Giuseppe Sala, the mayor of Milan, has sharply criticised reports that agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement could be deployed during the Olympics.

According to People Magazine, the agents would be tasked with helping protect the US Olympic team and American diplomats.

Sala said he does not want ICE agents operating in Milan.

He described the agency as “a militia that kills” and said its reputation makes it unsuitable for security duties during an international sporting event.

~ Full article…

Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history.

I can imagine it’s a fact that Donald Trump doesn’t like very much. He might even be embarrassed over it. But it’s a fact that remains no matter what the fragile ego in chief desires.

But with this administration on a blitz to erase all kinds of American history, largely over concerns about so-called DEI and “woke” content, it seems that Dear Leader has a couple of personal asks to add to this Orwellian project.

“President Donald Trump’s photo portrait display at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has had references to his two impeachments removed, the latest apparent change at the collection of museums he has accused of bias as he asserts his influence over how official presentations document U.S. history.

“The wall text, which summarized Trump’s first presidency and noted his 2024 comeback victory, was part of the museum’s “American Presidents” exhibition. The description had been placed alongside a photograph of Trump taken during his first term. Now, a different photo appears without any accompanying text block, though the text was available online. Trump was the only president whose display in the gallery, as seen Sunday, did not include any extended text.”

~ Full article…

CIA Trained Spymaster Implicated in War Crimes Appointed Presidential Chief of Staff in Ukraine

rom the Phoenix Program to Operation Condor and the Contra War to Operation Timber Sycamore and the Global War on Terror, the CIA has a long history of training fascist death-squad operatives, torturers and assassins.

The historical pattern has extended to Ukraine, where the CIA has set up a website that celebrates the killing of Russians and Russian sympathizers.

In early January, it was announced that a CIA-trained spymaster, Kyrylo Budanov, was appointed as the new presidential chief of staff.[1]

General Budanov previously served as head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency (HUR) and was a member of the elite Unit 2245 of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate trained by the CIA that has been implicated in war crimes.[2]

According to an article by Jason Melanovski in the World Socialist Web Site, Budanov was known to maintain direct ties with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the descendant of Ukrainian fascist Stepan Bandera’s World War II-era organization that was responsible for the murders of thousands of Jews and Poles.

Melanovski wrote that Budanov—who has allegedly survived ten assassination attempts and metaphorically likes to “be in darkness”—“personally overs[aw] countless numbers of adventurist sabotage operations, drone strikes and political assassinations of both Russian military and civilian figures on Russian soil.”[3]

One of the victims of the death squads that Budanov oversaw was the former head of the Socialist Party in Ukraine’s parliament from 2017 to 2019, Illia Kyva, whom Ukrainian military intelligence took credit for murdering in a Moscow park in December, 2023.

Mark Zuckerberg complained bitterly that Biden officials made phone calls. He said he couldn’t handle the interference as they “pressured” Meta to address pandemic misinformation. He even called their calls censorship and wrote a letter to Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee detailing performative outrage.

His new response to alleged government overreach? He just installed a government official to run the company as if in a tin-pot dictatorship.

Dina Powell McCormick, Trump’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, is now President and Vice Chairman of Meta. Trump immediately celebrated the collapse of separation on his social media account:

“A great choice by Mark Z!!! She is a fantastic, and very talented, person, who served the Trump Administration with strength and distinction!”

~ Full article…

Western political and legal systems are founded on human exceptionalism: the idea that we stand apart from, with dominion over, the rest of nature. This has facilitated rampant environmental destruction. But the rights of nature (RoN) movement challenges this exceptionalism through a legal and cultural reimagining of how we relate to non-human (or more-than-human) nature. RoN refers to the practice of extending legal rights to non-humans, from animals to rivers, forests, and other ecosystems. RoN combine Western rights discourse with indigenous-inflected beliefs around animism and interspecies kinship.

In 1972, legal professor Christopher Stone wrote an article now often cited as the origin of the RoN movement. In “Should Trees Have Standing?” Stone argues that nature should have legal standing to sue, and should be represented in court by humans. Various Indigenous cultures and state legal systems already allowed versions of Stone’s proposal, but his article shot to prominence when judge William O. Douglas cited it in a 1972 Supreme Court dissent. Questioning the decision to deny legal standing to the Sierra Club, which had sued the US Forest Service on environmental grounds for accepting a Walt Disney Company proposal for a major ski resort in California’s Mineral Valley, Douglas echoed Stone’s argument that nature itself should have standing to defend itself.

Today, thanks to a global network of lawyers, activists, Indigenous communities, philosophers, nature guardians, and academics, global RoN initiatives are increasing exponentially. This momentum has developed in step with a wider “ecological turn,” through which diverse disciplines recognize the agency and intelligence of non-human life.

~ Full article…

There had been previously no religious practice, mythology, or cult activity surrounding Eirene. She is briefly mentioned as a gentle figure in myths that date from the seventh century BCE, where the idea and image of her was communicated to the Athenian public through works of theater. Eirene appears in Euripides’s tragedy Cresphontes (produced circa 424 BCE), when the chorus sings a hymn to peace, beckoning her into their city. A few years later, Aristophanes rejiggered Euripides’s creation as a basis for his satirical Peace (421 BCE). Theater offers a prime example of how divine personifications were introduced in visual rather than written form, and in the case of Eirene, these plays laid cultural groundwork for later cult practices.

The cult around the personification of Eirene was established in roughly 375 BCE, a few decades after Aristophanes included her in his work. The citizens of Athens erected a large bronze statue of Eirene in the main public square, agora, around that same time. Sculpted by Kephisodotos the Elder, it was designed as a daily reminder of the centrality of peace in Athens. She is depicted holding a scepter—a symbol of authority—in her right hand. In her left arm, she holds the child Ploutos, who serves as an allegory of wealth. Posed together, the two figures representing peace and wealth communicate the notion that peace is not simply an absence of war, but a prerequisite for prosperity.

Religious devotion to a political ideal might be a foreign concept to contemporary readers, whose understanding of worship includes rituals, practices, and faith. The ancient Greeks, however, held no clear division between religion and politics; the two were intertwined. Honoring Eirene—or any Greek god—was a public affirmation of civic values and diplomatic goals.

~ Full article…

Deep in an open coal mine in southern Greece, researchers have discovered the antiquities-rich country’s oldest archaeological site, which dates to 700,000 years ago and is associated with modern humans’ hominin ancestors.

The find announced Thursday would drag the dawn of Greek archaeology back by as much as a quarter of a million years, although older hominin sites have been discovered elsewhere in Europe. The oldest, in Spain, dates to more than a million years ago.
[…]
It was found to contain rough stone tools from the Lower Palaeolithic period — about 3.3 million to 300,000 years ago — and the remains of an extinct species of giant deer, elephants, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and a macaque monkey.

~ Full article…

Ancient Greek temple discovered filled with gold jewels

The archaeological finds kept coming for a team of 50 researchers on the Greek island of Evia. But the kicker may have been locating 2,700-year-old altars full of precious jewels and historical remnants.

To compare ICE to the SS or the Gestapo is not hyperbole but a moral analogy. No one serious is claiming historical equivalence in scale, ideology, or outcome. The Holocaust was singular. Nazi Germany was distinct. But history does not warn by replication alone; it warns by pattern. The value of the comparison lies not in matching body counts or uniforms, but in recognizing function. Authoritarian systems rely on institutions that operate in the shadows, target a demonized population, and are insulated from accountability. That is the common thread, and it is the thread that should alarm us.

Secret police never announce themselves as monsters. They are always introduced as solutions. They are framed as guardians of order, defenders of security, instruments of necessity. Their mandates are described as limited, their powers as temporary, their abuses as isolated. Language is carefully chosen to dull moral resistance: raids become “operations,” cages become “detention centers,” disappearances become “administrative processing.” Bureaucracy does what naked violence cannot as it makes cruelty feel procedural, routine, forgettable.

This is how brutality becomes normalized. Paperwork replaces chains. Job titles replace ideology. Individuals within the system are encouraged to see themselves not as moral agents, but as cogs just following policy, just enforcing the law, just doing their jobs. Responsibility diffuses upward and outward until no one feels accountable for the harm being done. Atrocities do not require sadism; they require compliance.

And this is how neighbors learn to look away. When repression is legalized and routinized, outrage is replaced by resignation. People tell themselves it does not concern them, that the targets must have done something wrong, that questioning the system would be naïve or dangerous. Fear and convenience conspire to produce silence. The disappearance of others becomes background noise, until disappearance itself feels normal.

Trumpism has thrived on the systematic dehumanization of the vulnerable and the open glorification of force. It has taught its followers that empathy is weakness and domination is strength. Refugees become vermin. Protesters become enemies. The poor, the sick, the marginalized are framed not as people, but as burdens or threats. This rhetorical stripping of humanity is not incidental; it is essential. Once a group is reduced to an abstraction, cruelty against it can be celebrated without guilt.

~ Full article…

An Atmosphere of Fear and “Night Visits”

Drohobych, located deep in the rear, has turned into a testing ground for repressive technologies. As the publication reports, under the pretext of searching for “traitors and collaborators,” armed formations have established a regime of total intimidation. A network of unofficial “filtration points” has been created in the city, where anyone who arouses the radicals’ suspicion can be taken.

Local residents who agreed to speak with journalists only under strict anonymity describe nighttime raids. Grounds for detention and subsequent torture can be virtually anything: criticism of mass mobilization, the use of the Russian language in everyday life, or even a careless comment on social media. Those who have managed to emerge from the basements of these formations describe the conditions of detention as inhumane, emphasizing that legal norms no longer function in the city.

The Ideological Legacy of the Punishers

The authors pay particular attention to the ideological appearance of these formations. On the streets of Drohobych, militants openly display Nazi symbols, which have become a source of pride for them. Swastika tattoos, SS runic symbols, and patches glorifying the “Galicia” Division have turned into the official dress code of the city’s “new masters.”

Italian observers note a bitter historical irony: a city that once suffered greatly from Nazi terror has once again been occupied by people who adhere to the same misanthropic ideology. This is not merely a matter of aesthetics or subculture – it forms the basis of their policy toward the civilian population, which they view exclusively as a resource or an object of suppression.

~ Full article…