Everybody was told in 2010-15 that austerity was painful but necessary to improve living standards. And then no improvements came, ever.

Markets are treating the tentative US–Iran accord as a broad diplomatic reset, but the real story is are the backchannels of the Persian Gulf A reported secret pact between Tehran and Doha over the world's largest LNG complex exposes the true architecture of this "peace" 🧵🇶🇦🇮🇷👇

From @TheAthleticFC: There are 98 players born in France at the World Cup, and there are more French-born players (76) representing other nations than any other country at the tournament. Senegal’s squad has 10 of them. nyti.ms/4a46hVm

Wow, this is a huge and - rare for France these days - a genuinely good move: France's intelligence services (DGSI) are terminating their contract with Palantir in favor of a domestic alternative (source: franceinfo.fr/internet/intel…). I posted about this multiple times. See post below for instance, which Palantir officially replied to, calling my take "insane" (x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2…), where I called it a "complete dereliction of duty" for France to use Palantir as the "central software architecture" for their intelligence services. As I wrote, it's completely incoherent with any notion of sovereignty. Looks like my "insane" take wasn't so insane after all 😉 And, by the way, ALL countries currently using Palantir should do the same: you are, quite simply, not a sovereign country if you let your national data infrastructure depend on the goodwill of a company with such a clear political agenda. At this stage this isn't even a sovereignty question, it's a sanity test.

"China’s state-backed industrial model has enabled it to capture around 30% of global manufacturing and secure dominant positions in sectors from chemicals and steel to batteries and electric vehicles." Europe needs to abandon neoliberal economic policy. euractiv.com/opinion/europe-…

Today we remember Jo and everything she represented. 🙏🏻

The Gestapo marched hundreds of thousands of innocent people to their deaths. I've ended private schools' tax breaks to invest in state schools. No responsible leader makes vile comparisons like this. Kemi Badenoch is not fit to be Prime Minister.

When we started our campaign to bring water back into public ownership, we knew it would be a long, hard fight. Now it’s bearing fruit. This objection hasn’t been made in a vacuum. It’s a response to the fact that we’ve won the argument: water should be in public hands.

Michael Gove just wandered out in front of my bike against a red light. What a remarkable commitment to proving @MPIainDS wrong. Turns out the biggest menace to cyclists is middle-aged politicians ignoring the Highway Code As the song goes, he ain't the sharpest tool in the shed

Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it. The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state. What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it. Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure. In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.

Sheryl Crow speaks out after Trump’s UFC 250 event: “To stay quiet means to turn a blind eye. And so I am saying this. What happened last night on the lawn of the White House was disgraceful and void of decency. Powerful, rich people filled the lawn to watch a violent sport that ended with a vile and racist comment. All while the average American cannot afford healthcare, gas, and cost of living. Do not be fooled. This administration is corrupt and does not give a damn about the American people. It only cares about making money hand over fist at the expense and in spite of our democracy. If we continue to support this kind of distraction from reality, we are no better than them. Let's be better, America.”

Tempo de trabalho resulta nisso que vocês estão vendo. Marrocos engoliu a seleção brasileira.

France taxes Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple 3 percent on their French revenue. Brought in about $700 million last year. Trump's response: eliminate the tax or face 100 percent tariffs on all French wine exports to the United States. All four Silicon Valley companies being protected here publicly backed Trump's return to the White House. Musk just became the world's first trillionaire off the SpaceX IPO the same week BLS reported energy prices wiped out 18 months of American wage gains. A 100 percent wine tariff doesn't hurt Zuckerberg. It hits the American importer, the American distributor, the American restaurant owner trying to hold their margins, and eventually the customer staring at a menu in Fort Wayne wondering why the house Bordeaux costs what it costs now. The G7 is supposed to be a summit of industrialized democracies coordinating on trade and security. Trump arrived threatening the host country's flagship export to defend the domestic tax obligations of his biggest campaign donors. That's the trip. That's the agenda.

RT @SushantSin: When my mother, a young student at Shantiniketan in the 1930s, offered a blouse to the Santal girl who came to clean the ho…

Contrary to popular belief, it's actually rich countries (and their academies) that produce the soccer players for poorer countries. Reverse migration after skills acquisition

Paying Tribute to the 168 school girls murdered by Donald Trump

Such a blot on this World Cup. FIFA lets the US do their thing Iran manager Amir Ghalenoei- "We spent so much time in the air commuting, they didn't even give us time to recover. After the game today, they said to us you have to leave immediately. It's very important for us to have time for recovery, but we've been told to return to our camp in Tijuana and we are really troubled by that. I think perhaps our team is the most repressed team in the whole World Cup." goal.com/en-in/lists/most-re…

Naomi Klein: "Labour is sending lots of messages that very little is going to change ... hearing from your leader about fiscal rules and sounding like Margaret Thatcher on running a govt like a household, which is ridiculous, is going to set the table for a far right comeback."

Today we root for Senegal.

Virgil van Dijk says he's not a fan of the mandatory hydration breaks introduced at the World Cup 🤔