Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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Surly Bikes

@surlybikes.bsky.social

From Angry Catfish, independent bicycle shop in Minneapolis

Alex Pretti was a customer of ACF. A member of our local cycling community. An integral community member serving as a nurse at our local VA hospital. Murdered while standing up to bullies in his city. Then falsely smeared in the media as an agitator with an agenda. Do not believe the lies. He could be any one of us standing against evil, but evil cannot get us all if we stand against it!

January 25, 2026 at 1:50 AM

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Michael Lobel

@mlobelart.bsky.social

From the great David Wojnarowicz (thread):

"I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america & I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg & there’s a thin line between inside & the outside a thin line between thought & action & that line is simply made up of blood & muscle & bone"

B&W photo of a man's face covered in rocks & dirt as if emerging from or buried within the earth

January 19, 2026 at 2:33 PM

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Dr Kat Day (she/her)

@chronicleflask.katday.com

This is a good lesson, no matter how you come to learn it

Screenshot:

serialephemera
Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part! should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.

January 18, 2026 at 3:11 PM

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Jacobin

@jacobinmag.bsky.social

Patrice Lumumba, radical leader of the Congolese independence movement, was murdered on this day in 1961.

“The only thing which we wanted for our country is the right to a worthy life, to dignity without pretense, to independence without restrictions."

January 17, 2026 at 2:00 PM

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Gregg Gonsalves

@gregggonsalves.bsky.social

I’m a German Citizen in 1933, and Is It Just Me or Is It Really Hard to Get Any Work Done Right Now? www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-...

I’m a German Citizen in 1933, and Is It Just Me or Is It Really Hard to Get Any Work Done Right Now?

Our 25th most-read article of 2025. - - -Guten tag. I’m just wondering if anybody else can relate to this feeling I’ve been having that I just can...

www.mcsweeneys.net

January 11, 2026 at 1:23 PM

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Michael Lobel

@mlobelart.bsky.social

Jacob Lawrence, Struggle III—Assassination, 1965

Line drawing in black with added red of a violent scene, with a figure at right shooting one at left, and various figures on the ground

January 7, 2026 at 6:45 PM

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Eric Topol

@erictopol.bsky.social

Here's a summary of all the data that supports adding more red meat to your diet

January 8, 2026 at 6:03 PM

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Shawn Micallef

@shawnmicallef.bsky.social

If you've read about how the brownshirts behaved this video is a period piece. That is not hyperbole.

Chris⚖️Justice @chrisjustice01.bsky.social · 18d

👉 ICE Abusing Protesters After Murdering Driver 1/7/26
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnfi...

January 8, 2026 at 5:32 PM

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Erin Biba

@erinbiba.bsky.social

This is maybe one of my favorite videos of all time I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched it and I still die every single time.

January 8, 2026 at 4:16 AM

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Jimmy Thomson

@jameswsthomson.com

Re-upping this column because the idea seems to be gaining traction. But I think I didn't go far enough in this: the government should obviously be deleting its accounts so as to not have their tweets appear next to CSAM. But it should also be pursuing charges against X and banning it in Canada.

Canada's National Observer @nationalobserver.com · 23d

It's well past time for Canadian government officials to get off of X, @jameswsthomson.com writes. This latest — disgusting — incident is just one more reason.

Canadian government officials, what are you still doing on X in 2026?

The platform's own chatbot started posting sexualized material of children and other people who couldn't consent. With no moral bottom in sight, it's well past time our officials found other ways to c...

www.nationalobserver.com

January 8, 2026 at 1:10 AM

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Prof Ray Wills

@profraywills.futuresmart.com.au

I'm posting this for no other reason than goats

Well, solar's a pretty good reason, too

And also, solar is the GOAT

January 6, 2026 at 4:02 AM

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Brandon Friedman

@brandonfriedman.bsky.social

What in the Gestapo is going on in Grand Rapids?

Watch this activist get arrested *mid-interview* for speaking out against U.S. action in Venezuela.

January 5, 2026 at 4:12 PM

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb

@nkalamb.bsky.social

Really, a remarkable statement from Colombia’s President.

I don’t know if Maduro is good or bad, not even if he’s a drug trafficker; in the files of the Colombian justice system, after half a century of dealing with the biggest cocaine mafias, the names of Nicolás Maduro or Cilia Flores don’t appear. Those who have come forward to denounce him are Venezuelan opposition generals, nothing more, seeking to topple the popular vote.

The judicial power in Colombia doesn’t belong to me; it’s independent of me, and my opposition largely handles it.

If one wants to know about the mafia and the business of cocaine commercialization, just look at Colombia’s judicial files.

That’s why I deeply reject Trump speaking without knowing; my name doesn’t appear in the judicial files on drug trafficking over 50 years, neither from before nor from the present. Stop slandering me, Mr. Trump. That’s not how you threaten a Latin American president who emerged from the armed struggle and then from the people of Colombia’s fight for Peace.

I was part of the clandestine organization that fought for democracy in Colombia against the civil dictatorship of the "State of Emergency." The organization that in 1974, long before Chávez, carried out the operation to raise Bolívar’s sword once more, who said he would never sheathe it until injustice ended in Gran Colombia. I was with the M19 that made the first peace in contemporary Latin America.

He doesn’t read Colombia’s history, and that’s why he fails when he criticizes us. He should only meet with his officers who are experts in drug investigations in Colombia, whom I’ve helped with my own investigations as a senator of the Republic from Colombia’s Left and its people,

who have suffered the narco genocide and its political allies, who are also allies of the American far right.

Tens of thousands of our comrades from the armed and popular struggle for democracy were assassinated, and we didn’t go begging you for invasions; we endured and won through Peace.

I’ve never burned a U.S. flag because I’ve read the history of the popular and workers’ struggles in the U.S. through Zinn’s books in Spanish. And that’s why I honor the American working people, the Black and Indigenous people, the young soldiers who, alongside the Soviets, defeated Hitler.

And that’s why I dared to speak on a street in New York in front of the United Nations building and under U.S. law that protects the opinions of those attending the United Nations Assembly to speak freely. I spoke against the genocide in Gaza—how I would have loved to accompany you to make peace in Gaza! Where the Palestinians love me, and perhaps if instead of

going to capture a Latin American president with small controls on oil because you blocked the oil and condemned us to hunger and unleashed the exodus that reached your own country, I would have accompanied you to capture Netanyahu, the genocidaire.

For what I said, you took the arrogance to punish my opinion, my words against the Palestinian genocide. Your punishment is to falsely accuse me of being a drug trafficker and having cocaine factories; I don’t have a car, nor estates abroad—my house I’m still paying off to the bank with my salary. It’s unjust, and I fight against injustices.

I’m friends with a lot of people in the U.S. who stop me on the streets, surround me with their arms.

That’s why I respect the history that began with Washington and Bolívar together; they gave each other things, they were liberators more than enslavers.

I learned not to be a slave, and I reject your

January 5, 2026 at 3:39 AM

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Flavio Lehner

@climateflavors.bsky.social

2025 goes down as the ~3rd-warmest year on record (based on ERA5).

Like in 2024, every single day this past year was warmer than the average of even the most recent reference period (1991-2020).