In December 1958 the Polish embassy in Beijing refused to let the sparrow killers onto its grounds, so the Chinese surrounded it with drummers and kept the drums going for two days until every bird sheltering in the garden had dropped dead from the air, and the diplomats cleared them up with shovels. That is how thorough it was. The campaign had been running since the spring. Every village, school and factory was turned out with gongs, pans and firecrackers to keep the sparrows flying until their hearts gave out. Nests were torn from eaves, eggs smashed, chicks killed, and children went through the fields with slingshots and were paid by the bird. The dead came in by the basket, strung on wires, piled on carts, and the totals went up the chain as a harvest. Something close to two billion sparrows in two years. The embassy garden was the last place in the capital with birdsong in it, and the drums got that too. A zoologist called Zhu Xi had told them before it started that a king had tried this and lost. Frederick the Great of Prussia had put a bounty on sparrows in the 1740s to save his grain and his cherries, and the sparrows went, and the caterpillars they had been eating stripped his orchards to the stalk, and the king cancelled the bounty and paid to have sparrows brought back from neighbouring states and let loose. The whole episode was in the library. The ministry had a figure for what a sparrow ate and no figure for what it did, and a man with the second figure was told to sit down. The locusts arrived on schedule. Then the grain borers. A sparrow takes a few grains from a field in autumn and feeds its chicks nothing but insects all spring, and with the sparrows gone the insects had the rice and the wheat to themselves. The counties with the most sparrows to lose saw their grain fall the furthest, and the rice and wheat that had been holding the country up went down together. That was 1959, and the state took its grain quota anyway, on the harvest that had been reported. What was left in the villages was not enough, and the famine that followed over the next three years is the largest in human history: tens of millions dead, the estimates running from fifteen million to forty-five, whole counties in Anhui and Sichuan where the living could not bury the dead. The sparrows were one cause among several and the economists who have gone back to the county records put the bird's share at something over two million people, with another four hundred thousand never born. Two million, from a campaign against a thing that weighs an ounce. By 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng, who had been cutting open dead sparrows and counting the insects in their stomachs, got the bird struck off the list and bed bugs put in its place. There were almost no sparrows left in China to pardon. So the government did what Prussia had done two centuries before: it bought a quarter of a million sparrows from the Soviet Union and shipped them east in crates, to be released into a country that had drummed every one of their relatives out of the sky. The animal that does the invisible job is always the one on the ledger as a cost. Take the sheep off a chalk down and the orchids are under scrub in twenty years. Fence the cattle off a Welsh hill and the bracken takes it. Empty a savannah of its herds and the grass goes to fire. All of it written down, all of it in the library, all of it available to the next committee with a figure for what a cow eats. Beijing paid Moscow for the birds in hard currency. The men who had said so in 1958 were still not allowed to say so in 1960.

Attempted hijacking Pinetown, 3 hijackers unalived.

Friday we posted the video about the guy’s @Tesla saving him from prison… 4 days and 8M views later, the cop has now been fired.

🇮🇩 Brazilian woman caught smuggling  8 POUNDS of LIQUID COCAINE into Bali. Airport footage shows police inspecting her luggage and uncovering cocaine disguised as everyday personal-care products. Police said the 36-year-old told investigators she was promised $50,000 to deliver the drugs to someone on the island. If convicted, she could face life imprisonment or the death penalty under Indonesian law. No executions in years, but the country still threatens drug smugglers with the firing squad. Literally. Source: Globo / Writer: Marie

NJ Gov. Mikie Sherrill on the execution of Nidal Hasan: "The thing that just keeps breaking my heart: imagine the 20-year-old, maybe the 18-year-old that stepped up to serve, that gets orders and says, you’re going to go shoot this guy who’s in a wheelchair."

A 5-year-old girl plunged 49 feet from a moving cruise ship into the open ocean. Her father heard his wife screaming and raced toward the railing, only to discover that their daughter was gone. It happened aboard the Disney Dream near the Bahamas, where a family vacation took a terrifying turn when the little girl fell from the ship’s fourth deck. When her father realized what had happened, he jumped overboard after her, plunging nearly 50 feet into the ocean. But when he surfaced, he couldn’t see his daughter anywhere. He began desperately calling out for her, searching the water until he finally heard her calling back. He swam toward her and managed to reach her, but they were still stranded in the open ocean as the massive cruise ship began turning around. For roughly 20 minutes, he kept his little girl afloat, holding her above the water until a rescue boat finally reached them and brought them back to safety. Both survived, although the father suffered two fractures in his spine from the fall. It takes an incredible amount of courage to jump nearly 50 feet into the open ocean, not knowing what awaits you below. But this father didn’t hesitate to put his own life on the line for his little girl. Thank God they both made it home.

And you're a piece of shit. If you want American rhetoric, go fucking live in America. This is Australia. We outlawed capital punishment over 60 years ago. You want anyone executed? It just shows that you are nothing but a barbaric neanderthal with the IQ of a bar of fucking soap

Trump’s anti-Christian death cult can only lead to nuclear war.

Tucker is telling the truth. Your worldview on Christians is that we either labor for you or must be destroyed. Your nature is sniveling and backhanded, and the shamelessness with which you tried to rewrite your relationship with Charlie (a natural talent whose success you always resented, much like you do Tucker’s) is proof that you are utterly shameless as well. In both my experience and opinion. Respectfully submitted.

Half of them are children, and when they are harmed, they are counted among 'the children harmed in the war.'

Después de esta tremenda negligencia, la niña sobrevivió. La familia demandó y obtuvieron 5 millones de dólares

Incredible to catch it like this. Challenger Disaster Captured by Helicopter Camera 1986.

🚨TIGER ATTACK UPDATE #2 with significant blood at the scene. Witnesses reportedly TRIED TO STOP the man before he entered the enclosure. Moments later, a tiger had him by the neck. New details are emerging from the deadly attack at Yorkshire Wildlife Park in England. The tiger has reportedly been identified as Altai, a 5-year-old Amur tiger brought to the park from Norway in 2025. Witnesses say the man appeared to be psyching himself up near the viewing platform before allegedly climbing over a barrier. One woman can reportedly be heard saying she tried to stop him. What happened next was horrifying. Visitors, including families with young children, watched as the tiger repeatedly lunged at the man, eventually grabbing him by the neck and dragging him across the enclosure. Witnesses described significant blood at the scene. People shouted in an attempt to distract the animal. Park rangers reportedly fired TWO warning shots to scare the tiger away. Altai retreated and was secured. Emergency crews, including an air ambulance, responded, but the man died at the scene. Police have NOT identified him publicly or established why he entered the enclosure. The tiger was unharmed and reportedly will NOT be euthanized. The park remains closed through Sunday. Authorities are still investigating exactly how and why this tragedy happened. Source: The Sun eyewitness reporting; South Yorkshire Police. The witness accounts, Altai’s identification and the two warning shots are reported details, not all independently confirmed by police.

A Frontier Airlines passenger claims travelers were left on a plane without AC for nearly an hour after landing in Atlanta. The passenger said the crew shut off the engines and lights, leaving people struggling to breathe. She claimed some passengers began panicking and one appeared to pass out. [🎥: tavi.dinero/TT ]

Thank God Deng Xiaoping and his CCP comrades foiled that U.S. attempt at counter-revolution in 1989 so China could become the beacon for humanity that it is today. It's a pity that the Soviet Union didn't act with the same resolve.