What’s next? @two_30

A sword has been stuck in a rock in Tuscany since the 1180s. In 2001, a chemist from Italy's professional skeptics society, the people whose whole job is exposing fakes, drilled into the stone to test it. The metal came back medieval. The knight was Galgano Guidotti, from Chiusdino, a hill town near Siena. Around 1180 he quit fighting. He rode up a nearby hill, drove his sword into the bedrock up to the hilt, and lived next to it until he died in 1181, at 33. Locals built a round chapel over the rock, finished by 1185, and the sword stayed put. For centuries the obvious explanation was fraud. An iron prop cemented in to impress medieval travelers, the kind of thing you'd expect from a town with a relic to sell. Then Luigi Garlaschelli went in to check. He is a chemist at the University of Pavia and a member of CICAP, the Italian committee that takes apart exactly these claims for a living. His team drilled a small hole into the rock and pulled samples from the buried half of the blade, metal nobody had touched in 800 years. The samples went through atomic absorption spectroscopy and neutron activation analysis, a nuclear technique that reads a metal's exact elemental fingerprint. No modern alloys anywhere. The trace elements matched iron slag from medieval foundries whose waste still litters the ground around the site, and the blade shape matched swords catalogued from the late 1100s. The hilt above the rock and the section buried inside it are one continuous piece, so nobody jammed a fake handle into a boulder. My favorite detail is the one they left alone. Radar picked up a cavity directly under the sword, about six and a half feet by three, the dimensions of a grave. Nobody has ever opened it. One caveat, though: the sword snapped during a theft attempt in 1960 and got repaired and re-set with cement, so the thing under the case today is patched, even if the metal is medieval. The timeline bothers me in a good way. The earliest sword in the stone in the King Arthur legend shows up in a French poem from around 1200. Galgano's sword was in its rock by 1181, chapel and all by 1185. Scholars still argue over which story fed which, but the object beat the legend by roughly two decades, and it was planted by a man walking away from knighthood rather than claiming a throne.

Historic Vids @historyinmemes

a day ago

According to tradition, a Catholic saint from Tuscany thrust his sword into a stone after experiencing a vision of the Archangel Michael in the 12th century. A scientific analysis conducted in 2001 found that the visible portion of the sword and the section embedded within the

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Rory Sutherland nails a quiet injustice that’s growing fast. You can work insanely hard for 30 years, climb to the top… yet still live in mediocrity because your parents never owned a house in a good area. Meanwhile, your junior colleagues inherit property from parents in Kensington or Surbiton and cruise through life with houses, wealth, and freedom. The system taxes earned income heavily but barely touches inherited wealth, property gains, and pensions. Economic models hide the problem, they use one “average” person, so inequality vanishes in the math (hello, Bill Gates effect). This isn’t just unfair. It’s building a new class system based on inheritance, not effort. What do you see as the biggest driver of unfairness between generations today?

Today, I asked the Foreign Office Minister to take action to halt Israel's illegal settlement expansion. The best he could come up with was a completely baseless smear. What a total and utter disgrace.

Patrice Lumumba’s last letter to his wife after the coup backed by the CIA and Belgium: “Neither brutality, nor cruelty, nor torture will ever force me to ask for mercy…I prefer to die with my head held high, with unshakeable faith and profound trust in the destiny of my country, than to live in submission and contempt of sacred principles… History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. Africa will write its own history, and it will be a history of glory and dignity.”

Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi

18 hours ago

On this day in 1925, Congo’s🇨🇩 independence leader and pan-African hero Patrice Lumumba was born. He gained prominence as a charismatic and vocal advocate for independence from Belgian colonial rule, which led to his involvement in the Congolese National Movement (MNC). Upon

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He is SIX years old…

HatsOff @HatsOffff

2 days ago

This 6-year-old child suffered abuse at the hands of Israeli troops who abducted and beat him before returning him to his family.

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Will we get an apology from all those pro-Israel people who screamed on this hellsite throughout 2024 ‘why won’t they just release the hostages?’ as an attempted justification for every Israeli war crime?

Noga Tarnopolsky נגה טרנופולסקי نوغا ترنوبولسكي @NTarnopolsky

a day ago

#BREAKING: Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, Israel's chief hostage negotiator, says that hostages held by Hamas could have "come back alive" but the Netanyahu government repeatedly turned down truce deals on the altar of "the lie" of "total victory." @UnxeptableD

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Yvette Cooper says the “situation in Gaza is desperate”. Now perhaps she’d like to tell us WHY?

Yvette Cooper @YvetteCooperMP

3 days ago

The situation in Gaza is desperate. Today the UK is announcing £23m for @UNRWA to deliver vital support including food, water, education and medical support for Palestinian refugees. There must be more aid, all crossings opened, and humanitarian agencies able to operate safely.

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This is really disturbing. @LloydsBank have debanked @TheCanaryUK - with no explanation. This is a frightening precedent - where banks can pull the plug on media outlets without even saying why.

Canary @TheCanaryUK

3 days ago

BREAKING: Canary debanked by Lloyds Lloyds have debanked the Canary with no warning or explanation, putting the outlet in severe financial crisis thecanary.co/uk/analysis/20… thecanary.co/uk/analysis/20…

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Impressive how this was written without mentioning the word Israel once.

Yvette Cooper @YvetteCooperMP

3 days ago

The situation in Gaza is desperate. Today the UK is announcing £23m for @UNRWA to deliver vital support including food, water, education and medical support for Palestinian refugees. There must be more aid, all crossings opened, and humanitarian agencies able to operate safely.

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Just got off the phone with my college roommate. His daughter was diagnosed with leukemia in January. He has insurance. Good insurance. The kind you feel safe having. 7 months later: Savings: wiped out. 401k: cashed early. Penalties and all. House: refinanced to cover the gaps insurance decided weren’t their problem. He told me he’s not the same person anymore. Said watching your child fight for her life while simultaneously fighting an insurance company over coverage codes does something to you that doesn’t go away. They did everything right. Two incomes. No debt. Responsible their whole lives. One diagnosis undid all of it in 7 months. And somewhere a health insurance CEO is getting a $30 million bonus this quarter. I don’t know how people defend this system with a straight face. I really don’t.

In this episode of The Econoclasts we expose the phoney statistics used to 'prove' that Brexit was an economic calamity for the UK. We also focus on Germany's inevitable structural collapse through its automakers' loss of the critical AI-EV race to China youtube.com/watch?v=99CcW1…

Not only has the “Board of Peace” adopted Israel’s discourse & agenda, they have given it total support as it continues to expand the “yellow line” cramming Palestinians into less than 30% of Gaza while it continues to bomb, shell & murder the besieged Palestinians daily. The crossing points are closed, & no mobile units or even tents were allowed in; food is minimal & medical supplies & food are severely restricted. The National (administrative) Committee has not been allowed in, & no reconstruction, or even clearing of the rubble, is in sight. The genocide continues & the world is silent.

Board of Peace @BoardOfPeace

2 days ago

UNRWA has no place in the new Gaza. We are turning the page on the complex of perpetual aid dependency & conflict. The people of Gaza deserve better.

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Lloyds debanks The Canary with no explanation and are currently withholding their funds. This sets a very dangerous precedent and attack on Independent media. Journalism is NOT a crime

Canary @TheCanaryUK

3 days ago

BREAKING: Canary debanked by Lloyds Lloyds have debanked the Canary with no warning or explanation, putting the outlet in severe financial crisis thecanary.co/uk/analysis/20… thecanary.co/uk/analysis/20…

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The rock that wiped out the dinosaurs was about six miles across, taller than Mount Everest, moving at 45,000 miles an hour. It hit shallow sea off what is now Mexico at 60 degrees, which a 2020 Imperial College London study found was close to the deadliest angle possible. The steep angle mattered more than the size. Coming in at 60 degrees threw the most rock and gas high into the sky, where wind could spread it around the world. And the target was the worst it could have picked, shallow seafloor made of sulfur-rich rock. The impact turned that rock to vapor and threw billions of tons of sulfur into the air. The blast, equal to billions of Hiroshima bombs, was only the start. As the debris thrown into space fell back to Earth, friction turned each piece into a glowing hot pellet. For up to an hour, the sky over much of the planet glowed like the inside of an oven set to broil. Anything caught in the open cooked. The only land animals with a real chance were the ones that could hide underground or underwater. At a site in North Dakota, nearly 2,000 miles from the crater, scientists found fish buried with tiny beads of impact glass still stuck in their gills. Those fish died within an hour of the strike, killed by a wave that sloshed out of an inland sea when the ground heaved. What finished the dinosaurs came slower. The sulfur and dust wrapped around the whole planet and blocked out the sun, and with the light gone the warmth went too, dropping global temperatures by several degrees and keeping them down for years, in some models more than a decade. Plants need sunlight to make food, so in the dark they died. The plant-eaters starved. Then the animals that hunted them starved as well, and the loss climbed up the food chain until about three quarters of every species on Earth was gone. Here is the part the joke gets right. Birds are dinosaurs. They split off from small meat-eating dinosaurs more than 150 million years ago and lived alongside the giant ones for over 100 million years. Most birds died in the disaster too, including every last one that still had teeth. The ones that made it were small, ground-living birds with beaks that could crack open seeds, and seeds can sit buried in the soil for years, waiting out a disaster. Those few survivors became every bird alive today, more than 10,000 species. The pigeon outside your window is a dinosaur whose family lived through the single worst day this planet has ever had.

𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN

2 days ago

The extinction of the dinosaurs is technically the highest ratio of birds killed with one stone.

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The Government™ has made an ad about #Palantir, and it's surprsingly honest and informative.

Fourteen Years in Prison for Quoting Hamas? New Law Could Criminalise Journalists Starmer is rushing legislation through parliament that experts say threatens free speech, public interest journalism and international humanitarian aid. Read now: zeteo.uk/p/fourteen-yea…

When the German government sanctioned anti-imperialist journalist Hüseyin Doğru (@hussedogru), he was attempting to buy medication with his pregnant wife when their cards declined. Now, he faces indefinite financial insecurity after the government falsely linked him to the Russian state, uncertain about whether he will be able to feed his family on any given day. His story is illustrative of where the West is headed — initiating the dissolution of civil liberties, and the embrace of an increasingly fascist corporate state. Watch my discussion with Doğru on YouTube now. Link: youtube.com/watch?v=TD8SDs…

"The hardest decision we had to make in completing this report was.. not to name the Palestinian children, whose deaths, injuries & suffering we describe.. we didn't name them because we feared the consequences for their families" He means Israel would go after them too.

51 years ago today, women stood at the front line of the war that broke a five-century empire. Mozambique tore itself free from Portugal — and its daughters carried rifles to do it. 🧵

A colonized people took up arms against an empire that burned them — and won, with the socialist world behind them. The crimes belonged to the colonizer. The future was written by the colonized. A luta continua. Read the full article on my SUBSTACK 👇 hussedogru.substack.com/p/a-luta-conti…