Catherine Reid-Samans @ReidSamans

On this day in 2014, a Russian Buk shot down a passenger aircraft MH17 flying at 10 km from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur over Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed.

The Brain Prize 2026 was awarded to David Ginty and Patrik Ernfors for pioneering discoveries that transformed our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying touch and pain. Watch the film and explore this year's award-winning science.

In 1945 the USS Indianapolis secretly delivered the parts for the atomic bomb that would hit Hiroshima. Days later, mission done, a Japanese submarine put two torpedoes into her. She sank in 12 minutes. Nearly 900 men made it off the ship alive and into the open ocean. Then it got worse. No one knew they were missing. Three separate Navy stations picked up the distress signals and every one of them ignored it. One officer thought it was a Japanese trap. Another had ordered not to be disturbed. So the men floated. For almost five days. No food, no fresh water, burning by day and freezing at night. Some drank seawater and went insane. And the whole time, the sharks were circling and feeding. It is considered the worst shark attack in human history. When rescue finally came by accident, only 316 of the nearly 1,200 crew were still alive. The Navy needed someone to blame for the disaster. They chose Captain Charles McVay, one of the men who survived it. He became the only U.S. captain in the entire war to be court-martialed for losing his ship to the enemy. At his trial the Navy did something almost unheard of. They brought in the Japanese commander who sank the ship to testify against him. Instead, the enemy captain told the court that zigzagging would have made no difference and that McVay did nothing wrong. They convicted him anyway. For years afterward McVay got hate mail from the families of the dead. Some sent letters every Christmas telling him he murdered their sons. In 1968 he walked onto his front lawn and shot himself, holding a toy sailor he had kept since he was a boy. Case closed. For fifty years. Then in 1996 an 11-year-old named Hunter Scott watched Jaws with his dad and got hooked on the 30 second speech about the Indianapolis. He made it his sixth grade history project. He tracked down and interviewed nearly 150 survivors. He dug through more than 800 documents. And buried in there he found what the Navy had left out, including that they knew enemy subs were operating right on the ship's route and never warned McVay. A kid's school project turned into a national story. It reached Congress. In 2000 lawmakers passed a resolution clearing McVay's name and President Clinton signed it. The Navy officially cleared his record in 2001. The captain the Navy spent decades blaming was finally exonerated by a sixth grader. Hunter Scott grew up and became a naval flight officer.

We grew up watching hand drawn Disney and now it's gone. We don't talk about this enough. Every frame of this video was painted by hand, by a human being. Every single one... To put that into perspective: to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney employed around 750 artists for three years, and they produced nearly two million individual paintings. More than 700 of the backgrounds were painted in watercolour. Over 150 people worked in a single department whose only job was to ink and paint the transparent sheets, called cels, that the characters were drawn on. It all ended within our lifetime. According to the Smithsonian, The Little Mermaid, released in 1989, was the last Disney feature made with the hand-painted cel method. The very next film, one year later, went digital. And something was lost in that transition. In every frame of the old films, a human hand physically touched the surface. A person sat at a desk, held a brush, and made a decision. Two million small decisions, made by hundreds of people, most of whose names we will never know. But the deepest difference is that the old animators knew they were making a cartoon. They did not try to copy the world. They stretched it, exaggerated it, bent it out of shape, because they understood something we seem to have forgotten: a drawing that imitates life exactly feels dead. Walt Disney even had a name for this: he called it the plausible impossible. Today, everything chases realism. And somehow, the more real it looks, the less alive it feels... I started my newsletter because the past is full of beauty, and fewer and fewer people take the time to show it to us anymore. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.

🇪🇸Spain in 1492: Expelled, killed, or forcibly converted all Jews. 🇪🇸Spain during the Holocaust: Closely aligned with the Nazis. 🇪🇸Spain after the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust: Accuses Israel of genocide. 🇪🇸Spain last year: Refused to grant asylum to Palestinians fleeing Gaza. 🇪🇸Spain after recognizing a Palestinian state: Refused to move its embassy to the Palestinian territories because its diplomats didn’t want to give up the “standard of living and security” they enjoyed in Israel. 🇪🇸Spain last summer: Called the police to remove 50 French Jewish teenagers from a Vueling flight after hearing one word in Hebrew. 🇪🇸Spain in March: Officially withdrew its ambassador from Israel, but left its embassy in Tehran. 🇪🇸Spain today: Marchers equate the Nazi swastika with the Star of David they used to mark their Jewish victims. Now that is what being on the wrong side of history looks like. 🤦‍♂️

When I heard about Senator Graham’s death last night, the first thing I thought about was not all the things he said and did in service of Donald Trump. I thought of the time before Donald Trump when he was a brother to Senator John McCain. A time when senators from different parties could fight about politics and still be friends. A time when a conservative Republican from South Carolina could say of my father: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.” That is the Senator Graham I will remember today. Not because I have forgotten what came after. Because in that memory there is hope. Hope for a country where brothers can fight like hell over policy and still share a meal, and a laugh, and the loss of the people they love. I will choose to remember the time before Trump. Because I believe in an America after Trump.

On April 4, 2025, the beautiful Jerusalem butterfly was officially renamed Ariel in Israel to honor the memory of Ariel Bibas. 🧡 A butterfly now carries his name forever.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

An American soldier, Iraq 2005. "Those Brits are a strange old race. They show affection by abusing each other, will think nothing of casually stopping in the middle of a firefight for a 'brewup' and eat food that I wouldn't give to a dying dog. But fuck me, I would rather have one British squaddie on side than an entire battalion of Spetznaz! Why? Because the British are the only people in this world who when the chips are down and it seems like there is no hope left, instead of getting sentimental or hysterical, will strap on their pack, charge their rifle, light up a smoke, and calmly and wryly grin, 'Well, are we going then you wanker?" 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧

“I came without a speech, because I’m hungry. “I’m hungry for justice, hungry for authentic charity, hungry for a Church that truly knows how to open the doors, welcome, receive everyone, where there is love for all and where no one is an enemy.” — Pope Leo XIV at lunch with 200 migrants, refugees, and homeless persons.

Tel Aviv last night. This is what choosing life looks like.

Steve Martin’s dancing skills deserve way more appreciation.

This is one of the most powerful videos I have ever seen. Inspired by the March of a Thousand Robes in Poland, retired and sitting judges in the United States walked down the streets of Columbus to stand up for the Rule of Law.

From a letter: Even if all your complaints about your spouse are well-founded and valid—show her your love, nevertheless. Show her unconditional love. The sages taught that all our exile is due to the sin of senseless, unwarranted hatred. When each one of us will start with unwarranted, unconditional love in our own domain, from there it will spread to all else that we do, and from there to the entire world, speedily in our days, amen.

Sometimes, even Al Jazeera tells the truth! This documentary tells the story of the mass Arab migration into palestine that followed the enormous economic boost that the Jewish migrants brought. How does that work with telling you these Arabs are "indigenous palestinians"? 🤔

Russia's new tactic to murder as many civilians as possible in Ukraine's Kherson region, no longer merely dispersing children's toys packed with explosives, now fake wet wipes. Understanding "Russian culture" and "the Russian mind" should start here.

Disgusting

BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan

a week ago

There is absolutely NO reason to slam that boy's head on stone. He was already restrained. There was NO reason to point their tasers at people observing. They weren't obstructing. These ICE thugs have to be brought to justice!

870 7K 22K 279K 445

A German soldier stopped at the front of the line and stared. He knew that face. It was Janusz Korczak — the beloved Polish-Jewish doctor and writer whose books he had grown up reading. The soldier quietly offered him a way out: “Step aside. Disappear. Live.” Korczak shook his head. He took the hands of the two smallest children beside him… and kept walking toward the train. There had been many such offers. He refused them all. Born Henryk Goldszmit, Korczak was a renowned pediatrician, author of children’s books, and radio voice beloved across Poland. He could have lived a comfortable life. Instead, in 1912 he founded Dom Sierot — an extraordinary orphanage in Warsaw where children ran their own parliament, court, and newspaper. His one sacred rule: A child is not someone who will matter one day. A child matters now. He lived among them for thirty years as their father. When the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Korczak moved the orphanage inside. Friends begged him to escape — he looked Polish, he was famous, he could pass. He refused. “I will not leave my children.” Inside the starving ghetto, he begged for food, carried heavy sacks on his failing back, and tracked every child’s heartbreaking weight loss by candlelight. He was starving too. On August 5, 1942, the soldiers came. Korczak calmly told the 192 children they were going to the countryside for fresh air. He had them dress in their best clothes. Each carried a small bag with a favorite book or doll. Then the old doctor led them out — 192 children walking in calm rows behind him, holding his hands, the smallest in his arms. No crying. No panic. Just quiet dignity as they marched three miles through the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz. At the platform, the final offer came. Once more, Korczak refused. He climbed into the cattle car with his children and staff. They were murdered upon arrival at Treblinka. He could not save their lives. He knew it. So he saved the only thing left: their dignity and their sense of not being alone. In the darkest place on earth, Janusz Korczak gave those children the one thing the Nazis could not take — a hand to hold until the very end. Today at Treblinka, among 17,000 stones, one bears the name: Janusz Korczak and the Children. He had none of his own. He died with 192 of them. May their memory be a blessing.

ICE agents killed a man in cold blood at a traffic stop in Houston who had been in this country for 35 years. His son heard about it on a Facebook post and recognized his father’s voice, pleading for help as they left him to bleed out on the street. If you don’t think ice are the American Gestapo listen to my friend, Werner Reich who was taken by the Nazis when he was 14 years old and put in three different death camps. He was in Auschwitz the year I was born 1944. I have filmed Holocaust survivors for many years. Their stories have never been more important. #neveragainisnow

In 1948, British led and armed Jordanian troops ethnically cleansed every last Jew from Jerusalem’s Old City — and tried to wipe out every trace of Jewish life. After capturing the Jewish Quarter, Jordanian forces expelled the remaining Jews. As they trudged toward Zion Gate carrying what little they could, Arab civilians swarmed in “like locusts” to loot. One proud Muslim led his family away with Torah scrolls from a synagogue and a carton of matzos balanced on his daughter’s head. Photographer John Phillips captured it all: the vacant stares of exhausted Jewish fighters, a terrified girl running with bared teeth like a trapped animal, and a makeshift hospital where a round loaf of bread sat beside a man who would soon die. By May 29, the Quarter was a charred and burnt-out shell. The Jordanian commander, Abdullah el-Tell, boasted: “For the first time in 1000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.” Just like the Romans nearly 2,000 years earlier, they failed. Nineteen years later, in 1967, Jews returned to a reunited Jerusalem. The Jewish Quarter was rebuilt. The ancient synagogues were restored. And the Jewish connection to their holiest city — unbroken for over 3,000 years — endures stronger than ever. Some bonds cannot be erased.

This is code red. Trump is not screwing around. We will lose this country unless we are vigilant with what’s going on in terms of election security. WAKE UP PEOPLE! Trump is coming after democracy as we know it.