist’s career. “It caused a lot of strong irritation,” said a former editor at the Springer-owned broadsheet.

Long a powerful and polarising force in Germany’s postwar media landscape, Axel Springer is now aiming to become a major player in the transatlantic sphere. In 2021 it added the US-European outlet Politico to its large portfolio of German titles, and is buying the UK’s Daily Telegraph in a £575m all-cash deal.

Mergers and buyouts always end well.

U.S. President Donald Trump said in a social media post this morning that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," as his threatened attacks on Iranian infrastructure loom ahead of an 8 p.m. ET deadline.

Iran has rejected a 45-day ceasefire proposal and says it wants a permanent end to the war.

UN Secretary General António Guterres warned the U.S. that attacking civilian infrastructure is banned under international law.

The death toll so far includes more than 1,900 people in Iran, 1,400 in Lebanon, 23 in Israel, about two dozen in other countries in the region, 13 U.S. service members and 11 Israeli soldiers.

The TruthSocial Post:

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116363336033995961

UPDATE (5:32 PM EST / UTC-04:00):

Motherfucking TACO Tuesday.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116365796713313030

The blockage in the Strait of Hormuz is affecting more than direct shipments of supplies, said Jean Kaseya, the director-general of Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, at a press conference on Thursday. Fuel shortages have increased the cost of transportation and the production of key health commodities like mosquito nets, which are made of polyester, which is made of petrochemicals.

Save the Children CEO Janti Soeripto told NPR that the group has medicines stuck at a supplier's warehouse in India that need to get to Afghanistan urgently.

"We can't take the road because there's also been conflict, which means that is impossible," Soeripto says. "We would then normally airship it. Those costs have doubled over the last month, because of the price of oil. So now the transport for the drugs is more expensive than the drugs themselves."

Warning: long read.

Guests were enticed with the promise of luxury villas overlooking aquamarine seas; a world-first crypto resort where the tech elite could commune over the latest digital innovation in opulent surrounds.

The promotional material from June last year pitched a sprawling, futuristic development that would hug the coastline of Timor-Leste, one of the world’s poorest countries, and donate a percentage of profits to philanthropy.

But in February, when a joint investigative team visited the proposed site of the AB Digital Technology Resort – separated from Dili airport by a barbed-wire fence – we found an empty plot dotted with shrubs.

The planned resort is at the heart of a four-month investigation by the Guardian and Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project into an obscure cryptocurrency and blockchain network known as AB.

Troops and their families have been pushed back to the United States after their bases in the Middle East were threatened by Iranian counterattacks. Community groups are scrambling to react.

In 1954, the CIA wrote a classified report about Iran and coined a word: blowback. Then they filed the warning in a vault and spent seventy-two years proving it right. This video traces the 72-year paper trail from the 1953 coup against Mossadegh to Operation Epic Fury. How a peace deal was on the table the day the president ordered strikes. Why the Strait of Hormuz broke the global economy. What $20,000 drones do to $4 million missiles. Who made $580 million in oil futures fifteen minutes before a presidential tweet. And what any of us can actually do about it.

Also available on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/stepback-whats-happening-in-iran-is-so-much-worse-than-you-think/

Maikiuants, perched high in Ecuador’s southeastern Amazon highlands near the Peruvian border, sits atop copper-rich ground now claimed by Solaris Resources, a Canadian mining company seeking to gash an open-pit mine into these mountains. If extraction moves forward, the forest Jhostin and Olger were walking through—home to endangered species, waterfalls, medicinal plants, generations of Indigenous knowledge and undiscovered beings—could be permanently altered.

The jaguar’s presence here holds weight as a matter of law. In Ecuador, endangered species—and nature more broadly—have legal rights. The government must clear a far higher bar than under conventional laws before approving projects like large-scale mining.

Jhostin and Olger are paraecologists, people who document life in their homelands using generations of ecological expertise and scientific methods. They work with Ecoforensic, a nonprofit that trains paraecologists—paramedics for ecosystems—to document how ecosystems function and how they are harmed. Ecoforensic works in places in Ecuador like Maikiuants: biodiverse regions where scientific data is thin or nonexistent.

The data paraecologists collect, such as species inventories and water samples, is then translated into evidence that carries weight in courts. Increasingly, it’s winning cases.

In 2023, in Ecuador’s Intag Valley, community paraecologists helped halt a proposed mega copper mine by documenting threats to endangered species that the company’s environmental studies had failed to account for. The ruling hinged on Ecuador’s “rights of nature” laws, enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2008.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A channel affiliated with Iranian state television claimed Friday that a U.S. fighter pilot ejected from their aircraft over southwestern Iran. The U.S. did not respond immediately to requests for comment on the claim.

It was not clear what may have happened to the plane, including whether Iran was claiming it was shot down or had another issue. If the claim is confirmed, it could lead to yet another dramatic escalation in the war, nearing the end of its fifth week.

...

Television anchor urges residents to hand over pilot

The anchor on the Iranian channel urged residents to hand over any “enemy pilot” to police and promised a reward for anyone who did. The channel is in Kohkilouyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, an intensely rural and mountainous region that spans over 15,500 square kilometers (5,900 square miles).

Authorities also urged the public to search for the pilot in neighboring Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province.

Throughout the war, Iran has made a series of claims about shooting down piloted enemy aircraft that turned out not to be true. Friday was the first time that Iran went on television urging the public to look for a suspected downed pilot.

An on-screen crawl earlier urged the public to “shoot them if you see them,” referring to social media footage circulating of what appeared to be U.S. aircraft in the area. The channel showed metal debris in the back of a pickup truck while making the announcement but provided no other immediate details.

...

"There was no quid pro quo" was, I'm sure, claimed at some point.

The US has lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the latest step towards normalising relations between the two countries after US forces abducted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

The couple were taken to New York after their abduction in January to face charges of alleged drug trafficking, to which both have pleaded not guilty.

The lifting of the sanctions on Rodríguez, which was announced by the Treasury department on Wednesday, allows her to work more freely with US companies and investors. Without explicitly mentioning the sanctions targeting her, Rodríguez, in a statement, expressed hope for US-Venezuelan relations.

“We value President Donald Trump’s decision as a step toward normalising and strengthening relations between our countries,” she said on her Telegram channel after the Treasury’s announcement. “We trust that this progress will allow for the lifting of current sanctions against our country, enabling us to build and guarantee an effective bilateral cooperation agenda for the benefit of our people.”

At 194 years old, Jonathan the giant tortoise was a youngster when Queen Victoria ascended to the throne – and has now lived long enough to fall victim to a crypto scam.

News outlets including the BBC, Daily Mail and USA Today falsely reported his death after an X account posing as Jonathan’s vet broke the news.

The post, attributed to “Joe Hollins”, claimed: “Heartbroken to share that our beloved Jonathan, the world’s oldest living land animal, has passed away today peacefully on Saint Helena.

“As his vet for many years, it was an honour to care for him – hand-feeding bananas, watching him bask in the sun and marvelling at his quiet wisdom. He leaves behind a legacy of resilience and longevity that inspired millions. Rest easy, old friend. You’ll be missed more than words can say.”

Though the post received 2m views and was reported as fact by the UK’s national broadcaster, checks by the Guardian revealed the account was based in Brazil. The real vet, who does not use X, said: “Jonathan the tortoise is very much alive. I believe on X the person purporting to be me is asking for crypto donations, so it’s not even an April fool joke. It’s a con.”

The impostor was indeed asking for cryptocurrency donations at the time the BBC published – and later retracted – its report.

A new Israeli law that would allow the execution of Palestinians convicted on terror charges for deadly attacks, but not Jewish extremists accused of similar crimes, would constitute a war crime if enacted, according to one of the UN’s most senior human rights officials.

Speaking amid mounting international condemnation of the bill, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, described the law as “patently inconsistent with Israel’s international law obligations, including in relation to the right to life”. He added that it “raises serious concerns about due process violations, is deeply discriminatory, and must be promptly repealed”.

“Its application in a discriminatory manner would constitute an additional, particularly egregious violation of international law. Its application to residents of the occupied Palestinian territory would constitute a war crime,” Türk said.

The legislation, passed on Monday by the Israeli Knesset, has faced a wave of criticism, including from European leaders and human rights groups.

I have some thoughts, but as this is a topic that usually gets contentious, I won't share them at this time. Keep it civil, folks.

archive.is link

The kids are a little different here in Greystones. In 2023, the Irish seaside town just south of Dublin launched a grass-roots initiative led by local parents, school principals and community members to loosen the grip of technology on their younger kids by adopting a voluntary “no smart devices” code and supporting it with workshops and social events.

Three years later, no one in Greystones claims to have cured the ills of modern technology. But they’ve learned that they can’t do anything about it one child at a time. Only a townwide effort could defang the kids’ “everyone else has one” argument.”

“With social media, it’s a collective thing,” said Jennifer Whitmore, a member of Irish parliament and a Greystones mother of four. “Addressing it in a clustered manner is the way to go.”