Betore Rome, there was Carthage. Before Carthage, there was Tyre. Europe, Princess of Tyre, gave her name to the continent of Europe, to those who, today, let Israel destroy her city, Tyre—a city more than 5,000 years old—by European weapons without saying a word. What you see in this image are not merely ordinary columns; they are the historical columns of Tyre in southern Lebanon are iconic Roman architectural remains. They are part of an ancient Phoenician city-state that is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. I could not identify any military targets that would justify striking a UNESCO World Heritage protected site. We are watching history beirg erased in real time by Israel.

It is staggering to me that people are willing to give up a livable planet just to avoid the inconvenience of having to think for themselves. The Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water, and Land Footprints | United Nations University share.google/XFJ3U2KWMLyMn81…

Framing “Magnifica Humanitas” as an AI manifesto is a way to misdirect away from the broader point. The central object of the Pope’s critique isn’t the technology, but the socioeconomic systems under which it’s emerged.

Absolute bombshell. Prof. Rowlands confirms global power has completely shifted from sovereign states to a few tech billionaires. She exposes how elites secretly embed their own agendas into AI to build a terrifying new digital imperium to dominate humanity.

Ireland’s bid to join a Benelux-seeded treaty on automatic recognition of higher education degrees gives fresh momentum to a practical European effort to cut diploma red tape. Welcome to our club Minister Lawless ! 🇧🇪🇳🇱🇱🇺 @lawlessj @BelgiumMFA

🖊 Since the Lisbon Treaty, we've the right to submit an EU citizens' initiative. It forces @vonderleyen to respond to a specific issue and puts it on @EP_Petitions agenda. This one on the EU/Israel Association Agreement 🇪🇺🇮🇱 is near the 1️⃣ million supporters threshold. Worth a minute of your time to sign: eci.ec.europa.eu/055/public/…

Relieve en piedra del Imperio aqueménida en Persépolis: una mano sostiene una flor de loto, símbolo de paz, armonía y eternidad. Esta imágen refleja la estética serena y el orden simbólico del arte persa antiguo. #Iran

🚨 BREAKING: 🇶🇦 Qatari Minister Lolwah Al-Khater to Trump and Netanyahu: “Stop speaking on our behalf. Stop using us as an excuse for your agendas. We don’t want you to ‘liberate’ us—we just want to be left alone. Stop fueling wars. It’s not our fault you failed in school and were educated by Hollywood—the world is not a movie.”

They may be doing everything to keep her quiet but Catherine Connolly @PresidentIRL remains a rare light in the darkness.

RT @ciaraquill: “So, the idea that universities should train our students for specific jobs, for the sake of offering ‘direct routes to emp…

A Palestinian student has been accepted to Trinity College Dublin but urgently needs to pay a €500 deposit to secure her place. Unfortunately, she cannot afford the amount, and the deadline is approaching. If any individual or organisation can help, please contact me and I will connect you with her directly. Even a small act of support can help keep her academic future open.

The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It's beautifully made, but it's still telling the wrong story. A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island? It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on 'Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding's novel. These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time. Of course they fought too. But then they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That's how we stayed friends.’ Back home, everyone assumed that the boys – Luke, Stephen, Sione, David, Kolo and Mano — were dead. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, he radioed their names to Tonga. After twenty minutes, a tearful response came back: ‘You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!’ Peter commissioned a new ship, hired all six boys as his crew, and named the boat the Ata, after the island where he found them. They remained friends for the rest of their lives – Peter and Mano even became soulmates. I tracked them down, and it became one of the central chapters of my book Humankind. Here's what struck me most: William Golding (the author of Lord of the Flies) was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world. I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn't descend into savagery. They cooperated, they took care of each other, they survived. I'm not saying that the Tongan castaways were representative of all kids everywhere. But I am saying that every kid who has to read or watch the fictional Lord of the Flies also deserves to know what actually happened when it played out in real life. Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

Elites have been trying to erase "Palestine" for decades. That's why I wrote my dissertation on the history of the word, idea, concept of Palestine. Who called the place Palestine, when, where, what did it refer to and did it matter to people? academia.edu/34686627/The_In…

The British Museum has removed the word “Palestine” from its Ancient Middle East displays — despite the term appearing in Herodotus, Roman records, medieval maps, Ottoman sources, and even Shakespeare. Erasing a word erases a people. I’ve written about why this matters, and what we can do next. 👇 open.substack.com/pub/1taghr… #HistoryIncludesPalestine @21WIRE @AsaWinstanley @s_m_marandi @alon_mizrahi @FranceskAlbs @guychristensen_

First they steal your history. Then they bomb what remains. Then they erase you.

I wouldn't watch #Hamnet if you care deeply about historical accuracy. Nice use of l'ombre chinoise, though.

I’m watching the latest scenes from Minneapolis with the same horror as so many people. We feel inches from the abyss. Five years ago, in the wake of Jan. 6, I wrote a personal piece about the Belfast of my youth and the U.S. of today. I so wish I’d been wrong.

Riveting, extraordinary and brutally honest speech by Mark Carney, Canada's prime minister. God, I wish we would have European leaders like this. Here's an excerpt: In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called “The Power of the Powerless,” and in it he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down. For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We join its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Read/listen in full: globalnews.ca/news/11620877/…

What an honestly-acquired Nobel Peace Prize looks like.

Happy New Year from Dún Laoghaire