#police Courier

[madame-mongoose]

"yes man betrays the courier after the independent new vegas ending" "yes man stays loyal to only the courier after the independent new vegas ending" WHY NOT BOTH!!!! I keep seeing these two sides fight and like personally,,, I can see both depending how you treat him. If you keep going out of your way to make things harder for yes man and even killing/hurting him of course he's gonna wanna get rid of you once he can. Like why would he keep you around? But if you do what he asks and actively help him and are nice to him he genuinely really seems to like you back!!! I mean there's sooo much evidence of him enjoying the courier's company a lot!! I think he would be really happy to work with you instead of against. Yes Man is a sweetie you just have to treat him right

[undeadcourier]

[dullahandyke]

thinking about akudrive and feminism which is a thinly-veiled way of saying im thikning about doctor

[tenth-sentence]

News of the killings reached the Police Commissioner, who did nothing for months until Ernest Henry made an odd appearance in The Brisbane Courier.

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Indeed, in the aftermath of his massacres, he was given further responsibilities in Burketown. This pleased The Brisbane Courier:

The last Gazette announces that the Government has conferred on him the distinction of Inspection of Slaughter-houses for the district of Burke. It is written, "Happy is the man whom the King delighteth to honor," and though it is only a Minister, who smiles on the active Sub-Inspector, and the rewards in the hon. gentleman's bestowal are neither rich nor many, there is so much good taste, appreciativeness, and sense of fitness marking the nature of the reward, that it cannot fail to be highly valued by the recipient, and to give satisfaction to his admirers.

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr

[russianreader]

Independence Day

A roadside fireworks stand in Soledad, California, 28 June 2023. Photo by the Russian Reader When issuing diplomas, colleges in Ingushetia now require graduates to sign a summons to the army or refuse to accept the conscription notice and face possible administrative and criminal charges, Fortanga was told by a source close to one college. “To get a diploma, you need to sign a conscription…

[decolonize-the-everything]

GENERAL STRIKE TIME BABEY. READ THE WHOLE POST.

While we're all mad at government sending money to Israel that police budgets are so inflated because of how often they pay settlements.

And also that it's a verified fact that our police train with Israeli soldiers. Remember when they were black bagging people in PDX? It reminded me of this ex-Israeli soldier talking about how they'd do the same thing to innocent Palestinians just to terrorize them and their neighbors. It was intentional terrorism when they did it.

Police budgets pay for all that.

Correction, we pay.

To put it more bluntly,

We pay for them to kill and terrorize people.

Just as our taxes pay for the deaths of Black and Brown people all over the world from Turtle Island to Sudan and Palestine.

In Dec. 2022, Louisville Metro Government agreed to pay Walker $2 million to settle lawsuits against the city. Metro government previously paid a $12 million settlement to Taylor’s family in Sept. 2020

We paid for Breonna Taylor's death.

And her murderers were never arrested btw. Not that there aren't still people trying to arrest them of course. But our money paid for their lawyers and wouldn't you know it, no charges have stuck.

Four years to the day after Breonna Taylor’s death, federal prosecutors are moving forward with a re-trial of one of the officers involved in the botched raid that ended her life. At a status conference Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings scheduled Brett Hankison’s final pre-trial hearing for September 13th. His re-trial is scheduled to begin on Oct. 15. In November of last year, Hankinson was tried for violating the Constitutional rights of Breonna Taylor, her boyfriend, and three neighbors when he fired through two covered windows during the raid. Prosecutors argued he used excessive force when he shot into the apartment complex blindly. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, had fired at officers executing the search, claiming he thought they were intruders.

And Myles Cosgrove?

Yeah we're paying him to terrorize more people. He got a job as a fucking sheriff's deputy.

Myles Cosgrove, the former Louisville police officer, who was fired for fatally shooting Breonna Taylor in a botched 2020 police raid and hired earlier this year as a sheriff’s deputy in Carroll County, rammed a resident’s truck with his cruiser Monday and then pointed a gun at the owner and several bystanders, witnesses said.

Witnesses told The Courier Journal that Cosgrove barreled into Happy Hollow Private Resort Park trailer park at a high rate of speed without his emergency lights on, then struck William Joshua Short’s pickup truck with such force that it sent the vehicle flying into a building, breaking off two cinder blocks.

And Johnathan Mattingly wrote a fucking book about it to make money off of his role in her murder. $15 on Amazon.

He also wanted to sue Kenneth Walker, Breonna's boyfriend. You know why? For damages and injuries he sustained while killing Breonna Taylor.

WE PAID FOR ALL THAT. ALL OF IT.

Our power is in our dollar.

American politics and officials don't care for our lives. It's why they're content to watch us protest for months. Because we're still going to work. We are the worker ants simply fulfilling our duty, receiving the bare minimum to survive for our labor.

We're still building their bombs. Paying our taxes, so much that hardly any of us could afford more than rent.

We are just drones fulfilling our purpose to the upper class who doesn't give a shit about us beyond what we do for them and how little we will do it for.

If we want change we're gonna have to stop working. We're going to have to deprive them of products they sell, of our taxes, of our low cost labor.

And the strike that UAW is planning in May 2028 has inspired a lot of others to start looking at the opportunity to join in.

If you haven't heard of it yet, a strike is when workers organize and stop showing up for work. And a general strike is a mass strike across various industries around similar demands or bargaining positions.

There have been multiple calls for a general strike since then, predominantly from individuals and groups on social media, which has often resulted in confusion about what a general strike would actually look like. To be clear, a general strike is not a protest or a rally, a single picket line, or a boycott. It is, as I’ve previously defined, “a labor action in which a significant number of workers from a number of different industries who comprise a majority of the total labor force within a particular city, region, or country come together to take collective action.”

Throughout history, workers have used this tactic as a nuclear option to shut down entire cities when needed, including Philadelphia in 1835, Seattle in 1919, and beyond.[...]

If even four or five of the unions representing the workers mentioned above banded together in a nationwide general strike, the entire country would grind to a halt. When Shawn Fain asks his fellow unions to set the timer for May 2028, what he’s really saying is, get ready to shut sh*t down and level the playing field between bosses and workers once and for all.

JOIN A UNION. AND TALK ABOUT THIS.

And make one of the demands out to be an end of American support to countries participating in apartheid and genocide.

End the taxes for police budgets and settlements. If they want police departments so bad then they should FIND funding for themselves like the government makes USPS do.

One of the biggest pushbacks we hear is that there is never any official backing for calls to a general strike. Well here it is! Make sure you tell EVERYONE

This could be a global strike if other countries choose to participate on the same date

No, I don't think Palestine has 3 years so in the mean time join a union, keep protesting, start rioting, answer Every call to action coming from a Palestine and Sudan and the DRC and sign this strike card

[leona-florianova]

The three lives and deaths of Blondie the Courier 6

The Mayor, The Robobrain and The Ghost

After a close encounter with death, where NV mayor Blondie lost their left eye and another piece of sanity, they dedicated their life to finding a way how to keep their body and mind alive no matter what. This lead her on a path of obsession not too dissimilar from how Mr House tried to preserve himself and The Strip.

One of the steps to immortality was once again removing their brain in the Big MT, with the idea that even if their body got destroyed, their consciousness would survive within the brain.

And once again, once removed, but this time moved into a robobrain, the brain itself didnt really see “eye to eye” with its previous body. It reached its own immortality after all. So when the body pleaded for them to get the help of the Think Tank to make an AI copy of their consciousness, it they booted the body out of the Big MT, never letting them back again. The brain then spend their time talking science with Doctor Mobius, keeping the Tink Tank occupied, and doing some light adventuring on their own

Back at the Strip, brainless mayor Blondie didnt feel satisfied with their brain being safe in the Big Empty...They tried make a functional thinking AI of themselves which would then strenghten their policing of the strip.  But since the brain was in the Big Empty and refused to communicate, they had to try and repair an old copy of their consciousnes from an old project. A glitched out and broken scan of their personality and old visage .. locked in a loop and useless. Working only as a reminder..ghost of youth long gone.

Before the personality scan could have been turned int o a proper AI, mayor Blondie found their death by falling down the stairs at the Lucky 38..at the age of 70.

After this, the “rights” to The Strip fell into the robotic claws of the Robobrain, who didnt want to do anything with it, and told Yes Man that he can do whatever he wants, but preferably that he should  leave it to The Followers of the Apocalypse.

Which... he did

...

Yes Man had mayor Blondies body burried in the Graveyard in Good Springs..

The broken AI was locked in the computers of the lucky 38, untill somebody wanted to teach Mr New Vegas some new songs and somehow accidentally deleted the ghost.

The robobrain still roams the wastes, sometimes returning to the Big MT to check on the Think Tank...Their brain.. slowly deteriorating.

[1tbls]

some rambling thoughts on shivers (red bolding mine throughout):

so shivers says this to harry after he has a dance-induced seizure in the church, right:

YOU - But who am *I*? Why are you talking to me?

SHIVERS - YOU ARE AN OFFICER OF THE CITIZENS MILITIA. *AGENTES IN REBUS*, WHEN YOU WEAR YOUR COAT, YOU WEAR MY SOUL.

SHIVERS - YOU MOVE THROUGH MY STREETS FREELY IN MOTOR CARRIAGES AND ON FOOT. YOU HAVE ACCESS TO THE HIDDEN PLACES. YOU ALSO CIRCULATE AMONG THOSE WHO ARE HIDDEN.

here's wikipedia on "agentes in rebus":

"The agentes in rebus were the late Roman imperial and Byzantine courier service and general agents of the central government from the 4th to the 7th centuries."

"Being outside the control of the provincial governors, some agentes ... were appointed as inspectors ... for which they gained a reputation as a secret police force. As their routine assignments brought them into contact with matters of great concern to the court, and as they reported back to the court on everything they saw or heard on their varied missions, the agentes can be seen to have had an intelligence function ... This role, as well as their extraordinary power, made them feared: the 4th-century philosopher Libanius accused them of gross misconduct, terrorizing and extorting the provincials, "sheep-dogs who had joined the wolf pack". Nevertheless, the vast majority operated quite openly, and the claims of the agentes operating as a modern-day secret police are certainly exaggerated."

hey shivers. why are you invoking the RCM as your secret police, via a term not just associated with collection of information, but with corruption and manipulation of power.

and, if you fuck up the dance check and call kim a slur, she says:

"SHIVERS - BY THE WAY, APOLOGIZE TO YOUR PARTNER AT ONCE. UNITY AMONG THE RANKS IS PARAMOUNT."

which sticks out to me, because earlier we have this encyclopedia check with noid:

NOID - "A life is true if it's free from fear and internal division among oneself. And others -- mankind has seeds of greatness in it. A germinal will come, a return to trueness. It will be hard core."

YOU - "How would you go about *returning* to this true life?"

NOID - "Beats and bright lights to shatter falsehoods. Nerve impulses for the collective body. We are very much alike in basic structure. A hard enough beat would awaken everyone to a truer calling -- in unity!"

ENCYCLOPEDIA - Rejection of the right-left axis, emphasis on *unity*, appreciation of some primordial mode of being -- what does that remind you of?

YOU - "Sort of like fascism then?"

now, i don't think either noid or shivers are outright fascist :p but i do think the purpose of this encyclopedia line is to highlight how those criteria are flawed and damaging, how they are red flags, whatever the intention.

some comparisons:

1. return to trueness. le retour. the return of... what? in both cases, truly quite vague except for the idea of some dramatic upheaval of the current order, the idea of "returning" to some idealized past state or event.

2. nerve impulses. shivers. "appeal to nature" type fallacy, appeal to a baser instinct... invocation of physical reactions as metaphor for political reactionism, perhaps?

3. unity. on the surface, shivers telling harry to make things right with kim is touching, certainly. but specifically "unity among the ranks" is an interesting framing 🤨 as though the crucial thing is that their forces are not divided for what's to come, regardless of kim's feelings, regardless of harry's potential racism.

likewise, noid's call for unity addresses... nothing at all. simply that everyone would be awoken from their petty, false divisions into unity. neither this nor his criticisms of left vs. right acknowledge that the division is not equal, that one side in most social power conflicts is invested in stripping the rights of the other... because that is simply not on the radar when the priority is unity above all else. in its way, unity is authoritarian where it does not abide difference or dissent in the interest of the of the stasis/power of the institution.

this is all to say. hey. let's talk about the inherent nationalist nature of la revacholiere, my problematic wife ♥️

[lisbeth-kk]

May Prompts (24) Imperfect

The Luckiest Girl in the World (chapter 24)

Summary: Rosie meets a young man in Paris. Love is in the air but one thing gnaws on Rosie's nerves. She need to warn Timothy of her protective relatives without making him run for the hills.

Twenty-Four Years Old

When my first year in Paris was coming to an end, I went with a group from my school to a party. It was held in a big apartment that apparently belonged to some ridiculously rich aunt. The amount of red wine I’d drunk before we arrived, made sure I didn’t remember the details of the family tree.

What I do remember was the young man reading French poems with a British accent, and afterwards, the beginning of an interesting story about two men finding each other in a dream, and later apparently meeting in real life. I desperately wanted to hear more, but when I got him talking, he said that he wasn’t sure the idea was good enough to pursue.

“You wrote this?” I asked baffled. “I thought it was brilliant!”

“That’s probably the Pinot talking,” he retorted with a lopsided grin. “People normally say that it’s utter bullshit.”

I huffed at this ludicrous statement.

“So, why read it out loud, then?” I challenged him.

“Dunno. Perhaps I hoped that someone like you may turn up and like it” he quipped.

“That’s the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard,” I muttered and rolled my eyes.

***

Timothy and I were thick as thieves after that evening, and it soon evolved into more than friendship. He was studying literature and creative writing at Sorbonne Nouvelle, which was located quite close to Marguerite’s building. After our first official date, I pondered bringing him to my place, but uncle’s surveillance made me reconsider. Dad and Papa planned on visiting soon, and I knew it was futile trying to hide anything from Papa.

You’d better prepare the poor sod, before meeting the British Inquisition, I thought with a grimace.

After David, Papa wouldn’t make the same mistake of failing to observe even the tiniest flaw.

We hadn’t talked about our families at all, because there were so many other topics that were interesting, but I knew time was running out. I decided that after a good meal with some wine, it would be the perfect time to tell him about my fiercely protective family.

Rinsing and eating mussels, is a sticky and quite down-to-earth affair, and a better opportunity would be hard to find, so I plunged in with both feet so to speak.

“I…um…think it’s time to tell you about my…family,” I started.

“All of them, or just your fathers?” Timothy said while dipping a bite of bread in the creamy sauce.

I almost dropped my spoon in surprise. Had I told him that I was raised by two men and no mother? Not to my knowledge. Perhaps some of my other friends…

“Rosie?” Timothy said softly.

“Do you know who they are? Have you…”

Timothy lifted his hands, motioning me to calm down.

“Sorry, I assumed you knew,” he murmured. 

“Knew what?” I snapped. “You’re worse than…”

“I know who you are, Rosamund Watson-Holmes. A dossier, I think will suffice as a description, was delivered to me by a courier after our first coffee date. Four “letters” from each of your watchdogs. I didn’t know there were so many ways to threaten a person…”

“Damn, them!” I exclaimed. “Always, they have to meddle just because I had one bad boyfriend. Jesus, they’re incorrigible.”

“No matter how imperfect you find them, they love you dearly, or should I say fiercely,” Timothy chuckled. “After the initial shock, I must say I found it quite amusing and adorable. Four grown men, with the careers they have, your dad even an ex-military, and they’re all softies. Your police uncle was probably the scariest, come to think of it. Not that he doesn’t love you to bits, but he was the only one who stayed somewhat professional. He certainly didn’t bring any medieval torture methods or mafia tendencies into the equation if I hurt you purposefully or otherwise.”

“Oh, God,” I growled utterly devasted of my protective relatives.

Timothy chose to call them The Fab Four, which still earns him stern looks, but I know the four protectors are quite proud of themselves.

Also available on AO3

@calaisreno @totallysilvergirl @keirgreeneyes @raina-at @helloliriels

More tags in the replies

[racefortheironthrone]

fantasy sometimes doesn't afford itself the ability to fantasize about a better world with many of the same problems of real life. thankfully ive found fantasy thatfantasize about things like gender roles, orientations, social status, etc. being more accepting, and the world kinder more often than not. question is, as hard as it is to find solid urban fantasy, are there anyworks you know of that use itself to imagine a optimal city for us urban nerds? magic public works, free dragon transit?

So there is a real problem in the fantasy and sci-fi genres that they often have a failure of revolutionary imagination, as I’ve termed it. We’re so used to not just the world as it is but also the public historical imagination of how change happens, that even in art that’s supposed to be about radically reimagining our world or new worlds, we often revert back to the familiar. (I find this tic particularly annoying in alternate history, which is supposed to be about imagining how the world could have evolved differently, but often reverts back to a retelling of (often bad) history with the numbers filed off.)

(A sadly rare counter-example.)

You raise a fascinating question about the potential for urbanist fantasy. This is often quite rare in urban fantasy, because often out of a desire to maintain the verisimilitude of urban life, they default to a masquerade scenario which renders it impossible to explore the impact of magic on transit, housing, and other aspects of urbanism because the central conceit is that people with magic are trying to hide and thus have no impact on the mundane world.

However, it does crop up sometimes in Magitech settings, because their central conceit is all about how magic would function in place of science and lead to new ways of organizing societies, urban and otherwise. For a popular example, look at how Arcane examines the social impacts of Hextech and Shimmer. My personal favorite example of urbanist fantasy is the plane of Ravnica from Magic the Gathering.

Ravnica is a ecumenopolis, a city-state that covers the whole planet. The city is governed by a guild council, each of whom are responsible for an aspect of the city’s physical and social infrastructure:

The Azorius Senate is responsible for running the courts and the legal system, and sometimes they run the police as well (although they have a jurisdictional dispute with the Boros Legion on that front).

House Dimir are couriers, messengers, journalists, private investigators, spies, assassins, thieves, and librarians, as well as the city’s clandestine intelligence service - if it deals with information in any way, the Dimir have a hand in it…or do they?

The Cult of Rakdos run the city’s entertainment, food service, retail, and labor recruitment (lots of shanghaing and press ganging goes on in Ravnica) - and they’re also a crazed juggalo bdsm blood cult who are responsible for keeping an ancient arch-demon entertained so he doesn’t try to destroy the city, again.

The Gruul Clans are an anarchist collective responsible for the planet’s wilderness areas, which they try to maximize by violent raids that tear down developed areas any chance they get - which also makes them Ravnica’s main demolition industry. The Boros Legion spends a lot of time defending built-up areas from Gruul rampages.

The Selesnya Conclave are a hippie nature cult commune who manage the city’s parks and other green spaces, as well as providing basic welfare services (food, “shelter,” clothing, etc.) to the city’s poor. They also use magic to do weird hivemind brainwashing in the name of harmony and unity, and they can raise giant Ent-Kaiju to defend the city in times of need.

The Orzhov Syndicate are a vampire banker mafia, and also one of the city’s biggest religions. They believe in debt on a spiritual level, and their religion fully embraces indulgences to their logical conclusion. The Orzhov preach that you can literally buy your way into heaven, and that debts to the (Catholic by way of Prosperity Gospel Evangelical) Church or its many front organizations and legitimate businesses will carry over into the next life; the Orzhov practice debt slavery on both living people and ghosts. And lest you think it’s all a cover for profit-making, they can summon dark angels to conduct rituals, lead services, and make war on their enemies. Something above is answering their prayers…

My personal favorite is the Izzet League, an institute of mad scientists and engineers and elementalist wizards who combine science and magic to research, build, and maintain the city’s infrastructure (as well as funding all tech R&D and theoretical and experimental research in physics, chemistry, and engineering) - the power grid, water and sewer systems, heating and gas lines, as well as the city’s mass transit and transportation/freight system, are all powered by their steam and fire and lightning and Magitech gadgets and robots and cyborgs made out of a magic metal named mizzium. Yes, a lot of their devices explode, and yes their golems and robots and elementals have a tendency to go rogue, but that’s the price of progress!

The Golgari Swarm are a subterranean necromantic cabal who run the city’s waste disposal, burial services, and do the bulk of the agricultural production for Ravnica’s hungry masses. All of Ravnica’s citizens are entitled to a food dole provided by the Golgari’s fungi farms as a form of basic income. Just don’t think too hard about what went into the compost heaps or what your rations might be made of…

The Boros Legion is Ravnica’s main police and military, led by a literal host of warrior angels. Imagine the combination of a police force entirely made up of noir detectives and loose cannon Dirty Harry-esque cops and an army with flying fortresses led by fiery angels who are all deeply dramatic lesbians. True believers one and all, the Boros are here to mete out justice and divine wroth upon evildoers wherever they hide. If they had their way, the Orzhov would all be in prison along with the Gruul and the Rakdos, but the damn bureaucrats in the Azorius Senate keep trying them up in knots with paperwork.

The Simic Combine are responsible for the city’s environmental quality, ensuring biodiversity and sustainability in a global metropolis; they are also the city’s universal health care providers. All Ravnicans have access to free health care, as long as they consent to the Combine’s biomantic research. See, the Simic are the other group of mad scientists/mages in the city, except they went into genetics, environmental science, and (marine) biology and they believe in individual and societal evolution through the use of augmentation, cloning, and splicing. After all, why stop at curing someone’s respiratory illness when you could also give them gills? Or giant crab claws? Or tentacles?

I love the world-building and the attention to urban systems and infrastructure in Ravnica. More than most, they’ve thought about what urban life needs to function and made it magical.

[willtheweaver]

Random writing prompts

• Reverse King Midas: everything you touch turns to plastic or used chewing gum.

• The house is in fact haunted. Both you and the ghosts aren’t on the best of terms, but now you must team up and save the house from a greedy developer.

• What is life like for the courier who has to deliver all the letters from ‘a friend’ or ‘mysterious benefactor’ to random adventurers?

• The chess pieces start a revolution! How are you supposed to play now that the royal pieces have been done away with?

• Love at last sight

• “So we saved the world…”

“Now what do we do?”

“Become the Big Bad for the next hero to defeat?”

• You are shunned by other sirens because you are mute.

• You’ve been accused of several murders. You try and convince the police that you’re innocent, insisting the culprit is your sleep paralysis demon.

• Time continuity agency now faces their biggest challenge: a rouge time traveler messed with the timeline by eradicating smallpox and the plague. What is the ‘right’ choice?

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Johan Weidner 

Johan “Jean” Weidner was a Dutch businessman who created an extensive underground rescue network and saved the lives of 800 Jews and 112 downed Allied aviators.

Born in Brussels in 1912 to Dutch parents, Jean grew up in Switzerland in a devout Seventh-Day Adventist home. His father, a minister who taught Greek and Latin at a church seminary, wanted Jean to become a clergyman but instead he decided to go into business. He moved to Paris in 1935 and started an import-export textile firm.

When the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 Jean dropped everything and fled to Lyon in unoccupied France. He had to abandon his company, so he started a new one in Lyon.

In 1941, as the situation for Jews and other enemies of the Nazi war machine grew more dire, Jean took action. He created an underground network secretly run out of his textile factory. To facilitate escape to Switzerland, Jean opened a second branch of his business in Annecy, near the Swiss border. The route was dotted with safe houses and locals sympathetic to the Resistance who sheltered the refugees and helped them cross the border.

Known as Dutch-Paris, the network Jean created became one of the most effective resistance groups during war. Also called “the Swiss Way,” the network’s mission was to rescue people targeted by the Nazis by hiding them until they could help them escape to a neutral country.

Jean was leader of 330 men, women and teenagers working clandestinely in occupied countries of Western Europe as well as in Switzerland.

Dutch-Paris was constantly in need of funds to support their extensive activities, and Jean made a deal with the Dutch ambassador to Switzerland. The Dutch government-in-exile in London would fund the rescue operations if Jean 1) expanded the escape route to reach all the way to Spain and 2) used the route to convey intelligence on microfilm between Dutch resistance groups. Jean agreed to the terms and the expanded network began operating in November 1943.

In January of 1944 they began rescuing downed Allied aviators, an especially dangerous operation because it attracted the attention of German military intelligence officers. In only a month they saved over 112 pilots before tragedy struck. In February 1944, a young Dutch woman working as a courier was arrested by the French police and turned over to the Gestapo. They tortured her physically and psychologically, and threatened her family. She cracked under pressure and gave up names of her colleagues colleagues in the Dutch-Paris network.

Germans started arresting members of Dutch-Paris, including Jean’s sister Gabrielle. Over the next few months, many of the rescuers were sent to concentration camps, where at least forty of them were murdered. Gabrielle survived until liberation by the Russians, but she was so malnourished that she died days later.

Jean was able to escape capture long enough to rebuild networks and continue his rescue operations. In Toulouse he was arrested by the French police, but he escaped before they were able to transfer him to the Germans.

France was liberated in November 1944 and Jean was invited to London by Queen Wilhemina to inform her about the Dutch-Paris route, and the situation for Dutch civilians in areas occupied by the Germans. He was made a Captian in the Dutch Armed Forces but after the war he was let go by the Dutch government for not being a professional policeman. Jean returned to his textile business, and in 1955 emigrated to the United States where he and his wife operated a chain of health food stores for several decades.

He received multiple awards for his wartime heroism including the US Medal of Freedom, the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d’honneur. He was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, and a grove of trees was planted in his name. In 1993, at the opening of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, he was one of seven people chosen to light candles honoring rescuers.

Jean Weidner died in 1994 in Southern California. Abraham Foxman, then National Director of the ADL said, “John Weidner lived his entire life giving back… Until his death, he lived a life of selflessness and service, working tirelessly to make the world a better place.”

For creating an underground escape route for victims of the Nazis, and saving hundreds of lives, we honor Jean Weidner as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[tenth-sentence]

Of the Native Police, the paper said: "The force is inadequate for the work they have to do in protecting such a large district."

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr

[whats-in-a-sentence]

As D'arcy Uhr's 1868 Gulf killings became known in Britain, The Brisbane Courier still hoped the Aborigines' Protection Society could bring its influence to bear in Westminster.

The attack on the camp at Morinish was a trifle, performed in the grey of the morning, before breakfast, and when there was nothing to incite the preserver, of the peace and defenders of the lives of the colonists, but Mr. Uhr's was a regular expedition of vengeance, and a battue* of fifty-nine wild blacks is the result.

* The beating of woodlands to flush out game.

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr

[nexility-sims]

𝐍𝐎. 𝟏   ❛ 𝐝𝐨𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭 ❜   |   VARIOUS LOCATIONS, LATE 1990 - EARLY 1991

❧  𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠  /  𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬  /  𝐧𝐞𝐱𝐭.

❛ In early March, the Office of the Crown released its first personal statement since the funeral. It resembled the releases that had followed other deaths: ' With the mourning period ended, our family is eager to return to public life. We have spent our time away in the traditional manner. Our ancestors understood the loss of a loved one demands total acknowledgment. Public ceremony is one component, but life cannot resume without granting the wound time to heal. This is reality for even those of us blessed with tremendous responsibility. We expect to always bear the scar of remembrance, just as we know the nation will, but we remain grateful for this time of recovery. Each of us has engaged in true reflection. We intend to recommit to Uspana and its People with clarity and appreciation. This is what our beloved Princess Safya would have wanted. '

❧ i did kinda phone this one in, but akjfsdh it's a nice montage, i think.

𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐞𝐝 ↓

In truth, the family’s practice of mourning varied enough to warrant a white lie to the public. Some did indeed take the traditional approach. Rodrigo, Matias, and Leonor all sequestered themselves away to a degree; they engaged in that esteemed “true reflection” with only their selves and their memories as company. For others, the dictates of tradition mattered less. Their mourning looked like clinging to routine, revisiting familiar places, seeking comfort in the presence of others. Beatriz returned to Yaas for the first time in years, welcoming for once the way her childhood haunted it. Contemplation could find its way into these activities—in the tranquil baking Olalla did or the letters Mateo wrote to his father—but not everyone was willing to allow it. They formed a spectrum in their grief, one that none policed or much noticed.

The only requirement was that they maintain privacy. Whether at Alam Palace, in the residential quarters of Nakawe Palace, or retreated to personal homes and hotel rooms, they were to be reclusive. An uneasy but time-honored truce existed with the media. Whether the respectable evening news journalists or the scrappy tabloid photographers, all kept their distance. The Crown’s official policy nonetheless remained: they were untrustworthy. The intrepid would seek gossip from launderers and groundskeepers and couriers. The foolish would trespass, slinking along unmarked trails and hoping for glimpses of impromptu promenades through gardens and on private beachfronts. Temporarily, the embargo held. Pop stars, politicians, actors, and socialites dominated the headlines. The media cultivated a surreal alternate reality for the public in which Princess Safya had never existed because Uspana had no royal family of which to speak. All the while, they stockpiled stories to inaugurate the eighty-first day.