This 260-year demographic timeline of Poland’s Jewish population reveals the devastating scale of the Holocaust. Source: buff.ly/MEHJWla

BREAKING: Serbia's strongman Aleksandar Vučić CONCEDES defeat after 14 years in power, as a student-led anti-corruption movement wins Sunday's election > Ipsos/CeSID projection: Student List 52.1%, Vučić's list 39.3%, about 138 of 250 seats (126 needed for a majority) > The movement grew out of two years of protests after the Novi Sad station canopy collapse killed 16 > Vučić, endorsed by Putin, had called the students a foreign-backed plot Flares and celebrations in Belgrade tonight. Fourteen years, ended at the ballot box. 🎥 @MasinaRS per AP, CeSID/Ipsos

In November 1941 the richest man in America drove his twenty-three-year-old daughter to a hospital in Washington without telling her mother, had two surgeons drill holes in her skull and cut into the front of her brain while she sang God Bless America to them, and when the singing stopped she had a mental age of two and the family did not speak her name for twenty years. Rosemary Kennedy was the third child and the first girl, and she was slow. A nurse at the birth had held Rose Kennedy's legs together for two hours while they waited for the doctor, and the baby had been starved of air. She learned to read and write, but late, and in a family where the boys were being bred for the presidency and the girls for the right marriage, she was the one who could not keep up, the one who had to be coached and watched and given the simpler part in the photograph. She was also, by every account, the prettiest of them, and when the family went to London in 1938 she was presented at court in a white dress and curtsied to the King without a mistake. Then she was twenty-one, and the trouble started. Moods. Rages. Slipping out of the convent school at night and coming back in the morning and not saying where. The nuns said she might be meeting men. For Joseph Kennedy, who was managing his sons towards the White House and could not have a daughter who might get pregnant or get talked about, that was the end of it. He had read about a new operation. Walter Freeman had promised the newspapers it calmed the agitated, and Joe Kennedy had never in his life been told that a thing he could pay for would not work. Rosemary was given a mild sedative and kept awake. Freeman and his surgeon, James Watts, opened the skull on both sides and Watts pushed a blade into the frontal lobes and swept, while Freeman asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer and sing, and count backwards, so they would know how far to go. They went until she was incoherent. Then they stopped. She came out of it unable to walk or speak. Years of therapy got her a few words and a limp. Joe moved her to a private hospital in New York and then to a convent school in Wisconsin, told the family she was teaching the retarded in the Midwest, and never went to see her. Rose, her mother, was not told what had been done until long after, and did not visit for twenty years. The brothers and sisters, including the one who became President, were told she was away. When Joe had his stroke in 1961 and could no longer manage the story, Eunice went to Wisconsin and found a woman of forty-three who did not know her, and came home and started the Special Olympics. Rosemary lived to eighty-six, in the convent, and died in 2005 with her surviving sisters at the bed. The brother who became President had signed the first federal mental health law in 1963, and the family has said she was the reason. Freeman kept operating for another twenty-six years. His notes on Rosemary have never been released. That is what the expert's confidence looks like when it meets a powerful man with an inconvenient child. The science was published. The father was certain. The daughter sang to the surgeon until she could not. Every institution that has ever decided it knows what is wrong with you and how to tidy it has the same two ingredients in the room, and the person on the table is still the only one who pays.

This is absolutely nuts and only hitting German papers so far: leaked emails show that seven politicians from Germany's far-right AfD travelled to Syria to meet with Assad regime officials... facilitated by Hezbollah AND Russian intelligence. handelsblatt.com/politik/deu…

Le patron de la CIA, John Ratcliffe, travaille à faire l'interface entre un Donald Trump qui méprise Zelensky et une Ukraine qui dépend de Washington. On apprend notamment dans cet article que "même si la rhétorique de Trump ne le laisse pas deviner, les opérations de la CIA sont désormais « bien plus agressives » qu’elles ne l’étaient sous l’administration Biden." Plus d'une douzaine de sources ont confirmé à l'auteur que, même si Ratcliffe est un fidèle de Trump, il a un regard "lucide quant à la menace que représente la Russie non seulement pour l'Ukraine, mais aussi pour les États-Unis et leurs alliés." Paradoxalement, l'efficacité de la CIA sous Ratcliffe dans le soutien à l'Ukraine en arrive à ennuyer le président Trump : "Le succès de la CIA en Ukraine est devenu un problème — du moins du point de vue de Trump. Les attaques incessantes contre les raffineries de pétrole russes ont paralysé l'économie de ce pays et étouffé la machine de guerre de Poutine." En septembre dernier, lors de sa visite à Moscou, Ratcliffe a tenté de convaincre les Russes que cette guerre était un cul de sac. Il a ensuite briefé le président Zelensky. Mais si les Ukrainiens semblent conscients de cette situation, Moscou persiste. Et Trump, lui, appuie la Russie. Cet effort de la CIA et de son patron cache pourtant une réalité plus inquiétante pour le renseignement américain : ils sont nombreux à ne pas vouloir servir une administration dont ils sont convaincus qu'elle nuit aux intérêts des Etats-Unis : "Bien que la CIA ne communique pas de chiffres concernant ses effectifs, des agents actuels et anciens m’ont confié n’avoir jamais connu, au cours de leur carrière, un nombre aussi élevé de départs à la retraite et de démissions. Certains sont même partis alors qu’ils étaient sur le point d’obtenir une promotion importante. Les postes à responsabilité laissés vacants pourraient devoir être pourvus par des agents moins expérimentés." Une enquête passionnante sur le renseignement extérieur américain, à lire sur The Atlantic: theatlantic.com/national-sec…

“Without a strong America that cares about what happens in the world, the world would definitely be a worse place.” - President Zelenskyy, My weekly update on Ukraine and the Pacific, as well as my Big Five recommended war and national security readings. mickryan.substack.com/p/comm…

News that is unlikely to surprise those who have followed the Sandie Peggie case ... Link below 👇